Someone was telling me at a dinner party about this beer (not the one in the picture) and the (pardon the pun) pissing contest it became to brew the world’s strongest beer. Back in February Scottish brewery BrewDog could still claimed it brewed the world’s strongest beer called Sink the Bismarck! at 41 per cent. It has now been surpassed by Almere’s Jan Nijboer of brewery ‘t Koelschip with a beer called Start the Future that comes in at a whopping 60 per cent.

Game on.

(Link: spitsnieuws.nl)

On Saturday in Utrecht’s busiest shopping mall, Wim Hof, aka the Ice Man, broke his record of sitting in ice for 1 hour and 13 minutes by a whopping 31 minutes 23 seconds (1 h 44 min 23 sec).

Back in May, after having put Hof through tests, two Dutch scientists in Nijmegen concluded that what he can do “is medically impossible”.

He’s just the definition of cool.

Read and watch more about The Ice Man being a freak of nature.

(Link: rtvutrecht)

As of September, a sports park in Eindhoven (three football pitches, four tennis courts and the rest of the place) will be entirely lit using LED lights, made popular in its mordern-day version sometime around 1999 by Dutch firm Philips, headquartered in Eindhoven.

Local newspaper Eindhovens Dagblad claims that this is a world first, as they couldn’t find anyone else who did this. LED lighting is much less energy consuming that regular lighting, up to 60% according to measurements quoted in the newspaper.

(Link: nuzakelijk.nl, Photo of LED lighting project by Velo Steve, some rights reserved)

Dutch gamers in Rotterdam have scored a Guinness world record for the most hours of consecutive gaming: 50 hours playing Red Dead Redemption. The old record was held by Chirantan Patnaik from India at 40 hours 20 minutes, according to the print version Dutch daily De Pers.

The attempt to break the record was organised by Dutch company Vogel’s Products that wanted to promote a Sony PlayStation 3 controller.

(Link: wireupdate.com, Photo of a PlayStation controller 2 by blindfutur3′, some rights reserved)

On Wednesday 16 June, the Dutch defense department will be showing off the very first helicopter that flies on biofuel. A Boeing Apache AH-64D helicopter of the Royal Netherlands Air Force will fly on biofuel above the military Gilze-Rijen Air Base, located in North Brabant, between the cities of Tilburg and Breda.

During the demonstration flight, one of the Apache’s engines will run on a mixture of fossile fuel and biokerosene, of which 90% of this kerosene comes from discarded cooking oil and 10% algenol, biofuel made from algae that is still very new.

This is a picture of an Apache, most probably somewhere in the United States.

(Link: blikopnieuws, Photo of AH-64 Apache helicopter by nathanm, some rights reserved)

The town of Limmen, North Holland got 1800 volunteers with loads of free time to build the highest tower ever made of Lego blocks. The tower is made up of 700,000 Lego pieces and is 30,52 metres high, breaking the old Guinness Book of Records record by a mere 30 cm (see pic), set by the city of Oslo, Norway.

(Link: waarmaarraar.nl)

Last Thursday, the Dutch national library opened its repository of digitized Dutch newspapers from the period 1618 to 1995.

So far the library has digitized 1 million pages from 70 papers, which can be viewed at http://kranten.kb.nl. It plans on scanning 7 million more in the next two years in order to cover 5% of all newspapers ever printed in the Netherlands.

For the occasion, the oldest copy of a Dutch newspaper in existance, Courante uyt Italien, Duytslandt &c, is on display at the library, on loan from the Royal Library of Sweden. The name, meaning “‘currents’ from Italy, Germany, etc.” stuck around, and now courant—krant in its modern spelling—is the word for newspaper in Dutch.

The Dutch national library is not the first with an online newspaper archive, and there are some genuinely cool archives out there such as the Australian one that lets you proofread OCRed texts (much like Wikipedia). The range of the Dutch archive is actually impressive.

(Links: Webwereld, Trouw.)

Tulpfietsen.nl sells sturdy city bikes online that clients can design themselves, like mix and match outfits. (Here, just a picture of a totally unrelated cute, pink bike). The bikes are delivered within one week and are put together at your place, live. Tulpfietsen will also give you a free tune-up after four months.

For every bike sold Tulpfietsen will donate 2 euro to the 1WE Rickshaw Project, which offers rickshaw drivers in Bangladesh the opportunity to buy a fixed-up rickshaw with a microcredit.

(Link: zibb.nl)

Lodewijk Westerbeek van Eerten invented an anti-pirate system called ‘P-Trap’. Two booms are attached to the flank of large ships that have invisible electric ropes that hang in the water. The idea is that the pirate ships cannot board the bigger ships as their motor gets caught and shocked in the ropes. Then get dragged to wherever the boat is going unless they jump ship, which is highly unlikely.

Westerbeek van Eerten, who calls himself an inventive businessman and not an inventor in all Dutch modesty, says “this anti-piracy system dissuades pirates from boarding sea going vessels.” The Royal Dutch marine has tested the P-Trap, calling it an excellent invention. Hiring armed guards is very pricy as compared to installing the P-Trap. And since we always want to know the price of things in the Netherlands, it is 50,000 to 75,000 euro for a P-Trap as compared to 120,000 euro for armed guards. The latter doesn’t guarantee pirates won’t board you, either.

(Link: depers.nl)

For the first time ever Amsterdam will be one of the cities hosting the 11th edition of the Very Short Film Festival, featuring movies of less than three minutes, without titles and credits. On 8 and 9 May, the CREA in Amsterdam will play host to all kinds of movies, chosen for their originality, boldness, sense of humour, generosity and even bad taste. The festival has always been very francophone in nature, but this year films are being shown in and from countries such as The Netherlands, Brazil, Hungary, Moldavia, Israel, Romania, Singapore, Serbia, Palestine and the United Kingdom.

In the spirit of ‘Zoek de Nederlander’ (Find the Dutch person), Alix over at drooderfiets tells me that the Public’s Award of the fifth edition went to a Dutch short by Jeroen Annokkeé called ‘Road Kill’.

Road Kill

(Link: Very Short)