May 30, 2018

Eindhoven to boast world’s first 3D printed homes

Filed under: Architecture,Dutch first,Technology by Orangemaster @ 3:32 pm

Next year, the city of Eindhoven, Noord-Brabant will apparently have the world’s first 3D-printed concrete homes. Six parties are involved in the project: the municipality of Eindhoven, Eindhoven University of Technology, Van Wijnen from Rosmalen, Vesteda from Amsterdam, Saint Gobain-Weber Beamix, and Witteveen+Bos from Deventer.

The project called ‘Milestone’ will have five houses erected in the neighbourhood of Meerhoven, designed by Houben/Van Mierlo architects. The homes will look a bit like henges or even statues in a green garden and have a bit of a Flintstones house feel to them, according to Houben/Van Mierlo and the image above.

(Link and photo: studio040.nl)

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PSA: “Your Comment is Awaiting Moderation”

Filed under: General by Branko Collin @ 12:28 pm

When you post a comment on 24 Oranges, you should be seeing a message that says “Your comment is awaiting moderation”.

This means that we have received your comment, but a human being needs to look at it to determine it is a proper comment and not just spam.

Unfortunately it appears this message has disappeared, so that now when you post a comment, the site just shows you an empty form. I don’t know what causes this, but rest assured that a) we are looking into it and b) your comments are still being received.

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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 28, 2018

Student runs top sushi restaurant from dorm room

Filed under: Food & Drink by Orangemaster @ 1:11 pm

Thai student Kitsanin Thanyakulsajja lives in a dorm room in Amsterdam where he has been running underground sushi restaurant Ephemeral for about three years. Thanyakulsajja will be stopping soon to start writing his thesis because that’s why he came to Amsterdam in the first place: to study.

With no restaurant experience and instead of ‘peeling potatoes’ at some Dutch eatery for low wages, he decided to open up an omakase joint, offering a very fancy 15-course Japanese meal, prepared and served by him in his dorm room, complete with a Tokyo-style counter and traditional Japanese tableware.

According to Munchies, within the last year, Ephemeral has been visited by some of Amsterdam’s most popular food critics, all of whom gave rave reviews. Local Michelin-starred chefs have also eaten here, many of whom expressed an interest in working with with the young student-stroke-chef in the future, if ever his studies bring him on a different path. Thanyakulsajja already has plans to collaborate with other restaurants and introduce Project Omakase to the wider Amsterdam food scene.

Then there’s the elephant in the dorm room: it’s probably illegal, but apparently nobody has a problem with this because everyone is raving about it.

(Link and photo: munchies.vice.com)

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May 25, 2018

Dutch Donald Duck weekly now available in Braille

Filed under: Dutch first,Literature by Orangemaster @ 3:13 pm

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The Dutch often say that everybody in the country grew up reading the Donald Duck weekly magazine, but then that didn’t include the visually impaired.

Yesterday, Dedicon from Grave, Gelderland, a company that has been specialising in books for the visually impaired for 60 years, published a Braille edition of the classic, with accompanying audio. The Braille weekly is 10 cm thick.

Dedicon does not know yet if it can produce more versions, as it first needs to see if the target group likes the product.

Fun fact: In Dutch, Daisy Duck is called Katrien and the nephews Huey, Dewey, and Louie and Kwik, Kwek and Kwak, the latter being the sound a duck makes in Dutch.

Read more about Donald Duck in the Netherlands:

Donald Duck Junior mag for children that don’t read

Donald Duck a big hit in the Frisian language

Donald Duck magazine takes kids’ money for copyright lesson

(Link and photo: omroepbrabant.nl)

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May 24, 2018

Dutch app helps you sort your recycling

Filed under: Sustainability,Technology by Orangemaster @ 6:34 pm

On 23 May, Dutch company Sitio IT launched the free phone app EcoScan for Android and iOS that helps you figure out in what recycling bin you need to sort things you’re throwing out.

In the Netherlands, there are bins for paper, plastic, glass and a few more that makes life complicated, and every municipality seems to have different bins as well. And you don’t want to be that person who puts an old lamp bulb in with the glass and forces someone somewhere to ‘disinfect’ your mistake. Sitio IT claim that there are 10 to 15 different bins for things, and this prompted developer Rick Buiten to comp up with an app for doing the right thing easier.

By using a photo scan, EcoScan can even tell you that you’d better bring certain things to the thrift shop, as they are not meant for any bins. Although I very much like the idea, I’m going to assume it’s still being beta tested or I’m really bad at scanning, as I’ve just tried it plastic, paper and glass, and it didn’t recognised any of them. And it’s only available in Dutch, but it’s point and click.

(Link: bright.nl)

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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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May 21, 2018

Dutch radio aboard Chinese space mission

Filed under: Dutch first,Technology by Orangemaster @ 9:40 pm

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Today, the Chinese space agency launched a relay satellite to an orbit behind the Moon with a Dutch radio antenna on board, the first Dutch-made scientific instrument to be sent on a Chinese space mission, opening up a new chapter in radio astronomy.

The Netherlands Chinese Low-Frequency Explorer (NCLE) is a radio antenna developed and built by engineers from ASTRON, the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy in Dwingeloo, the Radboud Radio Lab of Radboud University in Nijmegen, and the Delft-based company ISIS. The instrument will measure radio waves originating from the period right after the Big Bang, when the first stars and galaxies were formed.

“We cannot detect radio waves below 30 MHz, however, as these are blocked by our atmosphere. It is these frequencies in particular that contain information about the early universe, which is why we want to measure them,” explains Heino Falck, Professor of Astrophysics from Radboud University and ASTRON.

(Link: phys.org)

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May 19, 2018

All Chinese Indonesian restaurants in one book

Filed under: Dutch first,Food & Drink,Literature by Orangemaster @ 9:59 pm

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Last summer, friend of 24 oranges HQ, journalist turned photographer Mark van Wonderen (pictured below) decided to write a book about Chinese Indonesian restaurants in the Netherlands, and visited all 1097 of them. The book is entitled ‘Chin. Ind. Spec. Rest., a disappearing Dutch phenomenon’. Chinese Indonesian restaurants are big family restaurants the Dutch would go to on special occasions, as well as being classic take away places, complete with separate entrances and waiting rooms.

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The ethnic Chinese born in the Dutch East Indies eventually came to the Netherlands as of the 1960s, and as a result opened a ton of restaurants, which are different than the usual Hunan and Szechuan Chinese fare you’ll find in other Western countries. The book captures the fading kitsch factor of these culinary institutions. The book launch was held at Wong Koen in Amsterdam Oost.

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In front of Mark enjoying his book singing, there are a bunch of newspaper-like papers with prints of the inside of the book, which were used to wrap up the books people bought and had signed, the same type of paper used to wrap up Chinese Indonesian take away food.

More about how this book came to be: Dutchman pens book about Chinese Indonesian restaurants.

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May 18, 2018

Dirty jokes found in Anne Frank’s diary

Filed under: History,Literature by Orangemaster @ 2:21 pm

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Using digital technology, Dutch researchers have deciphered the writing on two pages of Anne Frank’s diary, which have ‘naughty jokes, candid explanation of sex, contraception and prostitution’. The pages were pasted over with brown masking paper and remained a mystery for decades.

Experts claim that these new bits reveal more about Anne’s development as a writer than it does about her interest in sex. Other known passages about her coming of age and her body were censored by her father Otto before the diary was first published in 1947, but were eventually included in subsequent publications.

On prostitution, Anne wrote: “All men, if they are normal, go with women, women like that accost them on the street and then they go together. In Paris they have big houses for that. Papa has been there.”

(Link: phys.org)

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