March 12, 2018

Dutch university reveals world’s first circular car

Filed under: Automobiles,Dutch first,Sustainability by Orangemaster @ 3:22 pm

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Last month, students from the Eindhoven University of Technology revealed ‘Noah’, the world’s first circular car. Noah is made of entirely recyclable material that is easy to disassemble. The two-seater weighs 350 kilogrammes and is powered by six modular batteries. In July the students will demonstrate that Noah is also a practical road legal car.

The plan is also to prove that circularity (true sustainability) is already possible for complicated products like cars. The design team will use renewable resources to further develop bio based materials, drive fully electric and design Noah to be recycled, making Noah the most sustainable car in the world.

Noah’s motors have a power of 15kW, to reach a speed of about 100 km/h and a total range of 240 kilometres. At the end of the lifecycle, the car will be fully recyclable, lowering the need for raw materials and giving the used materials a new life.

(Link and image: electriccarsreport.com)

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March 11, 2018

Dutch Middle Age altarpieces found in Norway

Filed under: Art,History,Religion by Orangemaster @ 5:49 pm

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Up until recently, altarpieces from the Middle Ages found in churches along the coast of Norway have been called Lübeck altarpieces, as experts assumed they were imported to Norway by the Hanseatics from Lübeck, Germany.

After analysing the altarpieces using advanced technical equipment such as an infrared camera, UV camera and electron microscope, research by Kristin Kausland of the Department of Archaeology, Conservation and History at the University of Oslo (the only person to have a Ph”D. in conservation from a Norwegian university) has shown that major parts of these pieces were in fact made in Norway and not in Northern Germany. Paint fragments as well as gilding, type of wood, hinges and type of paint are some of the elements have helped reveal where an altarpiece was made.

The biggest surprise is that instead of figuring out if the altarpieces came from Norway or Germany, it turns out a lot of them were made in the Netherlands. In fact, 10 of the 60 altarpieces Kausland studied were made here, which is a big deal since according to her, almost all the altarpieces in the Netherlands were lost during the Protestant Reformation when the decision was taken to destroy church decorations. There’s also talk of a possible exhibition in the Netherlands at some stage to see what the fuss is all about.

(Link and image of a Dutch altarpiece from Western Norway: phys.org)

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March 8, 2018

Floating hotel for Dutch theme park in Japan

Filed under: Design,General by Orangemaster @ 10:02 am

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Huis ten Bosch (Hausu Ten Bosu) is a theme park near Nagasaki, Japan that is apparently more than three times the size of Tokyo Disneyland and still bigger than Tokyo Disneyland and DisneySea combined. Its theme is The Netherlands – all of it – and many of the famous buildings of the Netherlands have 1:1 replicas.

The Dutch-themed attraction park will be launching a floating capsule that can accommodate two or three people, with its the floor designed as an accommodation cabin and the second floor as an observation dome. The service is due to start this summer. The company plans to have a ship tow the hotel between the theme park and a nearby island.

And yes, it’s giving me a strong James Bond vibe, if you remember the final scene of The Spy Who Loved Me and the floating rescue pod that just happens to have Dom Pérignon 1952 champagne on ice.

(Link and photo: english.kyodonews.net)

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March 7, 2018

Van Gogh on sale for 3.5 million euro

Filed under: Art by Orangemaster @ 6:01 pm

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A still life by Vincent van Gogh will be for sale at The European Fine Art Fair (TEFAF) in Maastricht, a painting made in 1885 when Van Gogh lived in Nuenen, Noord-Brabant, which features bottles and cowrie shells. Since 1968, the painting has been owned by a private individual.

This will also be the second time that a Van Gogh painting is up for sale at TEFAF. The first time it was a townscape that changed hands for 1.4 million euro.

(Link: omroepbrabant.nl, Image: extreme close-up of The Harvest via Van Gogh Museum)

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March 5, 2018

Sexist toys for boys pulled from Dutch supermarkets

Filed under: General,Sports by Orangemaster @ 4:13 pm

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A football party pack marketed to boys aged 8-13 is being pulled from the shelves of the Albert Heijn supermarket chain for being sexist and glorifying stereotypically bad behaviour. Sure, a party pack with football-related items sounds almost acceptable except that this one automatically excludes girls form the get-go, making it not only sexist but also implying girls don’t play football, which they do en masse. What an odd situation, especially knowing Dutch women win at the highest levels of football. Maybe they should market this party pack to girls instead, albeit without belittling others in the process.

But this game gets worse, fast. They are cards in the game with multiple answer questions like “If a girl you don’t like asks you out, what do you do?” One of the answers is “I laugh at her”. Another question is “what is something you don’t want to see?”. One of the answers is “crying girls”. There’s another card about what to do at the beach that suggests “looking at girls” as an answer. Aren’t boys usually playing in the water or kicking a ball on the beach at that age?

This is a country where companies don’t check what they aim at children and a colouring book with an image of Hitler making a Nazi salute and wearing a Swastika armband and toys for boys to use to assault women (not girls, women).

(Link and screenshot: nltimes.nl)

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March 4, 2018

Amsterdam boasts world’s first plastic-free supermarket

Filed under: Dutch first,Food & Drink,Sustainability by Orangemaster @ 9:08 pm

A few days ago, a branch of organic food supermarket chain Ekoplaza in Amsterdam West not far from 24oranges HQ, opened a plastic-free pop-up supermarket, selling close to 700 plastic-free products. Although the initiative comes from international action group A Plastic Planet from London, Amsterdam’s Plastic Soup Foundation was able to convince the Londoners to launch the world premiere in the Dutch capital.

The packaging resembles the look, feel and strength of real plastic, but is made using natural, 100% biodegradable materials. Ekoplaza has 74 supermarkets throughout the Netherlands and hopes to rollout this concept to other branches by the end of 2018.

“Dutch designers Eric Klarenbeek and Maartje Dros developed a bioplastic made from algae, which they believe could completely replace synthetic plastics over time, while Design Academy Eindhoven graduate Shahar Livne created a clay-like material using discarded plastic.”

And if they can do, so can everybody else at some point, starting with the insane amount of uselessly, individually wrapped vegetables at regular supermarkets.

(Links: dezeen.com, plasticsoupfoundation.org)

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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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