Dutch women with partners are very happy with their part-time jobs and do not aspire to work full-time, a recent study reveals.

Professor Jan van Ours of the University of Tilburg who performed the study together with Australian researcher Allison Booth, told De Pers: “People often assume that [Dutch] women go for a part-time job to be able to raise children. But women won’t start to work more once the children have grown up. A part-time job is not an intermediate phase, but a goal in itself.”

More than 50% of Dutch women between the ages of 25 and 54 work part-time, FD reports. Within a heterosexual relationship it is often the woman who performs the most household tasks. This doesn’t change if the woman works more.

Meanwhile, the barbarous practice of alimony continues unimpeded in the Netherlands. Sure, let women work part-time, but don’t punish the ex-husband for his ex-wife’s lack of ambition.

See also:

• Women have low impact on Dutch work force
• Dutch prefer to work around 27 hours per week

(Photo of Jean Gautherin’s Le Paradis Perdu by Thierry Caro, some rights reserved)

Noise pollution, Dutch style: some 16.5 million of us are packed into a small country and the people living in the four big cities known in Dutch as the ‘Randstad’ (Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Utrecht and The Hague) often live in old houses that have very little isolation. I have friends who refuse to live anywhere with upstairs neighbours, and in my case here in Amsterdam I can hear the neighbours’ dog yelping at passers-by. When I lived in Nijmegen, the old man downstairs had the telly on really loud. The day that stopped, we found out he had passed away.

We can’t just move to the country: for most jobs you need to leave within 10 km of your work because beyond that employers would have to pay for your travel costs and therefore will not hire you. Coming by car means major traffic jams, and so we live in town and often bike to work. You can’t rent anything in the country, you have to buy, which many people can’t do. Oh, and in the country, they have bored youth with noisy, high-pitched scooters driving around, which has become a major noise pollution issue.

So tape your neighbours in the hopes of getting them evicted is a new strategy in the country’s second biggest city, Rotterdam. Granted, many people will pipe down if you ask them nicely, but many people, and I am sorry to say, usually with children, have no idea what kind of anti-social racket they are making.

“Since February, Rotterdam is offering possible victims of ‘noise pollution’ a noise-o-meter to monitor the nuisance. The noise-o-meter is part of a campaign to counter ‘neighbourhood terror’. According to a city survey last year, some 49,000 people in the Netherlands’ second major city say they regularly suffer serious nuisance from neighbours. The noise-o-meter offers ‘an objective measure of the sound, which gives us a stronger legal case in case of an eviction request,’ said city executive Hamit Karakus about the new weapon.”

(Links: nrc.nl, Photo of db meter by jepoirrier, some rights reserved.)

The way the Dutch viewed their national airport Schiphol has changed over the years. From the starting point of an adventure, it became the nuisance in the backyard. The Bijlmer disaster of 1992, when victims living (and dying) in Amsterdam’s biggest ghetto were pushed into a secondary role to El Al’s secret cargo, really helped define this latter view.

However, Schiphol’s own ambitions are radically different. Instead of becoming a smaller, gentler airport, it wants to become the major air traffic hub of this part of Europe. People therefore started to look at alternative locations for the airport, not as close to the most densely populated area of this densely populated country. An idea that keeps floating to the top is that of an airport in either the IJsselmeer or the North Sea, even though the Ministry of Transport and Water Management concluded in 2003 that a second national airport was superfluous, for now. Such a water-bound airport could be an artificial island, or a mega-floater.

In 2007 Haskoning and Van Oord, who helped build artificial islands before, proposed rotating, floating landing strips (see illustration). And last week, Jan van Kessel got his PhD for a study into the stability of mega-floaters made of hollow, upside down, concrete ’shoe boxes’, apparently, 50% more stable than traditional barges.

And even though the government has declared the debate redundant, the Dutch keep dreaming of their airport at sea.

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)

We could hardly contain ourselves either, but then we found out what Engadget is getting so excited about, and it is pretty nifty.

Electronic particles don’t just have or constitute a charge, but also a spin direction. If you have a medium, say a hard disk that works by setting the charge of particles, you can add an extra dimension of information by also storing and reading its spin direction (polarisation). It appears that by doing so, you can speed up reading a hard disk by several orders of magnitude.

The only problem so far was that all this reading and writing required an environment dozens of degrees Celsius colder than even the basement of the loneliest computer geek. Scientists from the University of Twente apparently have now come up with a way of doing all this spinning at room temperature, which has the added bonus of not scaring away their dates, thus improving their sex lives. And you were wondering what science was good for!

The University of Twente also mentions huge energy gains that can be acquired this way.

(Source of sciency looking image: University of Twente.)

Thanks to a new production process, Koen van Dijke of the University of Wageningen has come up with a way of making mayonnaise using less oil, but with the same taste as full on fat mayonnaise. When you make mayonnaise, you need egg yolks or lemon as an emulsifier to stabilise the mixture. To do this right, you need to use a lot of oil, which makes mayonnaise fattening.

Van Dijke developed a microscale system that adds very little oil to a lot of water, producing a stable emulsion. Then this mix is added to more water, producing a new emulsion that is mostly water, but that retains the same taste.

(Links: rtl.nl, evmi.nl)

If you can stomach it, have a look at x-rays showing a whole bunch of cutlery eaten by 52-year-old Margaret Daalman, a Dutch woman with an eating disorder called pica (I think it’s pica; oddly no one mentions it), which is an urge to eat non-food items. She ate 78 different items of cutlery and went to the hospital in Rotterdam with stomach pain. Although this happened some 30 years ago, the x-rays were apparently published for the first time this week in a Dutch medical magazine.

One of the most famous entertainers with pica (or just plain bonkers) was Michael Lotito aka Monsieur Mangetout (’Mr Eat-it All’), a Frenchman who holds the Guinness Book of World Records for eating undigestables.

He apparently had the ability to consume 900 g of metal a day. Since 1966, he had consumed 18 bicycles, 15 shopping carts, seven television sets, six chandeliers, two beds, a pair of skis, a computer, and a Cessna light aircraft. He died of natural causes in 2007.

(Links: presurfer, knurps.nl)

Fifty-one percent of all Dutch children think there is too much reporting on swine flu, with only 1% saying there is too little. Seventeen percent say news about swine flu scares them.

A poll held by Jeugdjournaal (kids’ TV news show) among more than 2,000 children and published yesterday also shows that 82% of the children are not afraid of swine flu.

Per year between 250 and 2,000 people die of the regular flu in the Netherlands. So far the swine flu has contributed to 17 deaths since the start of the outbreak last Spring, a little over 1 % of the known infections.

Swine flu is called Mexican flu in the Netherlands—vicious rumours suggest this may be so as not to upset the voters of government party CDA, many of whom presumably are pig farmers.

(Drawing by Ollie Crafoord, some rights reserved.)

Although parents keep checking their children’s hair and volunteer to check other children’s hair at school, the number of elementary school children with head lice has doubled in the past 15 years, according to a survey from the Dutch National Head Lice Support Centre.

An online survey filled out by over 750 parents and students showed that 25.5% of parents say their children have head lice in the past 12 months as compared to 11% of children with head lice in 1993. Researches do not understand why there is more head lice going around than back then.

Let me see… Many parents really don’t check for all kinds of dysfunctional family reasons? They in fact get it from children elsewhere than at school, like day care, camping, etc?

Theories, parents, anyone?

(Link: expatica.com, Photo tapirback.com)

Stefan Oerlemans, a student from the University of Twente, discovered a way to reduce the ‘noise source distribution’ of modern wind turbines. For those of you who may not know, people living near these wind turbines have to deal with the loud ’swishing’ sound they make. Yes, there are downsides to green energy.

Oerlemans figured out that the sound level could be reduced by half by fitting jagged edges, or teeth on the blades of the turbines. Now all I need is some black, red, yellow and orange to paint some flames and make them look cool as well.

(Link: depers.nl)