October 15, 2018

Christien Meindertsma’s new view on recycled materials

Filed under: Animals,Art by Orangemaster @ 1:33 pm

Dutch designer Christien Meindertsma, who got noticed in 2007 with her award-winning project PIG 05049 (shown above), featuring185 products made from a single pig, currently has an exhibition entitled ‘Beyond the Surface’ at the Vitra Design Museum in Basel, Switzerland, which examines her work with wool, flax, incinerator ash, and recycled wool.

Video and printed matter demonstrating her working process are displayed alongside products made from each material, to best demonstrate Meinderstma’s research-based practice. Rather than present the designer’s work chronologically, the museum decided to group the exhibition around the four materials.

“We realised that we would prefer a different format in order to give visitors a sense of the thoroughness that Christien applies to her work, which usually drives her to investigate a material or over long periods of time, producing a number of outcomes, not just a single product,” curator Viviane Stappmanns said.

The exhibition is the designer’s first outside her native country and is on display until 20 January 2019.

(Link: dezeen.com, Photo: Indexaward.dk)

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September 30, 2018

‘The Vegetarian butcher is not a butcher’

Filed under: Animals,Food & Drink by Orangemaster @ 4:00 pm
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Much in the same vein as ‘soy milk’ is not legally milk in some countries, the Dutch trade show for the meat products sector to be held on 5 and 6 November has decided that popular brand The Vegetarian Butcher (in the Netherlands known as De Vegetarische Slager) is not a butcher.

Funny enough, the company received an invitation to sign up to compete in The Best Butcher of the Netherlands, and didn’t hesitate a second. Once signed up, their shop and restaurant De Vleesch Lobby (‘The Meat Lobby’, in Dutch) in The Hague was out in front with some 3500 votes for the province of South Holland. But we can’t have meat substitutes win, right? In a way, it’s stupid for them to have received an invitation in the first place (nobody bothered to check what they produced), however, it would have made quite a statement if they had won.

At some point, the organisers realised that De Vleesch Lobby didn’t serve meat and decided they cannot be considered butchers. Owner Jaap Korteweg was disappointed to be chucked out of the competition, but one thing is certain: the meat sector can’t ignore the rising popularity of meat substitutes.

(Link: frontpage.fok.nl)

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September 13, 2018

Man fishes big pike out of Amsterdam canal

Filed under: Animals by Orangemaster @ 2:29 pm

A Dutchman has caught a pike of 105 centimetres in Amsterdam waters between the National Maritime Museum and the Nemo museum near Amsterdam Central Station.

He was fishing for pike, but never expected to catch a big one. “I was on my own, and realised that I had caught something way bigger than expected. It is my best catch ever in Amsterdam.”

A big fan of fishing, the man’s biggest ever catch was in Mexico, a 2.30-metre-long pike that weighed 32 kilos.

When I see a picture of a man showing off a big fish, I think of my first time using Tinder, but this time around, I’m simply amazed that such a creature swims around in the capital’s canals.

(Link and photo: waarmaarraar.nl)

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September 11, 2018

The Duck Guy’s book available in German

Filed under: Animals,Science,Weird by Orangemaster @ 7:00 am

Kees Moeliker, ornithologist and curator of the Natural History Museum in Rotterdam, who was awarded an IgNobel back in 2003 — the tongue-in-cheek awards of Improbable Research — for writing about “The first case of homosexual necrophilia in the mallard”, has recently had his book ‘De eendenman’ (The Duck Guy’, or Man) translated into German.

Not only is “Der Entenmann: Von Spatzenklöten, aussterbenden Filzläusen und nekrophilen Enten. Mysteriöse Todesfälle aus dem Tierreich” now available to the German-savvy population, the book is presented here by Moeliker himself in German.

Also known as ‘The Duck Guy’, Moeliker does give talks in English, but his book has yet to be translated into English or anything else than German at this point. However, if you’re in the Netherlands, you can visit the preserved remains of one of the ducks at the museum. The best time to visit is on June 5, when the museum and the city of Rotterdam celebrate Dead Duck Day, on the anniversary of the incident, involving two ducks and a glass wall.

UPDATE: Video now in Dutch.

(Link: improbable.com)

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September 10, 2018

World’s first floating farm to open in Rotterdam

Filed under: Animals,Dutch first,Sustainability by Orangemaster @ 10:30 am

The world’s first ‘floating dairy farm’ will open its doors in Rotterdam’s Merwehaven port this year, built by Dutch property company Beladon. It will feature 40 Meuse-Rhine-Issel cows (brown spotted, so not the Frisian cows in the picture), milked by robots.

The sustainability idea behind the project is that there is less and less good ground to produce food, while the world population continues to grow and demand more from their food. Built-up urban areas don’t exactly seem like the most sensible places to run farms, but reducing the distance food travels before it reaches consumers’ plates makes environmental sense as it reduces transport pollution.

The Floating Farm intends to produce fresh milk and healthy products, as well as provide tours, education and research.

(Links: bbc.com, floatingfarm.nl)

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September 7, 2018

Dutch hobby photographer makes National Geographic

Filed under: Animals,Photography by Orangemaster @ 7:00 am

Nature and wildlife photographer Rob Rokven from Oisterwijk, Noord-Brabant snapped a great picture of a Highland cow that will be featured in the 2019 National Geographic tear-off calendar. A picture was taken at the estate of Huis ter Heide, near Tilburg.

Rokven explains that there was a calf right behind the mother in the picture, and that right after he took it, an upset father Highland cow was heading towards him, which is when he ran off.

As a big wildlife fan, he sent in his picture to National Geographic and found out last week that his photo was chosen. And it will be the second time, since in 2018, he had a deer that made it into the 2018 calendar, a photo taken at the same place.

(Link and photo: Omroepbrabant.nl)

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July 8, 2018

Iris van Herpen presents bird-inspired dresses

Filed under: Animals,Design,Fashion,Photography by Orangemaster @ 5:24 pm

Amsterdam-based Dutch fashion designer Iris van Herpen has created a series of dresses that replicate the feathers and soundwave patterns of birds in flight, which was presented a few days ago at Le Trianon, Paris for the Paris Haute Couture fashion week.

To go along with them, Lonneke Gordijn and Ralph Nauta of Amsterdam’s Studio Drift had an installation of moving glass tubes that also capture the motion of birds in flight. Inspired by Studio Drift, Van Herpen also used chronophotography, a Victorian photographic technique that captures movement in several frames of print.

(Link and photo: dezeen.com)

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June 7, 2018

The purrfect cat crime in Purmerend

Filed under: Animals by Orangemaster @ 8:00 am

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In a street in the city of Purmerend, North Holland, swimsuits, dolls’ clothing and baby blankets were mysteriously disappearing, something that was happening to several neighbours.

First, the neighbourhood blamed the children for misplacing their belongings, but at some point, there was more thieving and the thief had not been found. Local resident Stephan de Vries solved the case by placing a security camera only to discover that a white cat was stealing all the stuff.

De Vries found the cat’s owner who was on vacation. The neighbours hope that the owner will keep the cat indoors after his vacation. I doubt it, since most people let their cat wander outdoors as much as they can here, but it’s a reasonable request.

And they still have to find out the where the kleptomaniac cat’s stash is.

(Link: nu.nl, Photo of cat in a box by Hehaden, some rights reserved)

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May 29, 2018

Cows do not sense the North Magnetic Pole

Filed under: Animals,Science by Orangemaster @ 9:54 pm

Around the world in the past decade, all kinds of publications apparently claim that cows, deers and dogs tend to lie down in a North-South direction, possibly affected by the North Magnetic Pole.

However, according to the first scientific studies on the sensitivity of cows for the magnetic North at the University of Wageningen, it’s not true. Although there is scientific evidence to suggest that small animals are affected by magnetism, anything that has been said about large animals has been solely based on observations, from farmer descriptions to Google Earth photographs.

Tests were done in Portugal on 34 cows fitted with a strong magnet by checking their orientation when they were resting. With or without the magnet, the cows just lie around wherever. Actually, the direction of the sun makes a difference, not the wind, which is the same result of a study done at the same time in Portugal of 659 cows on six farms.

Critics who claim that environmental factors such as wind and sun exert such a strong influence on animals that they obscure the effect of the earth’s magnetic field are welcome to repeat this experiment at night.

(Link: naturetoday.com)

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May 22, 2018

Amsterdam exhibition has robots interacting with animals

Filed under: Animals,Technology by Orangemaster @ 8:22 pm

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Machine Wilderness, an exhibition with Ian Ingram, Driessens & Verstappen, Rihards Vitols and Jip van Leeuwenstein in Amsterdam until 8 July explores together with artists, designers, ecologists, engineers and scientists, the role of technology in nature, which is now ‘a permanent and integral part of our landscapes’.

Machine Wilderness presents work of four artists who develop robotics. They explore how technology engages the surrounding and chaotic living nature. It is a work in progress in which the artists develop new robotic projects for specific ecosystems in Amsterdam’s Amstelpark, and experiment with the interaction between technology and the living creatures in the park.

Visitors will be able to see the artists at work in the park at various stages of the development of the work. Newly developed work and documentation will be added over the course of the exhibition, making it worthwhile to visit the exhibition several times.

Watch the video of a robot that warns squirrels of predators using a ‘tail-flick alarm system’ like squirrels use.

Ian Ingram || Danger, Squirrel Nutkin! (2009) from Ian Ingram on Vimeo.

(Links: naturetoday.com, Photo of Jip van Leeuwenstein’s robot that imitates the oak processionary caterpillar by zone2source.net)

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