June 6, 2017

Ajax women’s team petitions for their own party

Filed under: Sports by Orangemaster @ 9:52 pm

On 24 May 2017, Amsterdam’s men’s football team Ajax didn’t get a party on the Museumplein downtown, as Manchester United took the win 2-0 in the Europa League, and it was business as usual the next day.

However, on 26 May 2017, Ajax’s women’s team won the Dutch championship (Eredivisie) by winning against Eindhoven’s PSV. And even though they’ve won the national title and the cup, they don’t get anything because, well, sexism.

Ajax Women have decided enough with this unequal nonsense and have started a petition to get their own public honouring when then they win major titles instead of having a small party in their locker room. And they’re fine with having it somewhere smaller.

Here are some game highlights:

(Links: parool.nl, english.ajax.nl, Photo by Wikimedia user Carolus Ludovicus, some rights reserved)

Tags: , , ,

June 5, 2017

Word premiere: cuckoos on live stream

Filed under: Animals,Dutch first by Orangemaster @ 8:19 pm

Cuckoo-1

A world first from the ornithologists, the Dutch Bird Protection Society (Vogelbescherming) has set up a live stream on a cuckoo’s nest. And that’s always amusing to say, considering the cuckoo can’t be arsed to build its own nest, but uses other birds’ nest to lay its eggs in. According to Wikipedia, although its eggs are larger than those of its hosts, the eggs in each type of host nest resemble the host’s eggs, a form of mimicry.

In the case of this live stream, this Dutch cuckoo is a bit too big for the nest it is occupying and reminds me of YouTube cat sensation Maru trying to get into a box.

There’s a steady decline of cuckoos in all of Western Europe and the cause is unclear, which is why the Dutch Bird Protection Society has named 2017 the Year of the Cuckoo and is live streaming the nest. Hundreds of thousands of people have tuned in, including us, so give it a whirl.

(Link: naturetoday.com, Screenshot of live stream)

Tags: ,

June 3, 2017

Sensor aimed at men to hide their porn viewing

Filed under: Gadgets,Technology by Orangemaster @ 9:15 pm

Facepalm

Forget private browsing on your computer, shopping for gifts without others knowing, and using that bullshit excuse to watch porn as a man. Dutch inventor Moos Neimeijer is asking for money on Indigogo for a gadget called ‘Minimeyes’, which will close windows and mute sound if an ‘intruder’ walks into the room while you’re doing something you shouldn’t.

Minimeyes is a small box people can see next to your computer, but it’s an app on a phone. If you have one of those boxes in plain sight, aren’t you already telling everyone around you that you’re planning to do seedy shit and pretend you’re ‘doing nothing’ when you get caught? How stupid do you think people are? I doubt even kids will be convinced. And the money not pouring in speaks volumes: Niemeijer still has 17 days to go to collect 96,000 USD (about €85,163) and so far has collected the grand total of 807 USD (€715.90).

The YouTube video encourages straight white men to donate, is sexist towards both genders and stereotypically heteronormative. Good luck with that.

(Link: bright.nl, Photo of Paris Louvre facepalm by Phelan Riessen, some rights reserved)

Tags: , , ,

June 2, 2017

Lucky winner spends night in Rijksmuseum

Filed under: Art by Orangemaster @ 4:44 pm

Stefan-Kasper

The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam had a contest going where a lucky winner could spend a night at the museum in front of Rembrandt’s ‘The Night Watch’ or as it is really called, ‘Militia Company of District II under the Command of Captain Frans Banninck Cocq’.

Teacher and artist Stefan Kasper, 33, from Haarlem was visiting the Rijksmuseum with his class of elementary students and turned out to be the museum’s ten millionth visitor since they reopened in 2013. He was escorted to a gallery where he was greeted with trumpet sounds and some 200 employees of the museum when he was given the great news.

Kasper noticed the sign at the entrance about the contest, but didn’t pay much attention to it. He spent a “fantastic” night at the museum in what seems to be a comfortable spot right in front of the world-famous painting.

And instead of just falling asleep he decided to enjoy this “moment of euphoria that nobody else will get to have” by sleeping two hours and then walking around the museum in his socks. The silence in the museum was very enjoyable, Kasper explains. “This is history”, he said.

(Link: ad.nl, Photo: Stefan Kasper’s instagram)

Tags: , ,

June 1, 2017

High-speed public transport getting closer

Filed under: Technology by Orangemaster @ 9:37 pm

TUDelft

Today, outside in the sun at the Delft University of Technology, Dutch start-up Hardt Global Mobility, working together with BAM construction, unveiled a 30-meter-long and 3.2-meter in diameter white transport tube to be used to create ‘a futuristic high-speed transportation system’.

Known as the Hyperloop and originally suggested by Elon Musk of Space X and Tesla fame in 2013, the goal was to transport ‘pods’ with people in them at a whooshing 1,126 kilometres per hour, powered by electricity and magnetism that hurtle through low-friction pipes. And yes, it all sounds like science fiction and the Ceres station in The Expanse, which even has a stop called ‘Rosse Buurt’ named after Amsterdam’s red light district.

There are talks of building a transport tube between two Dutch cities within the next four years to be able to test cornering and lane switching. Being able to move goods from ports like Rotterdam is also in the cards.

On The Expanse, the pods are part of a subway station (a weird word to use considering that everything is underground on Ceres Station) and start whooshing at 0:47.

(Link: phys.org, Photo of Delft University of Technology by Gerard Stolk, some rights reserved)

Tags: , , ,

May 31, 2017

Thieves break into give-away shop, take nothing

Filed under: Weird by Orangemaster @ 7:37 pm

screwdriver

In a give-away shop, people can come and take stuff. Sure, sometimes there are limits, but the stuff is still free and the shop has no use for money whatsoever.

Oddly enough, some thieves decided to bust into the give-away shop in Zeist, Utrecht and leave all their tools behind. The thieves came in at night, forced open the doors with a crowbar which they left along with some screwdrivers. And they didn’t even take anything.

According to the shop, the place was tossed and the thieves poked around everywhere, possibly trying to find stuff of value. It’s also possible that they were trying to open an old safe in this former school, but the safe has nothing of value in it. The place is going to incur costs to fix, but the shop was open for ‘business’ today already.

I dunno, maybe it was a practice run, albeit a dumb one.

(Link: telegraaf.nl, Photo of screwdriver by Noel Hankamer, some rights reserved)

Tags: , , ,

May 29, 2017

Cat stays stuck in tree over the weekend

Filed under: Animals by Orangemaster @ 10:12 pm

Cat-view

Last Friday in Winschoten, Groningen a cat got stuck up a tree and only got down today.

Since the local emergency services didn’t want to burden the fire brigade, a local man decided to climb up the tree to get the cat down. And then he got stuck 15 metres up the tree.

The fire brigade then decided to help the man down with some equipment, while the cat was all the way up the tree. To try and get the cat down, fire firefighters sprayed 500 litres of water up the tree, but to no avail – the cat was stubborn and staying put.

At some point a firefighter in a wet suit went up the tree while other firefighters sprayed water and grabbed the cat with a blanket to finally get it down.

(Link: oldambtnu.nl, Photo (non lolcat version): arttherapyblog)

Tags: ,

May 25, 2017

Tree to tweet about the weather and its life

Filed under: Dutch first,Nature,Technology by Orangemaster @ 10:54 am

4377585008_867627b0ee_m

As of tomorrow there will be a 30-year-old elm tree at Wageningen University that is going to tweet about the weather and its health – a Dutch first. It will have all kinds of devices stuck it to do so, but that’s par for the course.

Is it getting enough water, it is being properly taken care of, that sort of thing. The tweeting is of course for fun and to make the public aware of trees and their environment. The boffins taking measurements will also use the data they plan to collect for climate change purposes.

Belgium already has three tweeting trees: an oak, a maple and a beech tree, while in Germany there’s a whole ‘forest’ of them. Spain and Switzerland will have some trees on Twitter in the near future as well.

(Link: nos.nl, Photo of Elm tree by Sludge G, some rights reserved)

Tags: , , ,

May 22, 2017

The Netherlands wastes an enormous amount of food

Filed under: Food & Drink by Orangemaster @ 11:03 pm

giro_trash

A quick Google search with ‘Netherlands’ and ‘food waste’ (albeit in Dutch) produces all kinds of links from the past few years, summed up as ‘it’s terrible that we waste so much food, we’re going to do something about it’ when the reality today is that the Netherlands is still number one in Europe when it comes to wasting food.

Despite goals that were set between 2009 and 2015, one third of all food gets thrown out in the Netherlands, as no progress whatsoever has been made since then to curb this bad behaviour. Reasons include the government saying that the goals they set back in 2015 of 20 percent less waste was not realistic and that consumers buy too much, get rid of it on the expiration date unnecessarily and don’t keep food in the right place. As well, supermarkets are guilty of putting unnecessary expiration dates on fruits and vegetables, while growers throw out perfectly good produce instead of transforming it into other products.

(Links: lunchroom.nl, brusselstimes.com)

Tags: , ,

May 20, 2017

Policeman tracks ‘unsuspecting’ bike thief

Filed under: Automobiles,Bicycles by Orangemaster @ 8:34 pm

Recently a policeman in Leiden was tracking a stolen bicycle that appeared to be very close to where he was driving in his cop van. He followed it around because dispatch told him that the bicycle was nearby, tracking it using a GPS signal, as it was a bicycle cops use to lure bike thieves in order to catch them, a ‘bait bike’.

Then he spotted another van that possibly had the stolen bike in it, followed it, and stopped it. However, once the van pulled over, the policeman figured out that the stolen bike was in the back of the police van he was driving, and promptly became the joke of the day at the police station.

The policeman in question usually bikes on the job, but on this day, he decided to use a van. While he was driving, dispatch told him about the stolen bike, but then they didn’t seem to know it was in the back of the van in the first place.

(Link:rtlnieuws.nl, Photo by Facemepls, some rights reserved)

Tags: ,