September 7, 2014

Pink refuge islands will keep their colour, Wijchen says

Filed under: Weird by Branko Collin @ 2:05 pm

refuge-island-wijchen-branko-collin

Last week bright pink refuge islands started popping up on Havenweg in the town of Wijchen near Nijmegen.

According to Volkskrant, the civil servant responsible for ordering the paint used the wrong colour code (it should have been a dark red) and the painters never questioned the result, so now Wijchen has its own ‘world famous’ refuge islands.

Realising their mistake, the municipality wanted to have the pink islands painted over but citizens liked the effect, so the striking colour stays. Deputy Mayor Paul Loermans said about the mistakes: “To err is human. Apart from getting the colour wrong, the painters actually did a neat job.”

Omroep Gelderland suspected a marketing stunt because a bike race for women will be passing through Wijchen next week, but everybody involved denies the allegations vehemently. “A lucky mistake”, both the organizers of the race and the municipality told the broadcaster.

This shade of pink is sometimes called ‘zuurstokroze’ in Dutch, ‘candy cane pink’.

(Photo: reconstruction via Google Street View)

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September 1, 2011

Tracking down pooping dog owners using dog DNA

Filed under: Animals,Science by Orangemaster @ 3:59 pm

There can be quite some dog pooh on the street in the Netherlands sometimes because the owners pay taxes and some interpret that as ‘my dog can go anywhere it wants without me having to pick it up because I pay for it.’ It could be worse, but it could always be better.

The town of Wijchen, Gelderland is considering getting some device that reads pooh DNA, finds the dog that matches it, which in turn leads to the owner getting a fine. It’s all very CSI. Would people and law makers actually allow the reading of dog pooh DNA as a basis for a fine? And then the town has to properly keep a DNA database of all the dogs. Experience teaches us that government and databases are a very bad match in general.

The bottom line is, it’s also really expensive, the boffins say.

(Link: www.gelderlander.nl.nl, Photo of Pick Up Your Dog Poo by Michael Coghlan, some rights reserved)

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