May 31, 2009

Men become stupid when talking to pretty women

Filed under: General,Science by Orangemaster @ 1:07 pm

After having recently realised the superpowers of the shimmery, shiny, hot gold bikini top on stage and men’s collective drooling response to it (shutting up in mid-sentence, staring, being turned on and slightly ashamed about it around women), this one is for all of you.

The Radboud University of Nijmegen in the Netherlands confirms what I saw recently in a room full of mostly heretosexual men: pretty women stop men in their tracks.

The study found that after speaking to a female, men become markedly less competent at tasks like maths or word games. And if that woman is someone the man finds attractive, they become even worse. Single or not (as if that would make a difference!), when speaking to women, men’s ability to carry out a task drops. But during the study, when they spoke to other men, their abilities remained unchanged. Women’s performance stayed the same throughout.

I bet you gay men also follow this pattern. Someone tell me, I want to know. And if I extrapolate, I suppose gay women totally keep their cool. I want to know, too!

And then, this song is just great, as is Hugh Laurie. Here we go with a golden oldie, The Sophisticated Song.

“…when you ask me what’s on my mind,
all I can think to answer is ‘fluh-uh’ ”

(Link: thelondonpaper.com)

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April 1, 2009

Woman takes driving exam at age 74

Filed under: Automobiles by Orangemaster @ 10:10 am
rijbewijs

Why bother taking your driving exam at that age? Because you’re a widow and need to get around, which is why Miep Derks from the town of Wijchen near Nijmegen is taking hers. Next Tuesday on her birthday at age 74, the energetic senior hopes to get her driving licence. In 2008 only 19 seniors above age 60 attempted to do so. The oldest candidate in Nijmegen was 64.

It took me three and half years (!) to get my Dutch driving licence (nine flippin’ tries and a hel-lu-va-lot of money). Driving in Amsterdam is tough, with all those bikes and trams, but driving in Nijmegen on the Keizer Karelplein roundabout from hell deserves a prize. It was modelled after the Place Charles-de-Gaulle in Paris, the huge roundabout around the Arc de Triomphe, which is really nasty, too.

(Link: gelderlander.nl, Photo dennismartijn.nl)

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February 2, 2009

Toy Smurfs bigger hit than football cards

Filed under: Comics,Gadgets,Sports by Branko Collin @ 10:10 am

Supermarket chain Albert Heijn has done it again. A collecting mania is sweeping the country and bringing tens of thousands of customers to “the biggest green grocer,” where every 10 euro spent earns you a package of football cards. However, last year’s action with Smurf figurines was perhaps more succesful, reports Algemeen Dagblad (Dutch). The paper quotes market research agency GFK which says that on average Albert Heijn can count 37% of all households among its customers. With the football cards, that number has risen to 39,7%, while at the height of the Smurf craze, it was 40%.

Joop Holla of GFK thinks there are several possible reasons why the Smurfs would be more popular: the cartoon characters are popular with both boys and girls, whereas the football cards mostly attract boys. Also, a competing chain (Plus Markt) had a similar action with football cards last year.

Regardless of which hype is bigger, the football card promotion is drawing plenty of attention. Last Tuesday, the Albert Heijn on the Daalseweg in Nijmegen had to install crowd control barriers because hordes of young boys begging for football cards were apparently bothering the customers. Telegraaf says (Dutch) that at one point at least 50 children were asking for cards in sub zero weather.

It just goes to prove that kids are crazy. If I were standing in the cold on the Daalseweg, I’d make sure to either get to Café Jos or ‘t Haantje in a hurry, and the only thing cold near by would be the brewsky in front of me.

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October 14, 2008

Two odd acts of mindless violence

Filed under: Food & Drink,General,Weird by Orangemaster @ 9:34 am
Street tile

Last Saturday, a 31-year-old man from Zwolle, Overijssel beat up a lumpia (spring roll) seller because the man did not sell vegetarian spring rolls. When the 60-year-old spring roll seller told him this last Saturday, the client got angry and beat the older man repeatedly in the face and on the head. A security guard of the shopping centre where the spring roll stand is located intervened and held the angry man until the police came to draw up a complaint.

Last Sunday in Nijmegen, Gelderland, a 31-year-old taxi driver ran over a 29-year-old man because he refused to pay his taxi driver colleague. The 29-year-old client was driven around for hours in a taxi and when the meter had reached an amount of 250 euro, the man couldn’t pay. He got out of the car and walked away. Two taxi drivers came to the ‘rescue’, with one of them driving over the reluctant client. A witness saw the incident and called the police.

What’s with this street tile of a ladybug? Since 1999 it has been the Dutch symbol for “no mindless violence” and can be found in front of bars, clubs and other places where fights usually break out.

(Links: vleesmagazine.nl, knurps.nl)

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August 1, 2008

RFID tags used to monitor hikers’ health

Filed under: Health,Science by Branko Collin @ 8:26 am

Researchers from the Radboud University in Nijmegen used RFID tags during the recent Four Day Marches to experiment with health monitoring. Volunteers were asked to swallow an RFID pill which sent the hiker’s body temperature to a receiver in their back pack every 10 seconds. The receiver would then relay that information via Bluetooth to a GPS-enabled mobile phone which in turn would forward the data to the operations centre at the university’s teaching hospital.

Using the data, the researchers could track the walkers on Google Maps, and even alert nearby walkers should a volunteer be in trouble. Radboud University was in the news earlier this year when researchers cracked and cloned London’s Oyster travel card and the Dutch public transportation card, which both used NXP’s Mifare RFID chip.

Via Engadget. Photo by Maurits Vink, published using a Creative Commons license.

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June 2, 2008

Foreign female professor in Nijmegen honoured in the US

Filed under: Science by Orangemaster @ 10:55 am
cutler.jpg

Anne Cutler, professor at the Institute for Cognition and Information at the University of Nijmegen and director of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, has been elected as a member of the National Academy of Sciences in the US, a huge honour bestowed to very few people. To give you an idea, The National Academy of Sciences currently has some 2,000 active members, of which more than 180 are living Nobel Prize winners. Famous past members include Albert Einstein, Robert Oppenheimer, Thomas Edison, Orville Wright and Alexander Graham Bell.

Cultler’s research revolves around how the brain processes spoken language. In 1999 she was the first woman to be awarded the Spinoza Prize, a kind of Dutch Nobel Prize. Back then, Dutch feminists (Opzij magazine) jumped at the occasion to hail women’s achievements only to realise that Ann Culter is Australian. “The most intelligent woman in the Netherlands is Australian,” read the article.

And then most female top managers in the Netherlands are foreigners. Is the hint big enough now?

(Link: ru.nl)

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May 11, 2008

Photos of “authentic” shopkeepers

Filed under: Photography by Branko Collin @ 7:32 pm

Like everywhere else in the world, the small shops are dissappearing from the Netherlands. Photographer Niels Helmink decided to document (Dutch) these “authentic” shopkeepers and their stores.

I remember when I was living in Nijmegen, about a decade ago, there was talk about giving up a whole neighbourhood to the wrecking ball. This sort of thing tends to alienate the citizens, so city hall sold its plans by promising that in this location Nijmegen would get an entire new shopping street (the Moenenstraat) that would house countless of cute little boutiques. Once the street was built (2004) the rents turned out to be way too high for mom-and-pop stores, and instead the citizens got the same old chains that fester the Dutch landscape everywhere: your Blokker, your Xenos, your H&M, et cetera.

More photos at Helmink’s website and at his online portfolio. The photos are currently on display in Amsterdam at Gallery Bart. Photo depicts bicycle store Cito on the Ferdinand Bolstraat in the Pijp in Amsterdam, a neighbourhood that is quickly yuppifying and losing its little stores for that reason—although yuppie-friendly stores such as Taart van mijn Tante (a cakeshop) and ‘t Mannetje (bicycles) appear to be doing fine.

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April 7, 2008

Buran passes through the Netherlands

Filed under: Design,History by Branko Collin @ 12:02 pm


Illustration: the Buran space shuttle on display at the MAKS air show, 1997. Public domain photo by Kobel.

One of the 10 Soviet space shuttles ever built traveled through the Netherlands last weekend on its way to its final destination in Germany. The shuttle, an atmospheric test model code-named OK-GLI or BTS-02, was shipped from Bahrain to Rotterdam, and from there was moved by river barge over the Rhine to the Technik Museum Speyer in Mannheim, German.

The story of the Soviet space shuttle is one of the most interesting of our time. The Soviets saw the Americans build a space shuttle, but could not figure out what it was for. So they built their own, and found out what NASA was desperately trying to hide: that in terms of effectiveness and launch costs, the shuttle is an inferior solution to current non-reusable launch technology (nowadays NASA shuttles costs USD 1 billion per launch). Astronautix even concludes: “The cost of Buran—14.5 billion rubles, a significant part of the effort to maintain strategic and technical parity with the United States—contributed to the collapse of the Soviet system and the demise of the spacecraft.”

The OK-GLI model was never intended to be launch tested. Instead, it was fitted with jet engines so that it could take off and land on its own, and was used to test atmospheric handling of the Buran shuttles. Later it was used as a demonstration model at airshows. It was bought by an Australian company which wanted to use it for the same purpose, but while the OK-GLI was in transit in Bahrain, its owner went bankrupt and the shuttle was stored for four years in parts at a junkyard.

The re-built shuttle drew crowds on its tour through the country, according to Blik op Nieuws (Dutch). Yesterday it passed Nijmegen, its tail clipped to fit under a bridge filled with onlookers.

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December 16, 2007

Elderly woman helps catch thief

Filed under: Weird by Orangemaster @ 12:31 pm
wallet1.jpg

Last Thursday, a 94-year woman from Nijmegen basically caught a thief by grabbing his wallet. At noon, the man came to her door pretending to be from the post office. She didn’t believe him, he showed her his wallet with his ID in it. She grabbed the wallet, slammed the door and called the police. The thief eventually went to the police station himself to report his missing wallet and got caught for trying to scam an old lady.

(Link: blik op nieuws)

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November 13, 2007

Non refundable gift membership

Filed under: General by Orangemaster @ 5:00 am
box.jpg

I don’t dare get into Dutch politics because they’re nuttier than a nut farm, but when a political party gets into gift giving so close to Sinterklaas and Christmas, it’s time to crack some nuts.

Democratic political party D66 wants to give free memberships as gifts to attract new members. Party members can give memberships as gift certificates to acquaintances, friends and familiy (the only people that will listen to them). This madness will be launched at the party congress in Nijmegen this Saturday.

The gift certificate costs EUR 15, whereas a membership usually costs about EUR 30. So it’s a bargain apparently. If you don’t like your gift, you can’t get your money back and probably won’t be invited to cool parties in the future.

The D66 slogan read “Finally you’re a D66er” and the gift certificate comes in a festive packaging.

bisnis.nl

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