April 27, 2010

Shocking and stopping pirates from boarding

Filed under: Design,Dutch first by Orangemaster @ 4:57 pm

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)

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April 26, 2010

Rights holders’ org wants to legalise music uploads

Filed under: Music,Online by Branko Collin @ 8:55 am

File sharing in the Netherlands shares a strange dichotomy with selling marijuana: acquiring the stuff is completely above board, but distributing it is illegal.

The collecting society for composers and performing artists, Buma/Stemra, has therefore come up with a plan to make uploading music legal, for a small fee paid through Internet providers of course. The society told Telegraaf that research shows users are willing to pay a fee of between 5 and 10 euro a month.

Response to Buma/Stemra’s plans has been varied according to an article by Webwereld. Access providers and representative organisations of consumers and record companies all saw positive sides to the proposal. The only group that has reservations (based on my reading visitor comments at the Webwereld and Telegraaf websites) are listeners themselves.

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April 25, 2010

Guilders

Filed under: Design,History by Branko Collin @ 11:48 am

The coin to the left was issued in 1681 by the states of Holland and Friesland, of the Dutch Republic. It was a silver guilder design sporting the lion from the coat of arms of Holland. The coin to the right was issued by the Netherlands in 1973, and was I believe the penultimate design.

The last design had a 1980-ish look with grids and layers. It was replaced in 2002 by the euro.

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April 24, 2010

Dutchman ‘accidentally’ buys historic German bridge

Filed under: Architecture,History by Branko Collin @ 1:44 pm

Toni Bienemann from Arnhem is an avid collector of vintage cars, but having acquired about 40 automobiles he decided it was time for a change. And so he bought an old rail bridge in Germany—only to find out that this particular bridge is a symbol of German reunification. The Germans would get very upset, for instance, if he were to strip the thing for scrap metal.

Bienneman told Duitslandweb:

I had expected perhaps a small article in a local news paper, but not this much attention. Spiegel, ORF, Berliner Zeiting, they all called me to ask me why I bought the bridge. So I told them a story which I had made up afterwards. Originally, the bridge just seemed a nice symbol for my company, Dutchi Motors.

The Dömitz rail bridge (1873) used to be one of the longest bridges in Germany. It spanned the river Elbe, and was bombed by the alies in World War II. Afterwards, one side of the bridge became East German territory and was scrapped.

Wendland-net faithfully reproduces some of Bienneman’s spin:

“It would have been a pity if such a symbolic bridge had fallen into the wrongs hands.” This is the fear that drove Toni Bienemann […] to buy the historic construction for 305,000 euro from Deutsche Bahn in an auction.

Bienemann has now proposed the Germans come up with suggestions on how he could use the bridge in such a way that its symbolic value won’t get lost. He doesn’t need to make much profit right away, according to Duitslandweb, but if running the bridge is going to take him too much time, he will sell or lease it. Some of his own suggestions are to turn it into a bicycle bridge and run an ice-cream stand from it.

(Link: Sargasso. Photo by R. Kirchner, some rights reserved.)

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April 23, 2010

The Big M gets the thumbs up from The Hague

Filed under: Architecture by Orangemaster @ 1:28 pm

What started way back in 2002 has finally been approved by The Hague’s city council: world-renowned architect Rem Koolhaas plans to build a 93-metre high building in front of the city’s central station as a new city landmark. The plans include three tapered towers, two with a total of 179 apartments and one for offices that meet and merge at the top, encompassing Koningen Julianaplein (big town square) on two sides. And it looks like a big M.

The Dutch press always likes to inform their audiences how much things cost. In this case, NRC tells us the ‘wowie’ building (that gives me a Grande Arche at La Défense in Paris feeling, but then a Dutch version) is estimated to cost 300 million euro and expected to be finished in 2015.

(Links: dutchnews.nl, oma.eu, nrc.nl)

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April 22, 2010

The Vegan Vampire conquers Amsterdam

Filed under: Film by Orangemaster @ 12:33 pm

The Vegan Vampire, directed by Suzi Terror, won the first ever Imagine Time Capsule 2010 during the Amsterdam Fantastic Film Festival this week. Many of the YouTube send-ins were very good, but the jury was “very impressed with the skilled production as well as with actress Mirte Eggenkamp who mimics and moves like a tragic vampire.”

Watch more films from the festival here.

(Link: imaginefilmfestival.nl)

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April 21, 2010

Taxi driver gets two years for killing client

Filed under: General by Orangemaster @ 10:41 pm

A taxi driver at the busy Amsterdam taxi stand Leidseplein was sentenced to two years in jail instead of the usual four for murder for beating a client, leading to his death (manslaughter). Last year, the taxi driver beat the man to death over the price of a cab ride. He dealt a deadly blow by going all amateur Jean Claude Van Damme on the man with his kickboxing. The court had asked for three years, but it turned into two and public opinion knows that if he’s nice he’ll get out even sooner, hence the commotion. This violent man has been in court before for threatening and assaulting three girls in 2007.

To give you some background, the taxi market in Amsterdam was liberalised a few years ago, out of town taxis were allowed to come and work in Amsterdam with little or no knowledge of the city and the situation is a general mess for honest taxi drivers and clients like me who need a cab at 3 am because I am carrying DJ equipment that won’t fit on my bicycle. There are many incidents, but this is really bad. The city of Amsterdam should really do something, but we don’t currently have a mayor and politics aren’t touching difficult issues until June.

As well, there is a constant claim that judges are too soft on sentencing in general, but I can’t judge (pardon the pun) if that is the case.

Back in October 2008 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.

(Link: spitsnieuws.nl)

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April 20, 2010

Seven men arrested for wearing the number 1312

Filed under: Sports by Branko Collin @ 1:44 pm

AT5 reports that seven fans of Amsterdam’s Ajax football club have been arrested for wearing shirts that sported the number 1312 before the match against Heracles last Sunday.

Police officers apparently were insulted by numbers, as they seem to believe the outcome of 1312 is “all cops are bastards.”

Football blog footballculture.nl—presumably fearing that if the police keep up their censoring ways, fans will have to go naked at this rate—came up with a completely innocuous T-shirt (photo) sporting an apple, some kind of citrus fruit, a member of the Ananas family, and a banana (Dutch names: appel, citroen, ananas, banaan).

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April 19, 2010

Delft students improve surgery for cross-eyed

Filed under: Health,Science by Branko Collin @ 1:48 pm

Team Daisy, made up of Elsbeth Geukers and Nicole de Bakker, has won the 2010 Philips Innovation Award with a diagnostic technique that should drastically reduce the amount of operations required to treat strabismus (aka “cross-eyed”) in young children.

One of the problems that apparently plague doctors when trying to measure the angle of ‘crossed’ eyes is that young children do not sit still enough for an accurate measurement. Sprout.nl claims that this can lead to a failure rate of the operations of up to 50%.

The technique developed by the TU Delft students will simply measure from different angles simultaneously.

Earlier this year Geukers and De Bakker proved not only to be successful inventors but also promising businesswomen, when they won first prize (1500 euro) in the Writing a Business Plan course at their university.

(Photo by Flickr user net_efekt, some rights reserved)

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April 18, 2010

The other ‘Anne Frank’ houses

Filed under: General by Branko Collin @ 12:08 pm

The Anne Frank House is called Het Achterhuis in Dutch, the apartment in the back, simply because that is what it was. The andereachterhuizen.nl website has collected 30 stories of other hiding places of Jewish refugees in World War II.

For instance, the story of Johan Sanders, who was separated from his parents and sisters. When he once met his sisters on the street, naturally he smiled. The other kids, not knowing the real deal, yelled that “ha ha, Johan van den Berk is in love with Lenie Vissermans.”

“That had a real impact on me.”

The people in these stories were hiding at one of 42 addresses. They received warmth or beatings. They were in the city or the countryside, alone or with others. They were in hiding or were not. They had to pay a lot, or nothing at all. They were treated like equals or as slaves. They were betrayed or not.

(The site is entirely in Dutch. Via Trendbeheer)

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