March 3, 2018

Amsterdam turns into picturesque skating rink

Filed under: General,Sports by Orangemaster @ 10:41 am

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As of Thursday, people started skating on a few selected stretches of canals in Amsterdam, mainly the Prinsengracht. Yes, there’s been skating of all kinds happening in the north of the country as it is somewhat colder, but when skate fever hits Amsterdam, it’s a big deal worldwide. The sheer amount of spectators on the canal bridges means we’re all on someone’s holiday pictures and social media.

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While co-blogger Branko was taking pictures, I cleared my schedule on Friday and went skating. I’ve own a pair of custom Riedell ice skates since I was girl in Canada and they are at my door with my hats and gloves at 24oranges HQ ready to go skating. The last time the canals froze in Amsterdam was February 2012 and back then I had a broken leg from roller skating and missed out on all the fun. I couldn’t be happier to finally get to skate this time around. Practicing any of my figure skating jumps was not an option though, sadly, since the ice would crack in places as we all skated over it. It got a bit scary: getting on and off the ice at strategic places meant relying on the help of strangers and nobody is going to tell you where to skate and where not to, which is all very unregulated yet freeing.

I saw a guy cycle on the ice while texting, I saw girls and boys playing hockey together with some adults and I saw people skating for the first time on speed skates.

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March 1, 2018

Germans pass on naming train after Anne Frank

Filed under: History by Orangemaster @ 2:30 pm

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German railway company Deutsche Bahn has decided not to go ahead with plans to name one of their Intercity trains after Anne Frank, the young Jewish girl who was deported by train to the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1944 and whose diary is world-famous. Frank was German until 1941 when she became stateless while living in Amsterdam.

Last September, Deutsche Bahn asked people to suggest names for trains, and along with Anne Frank, they suggested first Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany Konrad Adenauer and scientist Albert Einstein. Both Jewish and non-Jewish organisations pounced on the railway company with ‘this is a terrible idea, don’t do it’ and the original reply from the railway company was ‘Anne Frank stands for tolerance and reconciliation’.

Following the criticism, Deutsche Bahn is going to go the ‘IKEA’ route and give the trains names of German rivers and mountains.

A lot of companies and organisations seem to get Anne Frank wrong: as a Halloween costume, an espace room or even as a Spanish musical.

(Link: nos.nl)

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February 26, 2018

‘Girl with a Pearl Earring’ in the spotlight next week

Filed under: Art,Technology by Orangemaster @ 8:48 pm

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As hinted to in an article about using the Rijksmuseum’s scanner to catch baddies, the Mauritshuis museum in The Hague will be using a Macro-X-ray Fluorescence scanner (MA-XRF) scanner to analyse Vermeer’s ‘Girl with a Pearl Earring’ next week, to find out more about the painting.

And lucky us at 24oranges HQ, we’ll be there and bring back photos if we’re allowed to take any, as we have ‘a man on the inside’.

Nicknamed ‘the Dutch Mona Lisa’, Vermeer’s iconic painting was last studied in 1994 during a conservation project. In those days, they had to take paint samples from the priceless work to examine it, something that doesn’t have to be done any more thanks to technology. Scanners and X-ray machines don’t even need to touch the surface of the canvas and can provide new insights into how Vermeer painted the girl and the materials he used.

Whether her earring is a pearl (I’m in the ‘no’ camp) or some shiny trinket and whether or not the girl had some sort of connection with Vermeer is still a matter of speculation.

(Link and photo: phys.org)

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February 23, 2018

Stay over in a 1950s Fokker airplane

Filed under: Aviation,General by Orangemaster @ 6:50 pm

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In Hoogerheide, North Brabant adventurous folks can stay over at a Bed and Breakfast in an old Fokker 27 aeroplane, the most numerous post-war aircraft to have been manufactured in the Netherlands and one of the most successful European airliners of its time.

The plane has a big sofa, small kitchen and even a sauna. Hosts Gerhard and Esther Slootweg wanted to provide optimal comfort with a nod to the 1960s, although the planes are from the late 1950s. The accommodations aren’t far from the Fokker factory and the Woensdrecht military air base, and get a lot of ‘flyers’ as guests.

The Fokker Bed & Breakfast was on a Dutch television channel that caters to an older audience, and is getting all kinds of bookings since.

(Link and photo: omroepbrabant.nl)

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February 22, 2018

Multi-purpose robot boats to float on canals

Filed under: Technology by Orangemaster @ 3:37 pm

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Amsterdam will get the world’s first fleet of autonomous boats, ushering in a new chapter in the international push for autonomous vehicles thanks to ROBOAT, the world’s first large-scale research that explores and tests the possibilities of autonomous systems on water. A collaboration between America’s Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Metropolitan Solutions (AMS), the ROBOAT project will have a round of testing in Amsterdam’s canals in September 2018.

“This project imagines a fleet of autonomous boats for transporting goods and people that can also work together to produce temporary floating infrastructure, such as pontoons or stages that can be assembled or disassembled in a matter of hours,” explains Carlo Ratti, Professor of the Practice of Urban Technologies in the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning.

ROBOAT will also deploy environmental sensing to monitor water quality and offer data for assessing and predicting issues on public health, pollution, and the environment.

Here’s a smaller version zipping around Amsterdam’s canals:

(Links: designboom.com, ams-institute.org)

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February 21, 2018

Personal computer museum to open in Helmond

Filed under: Gaming,General by Orangemaster @ 11:44 pm

On 17 March, the Home Computer Museum in Helmond, Noord-Brabant will open its doors. At noon, visitors will be able to check out a collection of old personal computers, gaming computers and arcade games. There’s also an arcade café, 1980s films, a repairs corner, and more.

Thanks to crowdfunding, founder Bart van den Akker was able to raise the money needed to launch the museum. The city of Helmond also pitched in 7,000 euro for start-up costs and even an annual amount of 3000 euro for the next three years.

(Link: ed.nl)

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February 20, 2018

Detecting fake news by playing a game

Filed under: General,Online by Orangemaster @ 11:09 am

Dutch media collective DROG together with Cambridge researchers is launching an English version of the fake news game online today that teaches people how to immunise themselves against fake news.

“The game encourages players to stoke anger, mistrust and fear in the public by manipulating digital news and social media. Players build audiences for their fake news sites by publishing polarizing falsehoods, deploying Twitter bots, photoshopping evidence, and inciting conspiracy theories in the wake of public tragedy, all while maintaining a ‘credibility score’ to remain as persuasive as possible”.

Teenagers at a Dutch secondary school played the game use pen and paper, and demonstrated that the perceived ‘reliability’ of fake news diminished with those who played the game, as compared to a control group.

“If you know what it’s like to walk in the shoes of someone who is actively trying to deceive you, it should increase your ability to spot and resist the techniques of deceit”, explains says Dr. Sander van der Linden, Director of Cambridge University’s Social Decision-Making Lab.

The game will be rolled out in other languages and aimed at countries that have a high level of fake news like Ukraine.

(Link: phys.org)

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February 19, 2018

Bunker Day to feature two ‘unopened’ bunkers

Filed under: History by Orangemaster @ 6:54 pm
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On 9 June, two unique WWII bunkers in the small town of Driehuis, North Holland will be open to the public for one day only. According to Ruud Pols of the Bunkermuseum in IJmuiden, North Holland, this will be the first time these bunkers will actually be opened since the end of the war. Both bunkers are part of the Festung IJmuiden, one of the most important strategic defenses of the German Atlantic Wall. In fact, they’ll be open on National Bunker Day (Bunkerdag).

Pols also has no clue what they’ll find. Will it have been frozen in time or did someone already visit it that they don’t know about? No less than 2300 bunkers have been built in and around IJmuiden, a Dutch port city, and when taking a train and looking out the window in that area, you see cows grazing around the bunkers like it’s a normal sight.

(Link: nhnieuws.nl, Photo: cyberbunker in Zeeland)

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February 18, 2018

So why are the Dutch good at speed skating?

Filed under: History,Sports by Orangemaster @ 8:45 pm

After the ridiculous comments made by American commentator Katie Couric about the Dutch dominance in speed skating being the result of skating everywhere in the winter as a mode of transport and after apologising, but only after she received, as the Dutch would say, ‘buckets of shit poured over her’, it’s probably a good idea to find out how this dominance began.

Another rookie mistake made by Couric was equating Amsterdam with the Netherlands, something that grates more than a cheese grater at a Dutch breakfast table. Most Dutch skaters, if not all of them, come from villages nowhere near Amsterdam, often in the province of Friesland where people speak Frisian as well as Dutch.

Trigger warning: people used to skate on frozen canals back in the day, but due to milder winters, canals freeze less often, so people skate indoors. And yes, this woman is trying her best to pronounce Dutch names, but ‘Koen’ is ‘Koon’, not ‘Ko-en’ and I don’t understand how we got ‘Irene Worst’ out of ‘Ireen Wüst’ (more like ‘E-rain Woost’) or Netherlands (‘lands’ should be ‘lunds’).

(Photo by Remko van Dokkum, some rights reserved)

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February 16, 2018

Supermarket opening stops tram dead in its tracks

Filed under: Food & Drink,General by Orangemaster @ 12:45 pm

This week, a Jumbo supermarket in Zoetermeer, South Holland had a grand opening at which a bunch of yellow streamers were fired off into the air. So far, so boring.

Then, the wind caught the streamers and they flew all the way up to the tram’s overhead line and that messed up people’s commute. Someone called the local non-police neighbourhood uniformed agents to organise a clean up.

Jumbo supermarkets come into the news in weird ways. They had the pink shopping basket for singles, let students bring back a huge lorry full of beer bottles and let customers test different kinds of toilet paper in their bathroom.

(Link and photo: nos.nl)

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