May 10, 2013

Watch with holes for numbers by Michiel Cornelissen

Filed under: Design by Branko Collin @ 9:08 am

Designer Michiel Cornelissen created this watch for Lorenz after the Italian watch maker had heard of his experience with 3D printing and laser cutting.

The watch has a face that consists of several layers (the name of the watch, Camada, means layer in Portuguese). Holes cut out of those layers represent the time.

Cornellisen writes:

In Camada, I wanted the time-telling aspect of the watch face to be integrated into the form and build of the watch, rather than applied as a graphical element.

For this purpose, I proposed to build the entire watch up from layers of metal, to be joined in a process called brazing. The first layer of the face indicates the hour division of the watch, while subsequent layers provide a minute indication – creating functionality while giving depth and structure to the product.

Lorenz decided not to manufacture the watch because their processes currently cannot handle the design.

(Link: Bright. Photo: michielcornelissen.com)

Tags: , ,

May 9, 2013

Amsterdam, the city that knows no boundaries

Filed under: General by Orangemaster @ 10:46 am

There’s a new trend that has been brewing in Amsterdam when it comes to branding the city to tourists, and that’s making tourist attractions that are not actually in Amsterdam part of the city when it is convenient to do so (*cash register sounds*).

The cities of IJmuiden, Bloemendaal and Zandvoort on the coast are now just ‘Amsterdam Beach’, although they are closer to the bigger city of Haarlem, which is sometimes casually annexed to what is now being referred to as ‘The Greater Amsterdam Area’ by city marketing people. Schiphol Airport has been called Amsterdam Airport for ages although it is not in Amsterdam and the ‘Bulb Region’ again closer to Haarlem is the ‘Amsterdam Flower Strip’. Oddly enough, the most ‘bulbous’ region of the country is actually north of there, but that’s just inconvenient.

The lovely castle of Muiderslot 15 kilometres from Amsterdam is being sold to tourists as ‘Amsterdam Castle Muiderslot’. The number of foreign visitors doubled in 2012 from 10,000 to 20,000 (*cash register sounds*).

Although Amsterdam is the capital of the Netherlands, it’s never really marketed as such, probably because the Dutch refer to Amsterdam as that big city over there and not as ‘the nation’s capital’. However, this absorbing of non Amsterdam attractions makes many an Amsterdam resident uncomfortable. What gives Amsterdam the right to poach tourist attractions? Money? I mean Schiphol, OK, it’s tough to pronounce, but the beaches 20 kilometres away? That’s overstretching boundaries.

According to Amsterdam FM radio, Amsterdam presents itself abroad as being a city that is much bigger than its actual municipal boundaries. If the locals of other cities don’t mind the poaching and enjoy the money like Muiderslot does, then fine, Amsterdam just got that much bigger (*cash register sounds*).

While us mortals in Amsterdam still have to use normal city limits, we are all the dupe of some city marketing we can’t believe in ourselves because we know it’s not Amsterdam. Why are the 1.5 million tourists that come to Amsterdam every year being treated like morons? It almost looks to me as if we are ashamed of quaint villages like Zaandam with its famous windmills and its having housed Russian Tsar Peter the Great for a week. And will this branding go so far as to make the city of Utrecht 30 min away by train a suburb of Amsterdam? Don’t laugh, that’s where this megalomaniac trend is headed.

To quote any good Dutch person talking to tourists and expats: Amsterdam isn’t the Netherlands. Hell, Amsterdam is not even itself anymore.

(Link: www.amsterdamfm.nl, Photo of Muiderslot Castle by Coanri/Rita, some rights reserved)

Tags: , , , , , , ,

May 8, 2013

Northern radio stations to broadcast live ambulance sirens

Filed under: Automobiles,Dutch first by Orangemaster @ 10:44 am

If you’ve driving around the North of the country and listening to certain local radio stations, you will soon be able to hear ambulance sirens through the radio, a partial solution to people in their cars not hearing ambulances due to car noise or loud music.

The system will cut off radio signals from about a 300-metre radius around the ambulance and broadcast its siren for a short period. However, many radio stations are weary of this system, as they fear loss of advertisers. Another obvious concern is for anyone living near a hospital and hearing every siren that goes off from incoming and outgoing ambulances.

In true Dutch fashion, they’ll give this system a whirl for a year and see what happens.

Here’s what a Dutch ambulance looks and sounds like

Here’s a Dutch ambulance trying out an American sound

And for anyone who didn’t know, “You hear the high pitch of the siren of the approaching ambulance, and notice that its pitch drops suddenly as the ambulance passes you. That is called the Doppler effect.”

(Link: www.waarmaarraar.nl, Photo of a Dierenambulance (animal ambulance) by Alberto Garcia, some rights reserved)

Tags: ,

May 7, 2013

Amsterdam tops list of best biking cities in the world 2013

Filed under: Bicycles by Orangemaster @ 10:00 am

Although they say it took them more time than they had expected, Copenhagenize’s 2013 Index of bicycle-friendly cities is out, and Amsterdam is the orange on top.

“We ranked 80 cities in 2011 and increased that to 150 this time round. Although this time round we had the help of over 400 individuals on every continent – our eyes and ears on the ground – to assist with the ranking. Lots of changes in the Top 20 what with the addition of 80 new cities. ”

Some interesting bits about the list:
– Utrecht came in 3rd and Eindhoven 6th.
– My home town of Montréal came in 11th (tied with Munich and Nagoya), as the only North American city.
– France and Germany each have three cities in the top 20.

All in all, most top biking cities are European ones. I mentioned in passing on French Belgian radio last week how dangerous it was to cycle in Brussels, so I am glad to see Antwerp in the list.

From what I have seen and read, in the United States and in many parts of Canada, fitting in cyclists so late in the game is more of a nuisance and a diluted green affair than actually making cycling a valid and accepted mode of transport like it is here. It could make more sense in the long run to concentrate on electric cars in countries where the distances are greater than trying to get people to cycle two months out of the year when the weather is nice. Winter has to be a major factor worldwide for using a car over a bike. Copenhagen and Malmö have serious winters and are pretty far up the list, but they have relatively small city centres and apparently very good cycling infrastructure. I know for a fact that it took a lot of lobbying to get my home town of Montréal to build bike paths at the end of the 1980s.

(Link: www.copenhagenize.com, Photo by Flickr user comedynose, some rights reserved)

Tags: , ,

May 6, 2013

Dutch doctor cartoon: tasteless, funny or who cares?

Filed under: Comics,Science by Orangemaster @ 5:17 pm

Doctor (‘Medicine man’): ‘Jambalayla, Jambayla’ (= nonsense words, nothing to do with cooking)
Patient: Thank you… I feel much better already.
Caption: It should be easier for foreign doctors to practice here.

I personally know doctors and nurses with perfectly good diplomas from Eastern European countries that cannot or could not find work in the Netherlands, as their diploma was either not recognised or highly devalued.

After 14 years in the Netherlands, a land that generally hates to be politically correct, I can imagine that this cartoon didn’t even raise an eyebrow for most people. I’m not saying I agree, but I do understand why people didn’t have a problem with it: it’s a ‘far-from-my-bed-show’, the Dutch equivalent of ‘it doesn’t really concern me’, after all the medicine man is just a caricature not a real person, someone would say.

However, I also understand why some people would be offended at the depiction of a tribal sounding African-like Black person portrayed as a quack. I just think the cartoon is not that great (Hein de Kort does have his moments), but it does have a racial slant that could have been avoided.

The media have enough Dutch doctor mishaps to report about. Just today a Dutch doctor hit the presses for unnecessarily removing a man’s prostate in Leiden (in Dutch). The man had the same name as someone else. ‘Jambalayla, Jambayla’ to you, too.

(Link to more info, in Dutch: www.parool.nl)

Tags: , ,

May 5, 2013

Dutch programming whiz kid raises the bar that much higher

Filed under: Online by Orangemaster @ 3:30 pm

Problably best known for Puckipedia, 13-year-old Puck Meerburg from Delft has been coding since he was six. Meerburg has developed apps for a range of different mobile platforms already, including iOS, Android and BlackBerry.

Although Puck hasn’t quite mastered the art of giving interviews, which is maybe a lot to ask from a 13-year-old, he speaks better English than many of his adult counterparts. I like the way he ‘slags’ Apple for him not knowing how many copies of his apps he has sold. Apple lets people offer them apps that costs them no money at all to develop, which has hundreds of thousands of people (let’s cut the PC nonsense: mostly boys and men) around the world working day and night like slaves in the hopes of being picked up by Apple who apparently takes a whopping 30% off the top.

The Next Web tells us that, “His latest release, CatStacker is based on the growing hype around, you guessed it, placing items on a domestic cat and sharing them via photographs posted online.”

(Link: thenextweb.com, Photo: Photo by William Hook, some rights reserved)

Tags: , , ,

May 4, 2013

Copper thief electrocutes himself

Filed under: General by Branko Collin @ 12:30 pm

Last Friday a man accidentally electrocuted himself in an abandoned building on Mierloseweg in Helmond, Noord-Brabant, the police believe.

Friday morning a citizen told the police that there was a fire on the premises of a vacant business. When the fire fighters arrived, it turned out there was a man on fire! Although the fire was extinguished, the man died.

During an investigation detectives discovered several copper wires near the corpse that they suspect the man had cut loose. The police believe the 26-year-old man from Beek en Donk had tried to steal the copper from the company’s high voltage area and had accidentally created a short circuit which caused the fire.

According to Wikipedia copper theft is big business in the Netherlands. Rail manager ProRail loses about 10 million euro a year due to copper theft. In 2007 a copy of Rodin’s Le Penseur was stolen by copper thieves from the garden of the Singer Museum in Laren.

(Photo by Johan Wieland, some rights reserved)

Tags: , ,

May 3, 2013

Ex professor Diederik Stapel now pitches corporate Dunglish

Filed under: General,Weird by Orangemaster @ 2:02 pm

Dutch business magazine Quote has unveiled that the ‘professor’ who brought us piles of fake scientific research has become a language consultant. The nutty professor had a sales pitch on his website that has since been pulled, pitching him as, “being available as an opinionated consultant, motivator, coach, brand and identity language consultant, speaker, etc.”, and a whole bunch of other jargon-filled functions that show how narcissistic he really is, how crappy his Dutch is and how full of crap he still is.

He no longer has a Ph.D. as he was stripped of his title in 2011, but of course he has the right to go into business for himself. He has called his business Pile Consult. My comment is fair game for ridicule as he chose an English language name, not a Dutch one.

Just in case some of you don’t get it, Stapel, his last name, means Pile, as in a pile of things. Unfortunately, ‘pile’, or better yet ‘piles’ also refers to haemorrhoids. ‘Consultancy’ would also make more sense, but hey, we are dealing with a nut job. His ‘research’ was surely more akin to diarrhoea.

(Links: nederl.blogspot.nl, www.quotenet.nl)

Tags:

May 2, 2013

Queen’s Day 2013 in Amsterdam

Filed under: General by Branko Collin @ 10:46 pm

Maybe it was because I had an inauguration on my mind and maybe because everybody else had, but it seemed that there were more ‘kings’ and ‘queens’ than usual at the vrijmarkt last Tuesday, the annual nationwide flea market held during our national holiday, Queen’s Day.

I actually managed to catch the making of a new king on television because it all happened so quickly and so early. According to the law there must be a monarch. The very second Queen Beatrix put her signature under the declaration of abdication, she became a princess. The king next signed the same document as a witness. This happened around 10.07 in the morning, when I was still on my first coffee.

Tags: , ,

May 1, 2013

Hofman’s rubber duck invades Hong Kong

Filed under: Art by Orangemaster @ 1:26 pm

On Thursday 2 May the Rubber Duck is set to sail into Victoria Harbour, Hong Kong, China.

“We tested it for several days at a shipyard and it already got a lot of attention and spin off. People started going there to get a glimpse of the project. This is the first time the Rubber Duck is floating in Victoria Harbour, which is directly connected to the South China Sea. Right now it’s also the biggest rubber duck floating around the world.”

(Link and photo: www.florentijnhofman.nl)

Tags: , ,