January 22, 2010

Dialect on Ameland island kept alive by old men

Filed under: Nature,Science by Orangemaster @ 3:13 pm

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The island of Ameland off the Dutch coast is a popular tourist destination for the Dutch and many a foreigner. To get there you take a ferry boat, which sounds like a lot of fun, especially in the summer. I wouldn’t really know about the ferry, as on a 30 degree Celsius day a few years back, I had the chance to fly there and this was my view. Seeing the hordes of bunny rabbits scurry when a plane lands is hilarious and the runway has white plastic cans to ‘indicate’ where the runway is.

Mathilde Jansen researched the Ameland dialect for years and came to the following conclusions. ‘Amelands’ is mostly Frisian (an actual language, not a dialect) mixed with modern Dutch. Contrary to dialects on nearby Dutch islands, Amelands is also spoken by the kids, and not just the old folks. There are also East-West differences, only discernable to the real pros.

And about the old men: they still speak the most authentic version of the dialect, according to Jansen. She also says that previous research shows that men in general prefer to speak local dialect, while women opt for ‘regional and standard variants’.

(Link: kennislink.nl)

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January 10, 2010

Etten-Leur buys bath salts against frost

Filed under: Automobiles,Nature by Branko Collin @ 4:29 pm

The city of Etten-Leur in Noord-Brabant has purchased 18 tonnes of bath salts to sprinkle roads with, in an attempt to keep the roads from freezing.

Salt lowers the temperature at which water freezes. Municipalities and Rijkswaterstaat keep about 100,000 tonnes of coarse ‘strooizout’ (lit. sprinkling salt) ready to keep roads clear from snow and black ice at temperatures of about -10 degrees Celsius or higher. Because of this year’s wintry conditions, some municipalities have already run out of stock.

Etten-Leur’s bath salt stems from a batch condemned by its producers. Some of the salt already had perfume and colouring added. The city expects to not have to use its bath salts, as new shipments of regular road salt is expected to arrive this weekend. According to Radio Netherlands, “the coloured bath salts smell of lavender, green tea and mango.”

The minister of internal affairs, Guusje ter Horst, has given the green light to produce more road salt than usual, despite environmental concerns. Strooizout is a very aggressive product that can rust cars faster, changing the selection of fauna along roads, leading to maritime plants growing inland.

(Photo by Flickr user sburke2478, some rights reserved)

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December 21, 2009

Crash course in snow management

Filed under: Automobiles,Aviation,General,Nature by Orangemaster @ 9:44 am

sneeuwpop

I just got back from walking down my street at 7 am in the dark (Happy Winter Solstice) with bikers negotiating the snow and cars taking the onramp to the motorway near my house at 30 km/h like well-behaved cars.

So far, buses are generally not running. I’m guessing they don’t sport winter tires or radials (aka four-season tires). Putting winter tires on your car once every 10 years is not practical or good value for money in the Netherlands. Yes, they are tons of accidents, literally piling up (pardon the pun). My neighbour goes skiing every year in Austria and just switched tires because they are mandatory in winter in Germany, and has to drive through there.

Trains are running minimally, so I bet the delays are really nasty. Many taxis won’t be driving around and so people trying to get to work are going to have to come up with dog sleds or walk. Speaking of trains, while I whine about not being able to woosh to Paris at a proper speed, the famous Eurostar train that runs in the Chunnel between Britain and France has been cancelled for days now, never mind the people who were trapped in it Friday night.

And then there’s the airplanes. North American and European airports all have tons of delayed flights, as well as airports just closing shop all together like in Belgium, as seen on Dutch telly. Picture stranded passengers off to visit friends and family for Christmas, tired and sleeping on airport benches.

I still don’t understand why the Netherlands can plan for terrorist attacks that will probably never happen, but plan so little when it comes to serious snow, a more realistic situation. In real Northern countries like Norway and Canada, sure we’re having problems getting around too, but if we were to shut down the country for a bit of snow at just -1 Celsius, we might as well dismantle all Scandinavian countries, Russia, Canada and the Northern United States.

Granted, de-icing planes is international and trains can’t deal with autumn leaves properly (I still don’t understand why), but winter tires on buses, cars and taxis would have avoided many problems so far, methinks.

Again, we really seem to stink at planning ahead realistically. I’m loving all this snow, but then I have a home office. This was the view outside my window yesterday. And just as I finished writing this, it started snowing again.

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August 26, 2009

Dutch tap water will be chlorinated

Filed under: Dutch first,Food & Drink,General,Nature,Science by Orangemaster @ 11:38 am
glass of water

I once had a Dutch roommate back in Québec in the 1990s who asked me why our tap water looked so afwul. I explained that it’s slightly cloudy because it’s full of chlorine, but tastes fine. Many people pour water into a jug fitted with a carbon filter and keep it in the fridge. Problem solved.

“Isn’t there chlorine in the water in the Netherlands?” “Oh, no” she said, “we have very clean water”. For years I thought the Dutch were water geniuses and that Quebeckers were water dummies.

It turns out Dutch water has a dirty little secret: it’s chock full of the bacteria that causes legionnaire’s disease. Professor Annelies van Bronswijk, Professor of Health Technology at Eindhoven University of Technology estimates that 800 people die of legionnaires’ disease every year, more than the dozens quoted in official statistics. “Since severe pneumonia is what most people with legionnaires’ disease die from, you can put two and two together and get a proper estimate of the problem.”

These days, Western countries chlorinate with monochloramine, a compound of chlorine, which doesn’t leave a taste.

(Link: rnw.nl, photo: ipeg.eu)

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August 15, 2009

Socialist campground De Paasheuvel [HAR 2009]

Filed under: Nature by Branko Collin @ 5:02 pm

The early 20th century was the heyday of Dutch polarisation. Unions, universities, newspapers, magazines and broadcasting corporations were founded, all based on a certain religion or ideology. The three main pillars were Protestantism, Catholicism and Socialism.

One of the remnants of this great societal movement is De Paasheuvel campground (the Easter Hill), on which hacker conference Hacking at Random is held. De Paasheuvel was started in the 1920s as the first communist campground. And although the campground is now a commercial venture that tries not to put too much emphasis on its past, there are still a few clues here and there that tell the visitor of the history of the place where many a left-wing politico received part of their training.

The little castle-like house shown in the photo above is called the Voorpost, and it predates the campground by a decade and a half. It was built as a Summer place of the Rolandes Hagendoorn family in 1906, and bought by the Arbeiders Jeugd Centrale (Workers Youth Center) in 1922.

The Zonnehal (Sun Hall) was built in 1939 in the style of the Amsterdamse School, and is used during HAR as one of the conference halls.

The grounds also hold a tiny wild life garden called Heemtuin de Heimanshof, which was founded by the AJC, and maintained by them for a long time. Although former AJC members still work on the garden, Jonge Socialisten (the youth branch of the socialist and social democratic parties) and other volunteers now help with the heavy lifting.

(These and other photos should appear in higher resolution in our Flickr account after Sunday.)

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July 28, 2009

Zone 5300 in the land of the Dadas

Filed under: Art,Comics,Music,Nature by Branko Collin @ 8:19 am

The Summer edition of Zone 5300 contains a large retrospective of The Cramps, the psychobilly dinos that put the fun into punk, because of stiletto-heeled front-man Lux Interior’s death earlier this year. Writer Eric van der Heijden handcuffs you, then shows all the clean versions of rock ‘n’ roll and the dirty parents they sprang from. Guess where The Cramps belong?

Lars Fiske reports on a 1922 visit of Dada to the Netherlands (illustration).

What do you do if everybody is already shooting nice pics of microbes, hell, if nice pics of microbes are really old hat in your country? Stereoscopic photos of the creepy-crawlies! Plus you try to get American art schools and Dutch museums to believe your story that art can only be objectively enjoyed after you have dunked classic works and instruments in a bath full of micro-organisms. Such is the wondrous sense of humour of Wim van Egmond.

Maaike Hartjes tries her hand at photography. Eerie! Cute! How does she do it? (Maaike’s got a new blog by the by, so go check it.)

And finally a long comic of Fool’s Gold contributor Milan Hulsing about collected collectors, so you know he knows what he is talking, er, drawing about.

(Illustration: Lars Fiske.)

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June 3, 2009

Mmmm protein! Eating maggots at school

Filed under: Nature,Weird by Orangemaster @ 1:43 pm
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A Dutch school in The Hague, Nutsschool Bezuidenhout, decided that teaching kids about eating maggots was worthwhile subject matter during a school outing, according to Dutch newspaper AD. Two brave kids ate some maggots on a dare from teachers. Lo and behold, the mother of one of the other children complained to the newspaper of this ‘game’ played by 11 and 12-year-old children who do not have the capacity of making their own choices. Apparently, the kids threw up as well. In true Dutch ‘everything is relative’ form, the school said none of the children threw up, but admitted that eating maggots was ‘a bit disgusting’.

The most digusting thing I have every had to eat was as a preschooler: green Jell-o, a glow-in-the-dark lime green dessert made of sugar and jelly. I ate half, got scolded for not eating it, got sick and my mother yelled at the teacher in front of the entire preschool class for at least 30 minutes for forcing me to ‘crap junk food’. Never had the stuff again.

(Link: vleesmagazine.nl)

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April 17, 2009

Dutch Project Gutenberg reader for April 2009

Filed under: Animals,Literature,Music,Nature by Branko Collin @ 1:37 pm

What is it with adventurers and gadgets? Do they need the distraction when all there is between them and a 2000-metre drop is an almost negligible amount of tent cloth? Or do they feel they have to be at the frontier of everything, including that of technological advances?

This photo shows an early iPod, 1909, used by Ernest Shackleton’s expedition to the South Pole. As you can see, there’s only one earbud—which is rather large, the idea being that the music might be shared with penguins this way. Shackleton failed his bid but did set a record for going farthest South. When he came back later that year, he wrote an article about his adventures which got translated into Dutch and published in De Aarde en Haar Volken.

My Nederlandse Project Gutenberg Reader for April (Dutch) dips into a number of translations, among which translations of the chapter Birds of Brehms Tierleben, of Durch das Land der Skipetaren (Karl May), and of Erasmus’ Morias Enkomion (The Praise of Folly).

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April 16, 2009

Yellow tulip named after Spongebob Squarepants

Filed under: Nature by Branko Collin @ 9:13 am

Last Wednesday famous cartoon character Spongebob Squarepants got a tulip named after him in the Keukenhof flower garden. Under the watchful of eye of many a young fan and the great big yellow sponge himself, the flower got baptized with perfectly good champagne by Nickelodeon presenter Patrick Martens.

It took grower Jan Ligthart from Breezand 18 years to develop the tulip, writes De Telegraaf (Dutch). Presumably that time was not spent exclusively on this new tulip, as many companies have already paid the man to do the same. Ligthart told the paper it would take four years for the bulbs to arrive in Dutch stores: “The first bulbs are for the US, because they pay better abroad. It’s as simple as that.”

(Photo of a totally unrelated yellow tulip by Hisa Fujimoto, some rights reserved.)

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March 26, 2009

Van Leeuwenhoek microscope to be auctioned

Filed under: Gadgets,History,Nature by Branko Collin @ 6:37 pm

One of only three surviving silver microscopes of the Father of microbiology, Renaissance scientist Antonie van Leeuwenhoek (1632-1723), will be sold on April 8 at an auction at Christie’s in London, writes De Telegraaf (Dutch). The auction house expects to sell the silver device for somewhere between 75,000 and 105,000 euro.

The other two surviving Leeuwenhoek microscopes are at the Deutsches Museum in Munich and the Museum Boerhaave in Leiden.

Van Leeuwenhoek built his own microscopes, superior to what was available at the time (the first microscope was invented in Middelburg seven years before his birth), but kept the secret to his lenses meticulously hidden, and only in the 1950s did scientists manage to reconstruct them. It turned out that rather than grinding lenses, Van Leeuwenhoek seems to have used a glass fusing method, which allowed him to quickly make a microscope, of which he constructed around 400 during his lifetime.

The Internet Archive has The Select Works of Antony van Leeuwenhoek, translations into English of Van Leeuwenhoek’s many observations, unfortunately without his drawings. Fascinating stuff, almost like being alive in the 21st century.

The silver microscope that will be sold at Christie’s was used by Van Leeuwenhoek to discover sperm cells. The current owner found it during the 1970s among old laboratory equipment.

Portrait of Van Leeuwenhoek by Jan Verkolje (1650-1693).

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