This week, the Delft University of Technology’s Solar Boat Team has set a world record of 50.5 kilometres per hour on Day 5 of the Dutch Solar Challenge in Drachten, Friesland. There wasn’t any previous record, making this a sweet victory for the students.
This world record will also be added to the Guinness World Records as the first record ever set for a solar-powered boat. Second place in the challenge was 42 kilometres per hour set by a team from Leeuwarden, Friesland and 30,3 kilometres per hour was clocked by a team from Slochteren, Groningen.
The Delft team also won ook the innovation award thanks to the technology it used, which included two hydrofoils placed one behind another instead of next to each other, which had the boat ‘skating over the water’.
The ball of this story got rolling back in 2014 when an American journalist was ‘shocked’ at an amusement park ride from De Efteling called ‘Monsieur Cannibale’ (French – new and improved explanation coming up) that features a black cannibal-like character with a bone through his nose cooking up unsuspecting children.
The racist door has now opened up as the Stop Oppressive Stereotypes (SOS) group published an open letter to the amusement park accusing it of featuring racist rides, one of which is Monsieur Cannibale and the other Carnaval Festival that features Asian stereotypes. However, Efteling asked SOS for a sit down and SOS haven’t responded yet – to be continued.
One side is telling the other to get a life and ideally a job and the other is having a ‘hey’ we never really saw things that way and it makes us feel uncomfortable moment, akin to the debate about Zwarte Piet. The Efteling says it mostly gets complaints about serving unhealthy food, but not about racist stereotypes.
I love Sacha Distel, the French singer and guitarist who sang this 1966 racist and sexist song that the Efteling chose to subject to children: it matches the ride perfectly in its bad taste. Distel’s song is about a white man captured in Africa by black cannibals who thought he was a spy, trying to politely plead the head cannibal (hence addressing him as Monsieur) not to eat him, but negotiates his way out of it by offering him porno magazines. The head cannibal laughs, brings the guy back to his harem for a week after which the guy lose 20 kilos and refuses to leave. The man basically shagged all the presumably black ladies who were all “hungry for it”.
Here’s a version of the song with a decent Dutch translation:
And since the French playback performance I posted in the original post was removed, here’s the same offensive performance sung in Spanish. He still pulls his eyes sideways to indicate the Chinese language at the beginning, so the Asian stereotypes are conveniently addressed by Distel as well.
Eindhoven’s Tech United team has won the Robocup 2016 in Leipzig, Germany, a team that keeps on supplying us with stories of victory thanks to their sweet robotics.
Their match up was against the Chinese team ‘Water’, defending their 2015 title. Eindhoven was ahead 2-1, and after regulation time, it was tied 2-2. In overtime both teams made it 3-3 and much like some games in Euro 2016, it came down to penalty kicks.
However, Water missed all five shots, nicely stopped by Tech United’s goalkeeper, while Tech United putted one in for the win.
Two years ago Heineken developed the Brewlock tap system, which addresses the issue of delivering draught beer at the right level of carbonation. And if KLM is to serve beer high up in the air, it needs to be tapped properly and not spray out of the keg due to a lack of carbonation.
The system will be fitted onto a trolley for serving and will be pre-cooled before takeoff and then kept cool for a maximum of eight hours with insulating material. KLM plans to serve beer on tap on a few selected flights and then eventually roll it out.
Roll out the barrel, and we’ll have a barrel of fun – in the air.
First Rotterdam Central Station had the giant staircase built by architectural firm MVRDV that goes from the station’s plaza all the way to the top of Rotterdam’s ‘Wholesale trade building’ (‘Groothandelsgebouw’), and now the entrance to Rotterdam’s Central Station’s metro has piano stairs as well.
The whole piano stairs affair started in Stockholm, and now there are quite a few of them around the world. Apparently, more people will take the stairs instead of the escalator or lift if they can make music, 66% more as was the case in Stockholm.
Rotterdam’s piano stairs, which will remain for one year, are pre-programmed with Ludwig van Beethoven’s ‘Für Elise’, although you can compose your own number. Rotterdam alderman Hugo de Jonge would have rather had ‘You’ll never walk alone’, but then said the programming sounded a lot more difficult that you’d think. “The idea is to get people to smile when they use the stairs”.
Belgian company Montea from Aalst, Belgium, which specialises in really big warehouses, is currently building the biggest bakery in Europe in Aalsmeer, North Holland, a city known its world-famous flower auction and proximity to Schiphol Airport.
The bakery will be the size of eight football pitches, use 8000 m3 of concrete and cost 40 millions euro. Construction should be done in October and family business Borgesius-Bakkersland, two recently merged Dutch companies, will start producing some 600,000 loaves of bread and pastries to supply supermarket chain Albert Heijn.
One of Montea’s last big Dutch jobs was the development of the biggest Internet pharmacy in Europe located in Heerlen, Limburg, of which the warehouse was a “mere” 14,800 m2.
Filed under: Technology by Orangemaster @ 10:54 am
It’s true that many non-Dutch people don’t buy from Dutch online shop Bol.com because their products are often more expensive than ‘that other website we all use’ and it’s all in Dutch. However, Bol.com is currently beta testing an English version of their site, which is a total Dunglish fest done using Microsoft, and so far it’s crap. Instead of hiring proper translators, Bol.com would rather be a laughing stock and insult its non-Dutch customers. I can’t wait for them to make a French version.
I barely got past the disclaimer: “Bol.com uses cookies (and similar techniques) to visit and shop at bol.com for you even easier and more personal. These cookies can we and third parties your internet behavior within and possibly outside our website. This allows us and third parties modify ads to your interests and you can share information through social media. By using this website, you go.” Using American English spelling and in other places British terms is a classic mistake as well.
– There’s a “Baby, Child & Mama” section, which sounds like a lost soul-funk number.
– “Products for every day: The sharpest drugstore and animal actions”. Ouch.
Go have a laugh. Remember they can’t be arsed to hire humans to do this, but I’m sure they have real staff for their programming, accounts and shipping. As they said themselves, “Please bear with us, we do not have it under the knee yet.”
Filed under: Food & Drink by Orangemaster @ 11:45 am
According to linguists Ilja Croijmans and Asifa Majid of the Radboud University Nijmegen, the Dutch language is a bad choice for describing smells, and therefore not great for wine-tasting. However, Dutch wine experts are getting better at describing smells by using very colourful language, something the average person would not do. Then again, pointing out that experts are actually better than ordinary folks sounds odd, considering that’s usually the point of being an expert.
To drive the point home, ordinary mortals and wine experts tasted wine and coffee, to see which group used what kind of language in their descriptions of smells and flavours. The wine experts were better at describing both wine and coffee, although both wine and coffee experts were no better than novices at naming everyday smells and tastes, showing that the expertise benefits are limited to the specific smells and flavours used to train experts, and not to more general ones.
For anyone who sucks at finding words other than ‘fruity’ (calling wine ‘sweet’ is often a no-no) and ‘dry’, Dutch wine shops and even supermarkets sell wine by numbers, which represent some sort of range between ‘fruity’ and ‘dry’ for us plebs.
Amsterdam resident Maurice Beljaars had first petitioned Twitter and then Unicode for a rainbow emoji flag, which would add a nice touch to any LGBTI-related news, instead of just using an ordinary rainbow.
Beljaars explains that the rainbow flag has been the international symbol of the gay community since the late 1970s. Unicode has already felt it was important to add recent emojis such as the croissant, cowboy and selfie, so why not the rainbow flag? Google employees have also recently made requests for emojis that better represent women in actual jobs rather than in superficial beauty situations and not too long ago many emojis with people in them became available in different skin tones.
Boyan Slat, the young Dutch inventor who came up with an inventive way of cleaning up the oceans, has recently unveiled the prototype of his ‘ambitious sea-cleaning device’ in Scheveningen, South Holland.
“Why move through the ocean if the ocean can move through you?” Slat asked at a press conference during the unveiling. He plans to use a 100-kilometre long V-shaped barrier made up of large, rubber pillow-shaped buoys floating on the ocean surface that trail a three-metre long curtain from its arms into the water.
Slat hopes to fully roll out the system in 2020, which could capture up to 3,000 cubic metres of plastic soup. Find out more at The Ocean Clean Up.
(Link: phys.org, Photo: screenshot of Tedx presentation)
