July 3, 2009

Van Gogh’s paintings as shot by amateur photographers

Filed under: Art,Photography by Branko Collin @ 9:06 am

The Wiki Loves Art contest that I reported about earlier is over, and all that is left is for the judges to declare a winner.

One of the extraordinary things about this contest is that the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam opened its door to amateur photographers. That must have been a frightful decision to take, what with all the paintings worth millions just a camera stand leg away from scratching, so I hope it was a good experience for them.

Painting above is The Harvest (1888), photo taken by Flickr user Pachango. View the 4,500+ contest photos here, or just the 450+ Van Gogh ones here. (I edited the colours into oblivion, but I just could not agree with the red hue that Pachango’s version had, or the yellow hue on the museum’s website.)

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July 2, 2009

Stedelijk Museum gets American woman as director

Filed under: Art,Dutch first by Orangemaster @ 9:22 am
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Only because the word ‘director’ doesn’t cover gender in English, did I use the word ‘woman’. In Dutch, ‘directrice’ (female director) is seen as a lesser choice of ‘directeur’ (male director) and not appreciated, while the French ‘directrice’, where the Dutch word comes from, is perfectly fine. And now, the news.

Ann Goldstein, an American, will be the first foreigner and first woman to head the Amsterdam Stedelijk Museum in its 114 year history when it will reopen in the spring of 2010. Goldstein is currently the senior curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCa) in Los Angeles where she has worked for 25 years.

Gys van Tuyl, the current artistic director of the Stedelijk Museum says that the MoCa is a model institute that feels closer to the Stedelijk than the MoMA in New York. He also mentions that the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA) has shown many of Goldstein’s touring exhibitions, which “says a lot, because the MoMA basically doesn’t take shows from others.”

Read more about all the bits of the Stedelijk Museum being exhibited throughout the city in the meantime.

(Link: rnw.nl, Photo: designboom.com)

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July 1, 2009

World’s first mobile Augmented Reality browser

Filed under: Dutch first,Gadgets,Online by Orangemaster @ 10:19 am

Mobile phone Augmented Reality browser Layar, designed by Amsterdam’s Sprx Mobile has been the talk of the Dutch IT town on Twitter (we’re all friends in this neck of the woods) and just about everywhere else for some two weeks.

Layar is an application that can find everything using a mobile phone with a compass, although for now it can only be used with Android and soon the iPhone 3G S as well. As the name implies, the application provides extra ‘layers’ to reality. “You don’t have to browse on the Internet, you can see your immediate environment using Layar,” Sprx Mobile Director Raimo van der Klein explains.

For more cool developments, follow Maarten Lens-Fitzgerald (@dutchcowboy) on Twitter. He twitters in English as well, and his wife Lori Lens-Fitzgerald (@lorilens) already made this blog with her photo book about world famous restaurant El Bulli.

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June 30, 2009

Folding cargo containers save space and energy

Filed under: Design,Dutch first,Sustainability by Orangemaster @ 11:59 am
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Rotterdam businessman Rene Giesbers dreamed up, helped design and launched an innovative container concept called Cargoshell, a fully foldable container made from composite that significantly reduces the amount of space empty containers take up on ships and trains. In fact, acccording to the report on Dutch television (RTL 4) yesterday, some 20% of all containers on ships and some 30% of all containers on trucks are just ’empties’ requiring much fuel to transport. According to a Dutch article earlier this year, some 20 billion euro is lost every year just transporting empty containers.

When the Cargoshell is folded, it takes up 25% of its actual size. It can be folded by one person and a forklift in just 30 seconds.

The Dutch often use foldable and obviously re-usable shopping crates, which I had never seen in North America, that look like this:

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This crate was what inspired Giesbers to do the same for containers.

Sometimes innovation is really just staring at us in the face.

(Photo: cargoshell.com)

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June 29, 2009

Older men least likely to be fired

Filed under: General by Branko Collin @ 9:03 am

Men of age 45 and older are not sharing in the general economic downturn, reports Z24 (Dutch). To the contrary, in May of this year 9,000 more men of that age group were employed than in May 2008.

Statistics Netherlands economist Michiel Vergeer explains to the financial news site: “These are the people who have been in their jobs for a long time, you just cannot get rid of them. But once they have become unemployed, it becomes very difficult for them to find another job.”

In the Netherlands jobs are ‘protected,’ meaning that you have to get permission from a court to be able to fire somebody. Although mass lay-offs are possible, courts tend to spare older employees during such procedures. Unemployment has risen 8,000 from April to May, a number Vergeer calls “still modest.”

(Photo by Erich Ferdinand, some rights reserved.)

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June 28, 2009

Hans Koning’s aphorisms online

Filed under: Literature by Branko Collin @ 10:36 am

Hans Koning (1921 – 2007) was one of that rare breed, an author who successfully traded his native tongue for another, in this case Dutch for English. A member of the Dutch resistance and a writer for the Groene Amsterdammer weekly, Koning emigrated to the USA in 1951. His publisher has put his book of aphorisms online, Hans Koning’s Little Book of Comforts & Gripes:

The tool for judging by those who don’t understand a thing about the arts is: categorizing. “What kind of books do you write?” they ask. “What kind of painting do you do?” It may seem harmless until art becomes dependent on money controlled by these ignorant men. Recently some people made a motion picture ‘based’ on Dostoyevsky’s “Crime and Punishment.” They hadn’t really understood much of the book and the film was a disaster. Now Hollywood producers know that “Dostoyevsky movies don’t sell.”

(Slide 53. It’s a pity that the book is published as images rather than text, and that it is riddled with spelling errors.)

See also: his New York Times obituary; his ever changing Wikipedia entry.

(Via Eamelje.)

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June 27, 2009

Tricycle car company Carver keels over

Filed under: Automobiles by Branko Collin @ 1:20 pm

Carver Europe, producer of the tricycle car with the same name, has gone bankrupt, reports Algemeen Dagblad (Dutch). The Carver is a cross between a regular car and a motor cycle, of which the cockpit and front wheel can roll (or list if you are nautically inclined)—something the Reliant Robin never quite got the hang of.

CEO Willem Verheul told the paper that there wasn’t enough of a market for the 50,000 euro vehicle: “We were hoping to sell 300 per year, instead we only managed 200.” The ‘s Gravendeel, Zuid Holland based company will lay off nine employees.

One company that is going to be distraught at the news are flying car / vaporware makers Pal-V, who based the design of their eponymous vehicle on the Carver One. When earlier this year Pal-V promised a demonstration of its technology, it disappointed the collected international press by showing a gyroscope and a Carver, but not the hybrid that everybody has been waiting for these past years.

Top Gear’s Jeremy Clarkson once famously said about the Carver: “Absolute, hands-on-heart, I have never had so much fun in a car,” and his side-kick whose name I forget called it “the gadget to end all gadgets.”

(Photo by Wikimedia user Detectandpreserve, some rights reserved.)

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June 26, 2009

Modern wood with a dash of bright pink

Filed under: Architecture by Orangemaster @ 8:00 am

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Built in Hoogvliet near Rotterdam and designed by British design firm Fat, The Villa is a bold public building that does not go unnoticed. It can be found at the Heerlijkheid recreation park and it features several offices and a café. The goal was to create a modern and sophisticated building that has its own style and character. The bright pink bit is very daring and spells out the word ‘heerlijkheid’ (‘delightfulness’).

(Link: artstyleonline.com, photo: designboom.com)

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June 25, 2009

Fish sitters at Schiphol airport

Filed under: Animals,General by Orangemaster @ 10:55 am
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Schiphol Airport (aka Amsterdam Airport for those of you who ‘break their tongues’ pronouncing ‘Schiphol’ – try ‘Shrip-pole’ – there, see?) has just opened up a goldfish hotel so travellers can have their fish taken care of while they fly away to warmer pastures. The hotel was the brainchild of well-known travel agent D-reizen and was opened by Olympic long-distance swimming champion Maarten van der Weijden.

The aquarium looks like a hotel, with a tennis court and a pool with a slide. “Goldfish dropped off by travellers will get private suites, so that they don’t get mixed up or get sick,” says D-reizen director Steven van Nieuwenhuizen. And if a fish happens to die while its owners are away, D-reizen will make sure they will be able to take the real dead one home, regardless.

(Link: nrc.nl)

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June 24, 2009

Kite your way from Amsterdam to New York in four days

Filed under: Aviation,Gadgets,Science by Branko Collin @ 10:05 am

The vehicle pictured above consists of a kite, a cabin and a keel, and should be able to take you across the Atlantic Ocean. The 157 m2 kite should produce enough power to make you go 90 km/h, the cabin seats two, and the keel makes sure you can actually steer the thing. The only catch is that the Hydrokite so far only exists in the minds of former astronaut and kite nut Wubbo Ockels and ten of his students at the TU Delft.

At 90 km/h you should be able to reach New York from Amsterdam in four days and 1 hour, which would break the old record with three hours, although Kennislink doesn’t say what record that would be (sailing? flying? kiting?).

Laurens Alblas, one of the students, told Kennislink that it will probably “take a couple of years before a control system for kites is developed. But once we have such a system, and assuming we can find sponsors, we will build the Hydrokite and we will try and break the record.”

(Link: Kennislink. Source image: TU Delft)

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