Eideard

Of all the energy-saving tips out there, probably the one we hear most often is to not leave lights on when we leave a room. It’s good advice, yet cities around the world are not following it in one key way – their streetlights stay on all night long, even when no one is on the street.

The Netherlands’ Delft University of Technology is experimenting with a new streetlight system on its campus, however, in which motion sensor-equipped streetlights dim to 20 percent power when no people or moving vehicles are near them. The system is said to reduce energy consumption and CO2 emissions by up to 80 percent, plus it lowers maintenance costs and reduces light pollution.

Delft Management of Technology alumnus Chintan Shah designed the system, which can be added to any dimmable streetlight. The illumination comes from LED bulbs, which are triggered by motion sensors. As a person or car approaches, their movement is detected by the closest streetlight, and its output goes up to 100 percent. Because the lights are all wirelessly linked to one another, the surrounding lights also come on, and only go back down to 20 percent once the commuter has passed through. This essentially creates a “pool of light” that precedes and follows people wherever they go, so any thugs lurking in the area should be clearly visible well in advance…

Some fine-tuning is still ongoing, in order to keep the lights from being activated by things like swaying branches or wandering cats. In the meantime, Shah has formed a spin-off company named Tvilight to market the Delft technology. He claims that municipalities utilizing the system should see it paying for itself within three to four years of use.

Anything that saves on electricity use pays for itself sooner than most people realize.

Yes – I can still hear my father instructing me to – “turn off the light when you leave a room”!

The Dutch lower house of parliament has passed a law effectively banning the ritual slaughter of animals…

The legislation states that all animals must be stunned before being killed. But the Islamic dhabiha and Jewish shechita methods of ritual slaughter require them to be fully conscious.

The legislation was proposed by an animal rights party with two MPs, which argued that failing to stun the animals subjected them to unnecessary pain.

But debate over the matter swiftly became a focus of animosity towards the Netherlands’ 1.2 million-strong Muslim community. The country’s Jewish population is comparatively small at 50,000.

Following months of debate a last minute concession was offered – the Muslim and Jewish communities will have a year to provide evidence that animals slaughtered by traditional methods do not experience greater pain than those that are stunned before they are killed.

However, observers say finding such proof will be virtually impossible.

The bill must still be approved by the upper house of parliament before it can become law…

In a rare show of unity, the Muslim and Jewish communities condemned the legislation and said it infringed on their religious freedom…

To make meat kosher for Jews or halal for Muslims, animals must be slaughtered while still awake, by swiftly cutting the main arteries and veins in their necks with sharp knives, and then allowing the blood to drain out.

Overdue.

Giving way to religious ritual 3000 years out of date is neither democratic or reasonable. So, of course, our government gives way in the United States.

Modern image on the right

Scientists have dusted off X-ray equipment dating from shortly after the discovery of the rays in 1895, in order to put it through its paces.

Researchers from the same Dutch town where the system was originally built used it to produce striking images that belie its simplicity and age…

The original system was developed by high school director H J Hoffmans and local hospital director Lambertus Theodorus van Kleef from Maastricht in the Netherlands…Following a publication by X-ray discoverer Wilhelm Roentgen just weeks before, the pair built their device from parts found at the high school and used it for anatomical imaging experiments.

The machine ended up in a warehouse in Maastricht and was unearthed last year for a history programme on television.

Fortunately, no one in Europe ever throws anything away.

Then Gerrit Kemerink of Maastricht University Medical Center decided to put the equipment to the test against a modern system…

Given that a high radiation dose might be required to carry out the tests, the team obtained a hand from a cadaver as their imaging subject – rather than the “young lady’s hand” listed in Hoffmans and van Kleef’s notes…

Using a photographic plate and the same imaging conditions Hoffmans and van Kleef used, a dose 1,500 times higher was required…

“Our experience with this machine, which had a buzzing interruptor, crackling lightning within a spark gap, and a greenish light flashing in a tube, which spread the smell of ozone and which revealed internal structures in the human body was, even today, little less than magical,” they wrote.

Sounds like most early pop movies about science and sci-fi.

For the first time since the dioxin scandal broke out in Germany, the toxin has been found in pigs. EU officials have confirmed that the animal feed was also exported to France and Denmark.

German authorities have detected high levels of the toxic chemical dioxin in pork from a farm banned from selling since last week’s scare, the Consumer Protection Ministry in the state of Lower Saxony said Tuesday.

“A test on the meat has shown high levels of dioxin content,” a ministry spokesman told the news agency AFP.

One animal had been slaughtered for testing purposes and found to be over the limit. Hundreds of pigs on the farm were then culled…

The northern German farm was one of those supplied with animal feed containing ingredients made by a firm suspected of knowingly selling some 3,000 tons of fatty acids meant only for industrial use. Samples of the fat contained more than 70 times the approved amount of dioxin.

The scandal broke last week when German investigators found excessive levels of dioxin in eggs and then some chickens. Authorities then froze sales of poultry, pork and eggs from thousands of farms…

The government has said so far that there is no immediate risk to public health. German officials say the dioxin levels pose no risk to humans if they only eat small amounts of the tainted food, but add that the contamination must be stamped out to avert serious long-term risks…

“The damage that has been caused is immense, not only financially but also when it comes to consumer trust … This is a scandal, as consumers who expect safe food were duped,” German Agriculture Minister Ilse Aigner said on Monday.

Minister Aigner said, “This incident must and will have consequences” – and I certainly hope so. Traditions of food purity are older and most would think more deeply ingrained in the commerce and culture of Europe than in much of the rest of the world.

Maybe much less so than we assumed.

In a novel bid to combat illegal cannabis cultivation, Dutch authorities started handing out 30,000 cards with a marijuana odour Monday to alert citizens to what their neighbours may be up to.

“Citizens must be alerted to the dangers they face as a result of these plantations, and if they become aware of any suspect situations they must report them,” Arnie Loos, spokesman for a government-appointed working group on cannabis cultivation, told journalists in the port city of Rotterdam.

Yes. Bureaucrats in Holland retrieve that quaint history of informing on your friends and neighbors from the garbage heap of fascism. Will they provide bonuses if those you turn to the police are close relatives?

Though it remains technically illegal, the Netherlands decriminalised the consumption and possession of under five grammes of cannabis in 1976 under a “tolerance” policy.

Authorities turn a blind eye to citizens growing no more than five plants for personal use. Bulk cannabis cultivation and retail remain illegal…

Organisers said the project, a pilot for possible expansion, was a first for the Netherlands.

“If people do in fact call the number listed on the card, we could make this a national operation,” Loos told journalists, standing in the middle of about 200 plants of what he called “green gold” in the attic of an apartment building in Rotterdam.

The ugly vision of morality police working their way through public gatherings, say, in Tehran or Riyadh, should remind voters dim enough to think conservative politicians only represent a fiscal agenda – to peer back over their shoulder at what was constructed in so many lands by a Joe McCarthy, Vidkun Quisling or – Anton Mussert.

The Netherlands has agreed to a Nato request to deploy a submarine off the coast of Somalia to combat piracy…

It will be used for reconnaissance in the vast area from the Gulf of Aden deep into the Indian Ocean where Somali pirates have been hijacking commercial vessels for ransom…

The EU has an anti-piracy mission in the same region, Navfor, which is also tasked with protecting World Food Programme ships carrying food aid to Somalia.

Pirates have in the past succeeded in collecting multi-million-dollar ransoms and the head of the Navfor says there has been an upsurge in attacks recently after a period of relative calm…

With warships patrolling along the Somali coast, the pirates have started to operate further away and have even staged some attacks across the Indian Ocean, closer to India than Somalia.

Efforts to fight piracy are complicated by the lack of a functioning central government in Somalia and the lack of an international legal system for people accused of piracy. It is up to individual governments to put suspected pirates on trial if they are captured.

Last week a Dutch court sentenced five Somali men to five years in prison for attacking a Dutch Antilles-flagged cargo ship in the Gulf of Aden last year, in the first such case to come to trial in Europe.

I know they wouldn’t waste anything as expensive as a torpedo on gangbangers like this; but, I’m confident that what passes for small arms on a modern submarine will be used – if needed.

These clowns are dumb enough to attack a military vessel every now and then. I wonder if anyone ever told them about submarines?

It would make a good gag for a comedy if it weren’t actually true: thieves have broken into a Dutch prison to steal the inmates’ televisions.

Twice in the last six weeks, burglars broke into a minimum-security prison and stole TVs from cells while prisoners were on weekend furloughs, a spokesman for the justice ministry said on Wednesday…

The facility is what the Dutch government calls a “very modestly protected environment,” where prisoners transition back into society. They are typically allowed weekend leave, which is when the burglars decided to take advantage.

The thefts happened on two separate weekends about a month apart in March and April. The ministry spokesman said it has still not been able to confirm how the burglars gained access.

Har! Authorities have to figure out how to protect their criminals – from criminals.

Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

Germany’s most wanted fugitive was captured Tuesday after a five-day manhunt, when police knocked the escaped murderer off the woman’s bicycle he was riding along a rural road near the Dutch border.

Peter Paul Michalski surrendered without a fight after an unmarked police car deliberately crashed into him, knocking him off the bicycle onto the grassy shoulder of the road.

The 46-year-old, who was serving a life sentence when he escaped from prison last week, was carrying a pistol. An accomplice in the escape was captured Sunday.

They made a copy of a key inside the jail and simply unlocked several doors to escape, according to German media reports. They even stopped to wave good-bye to a security camera outside the front gate before getting into a taxi.

Cars trump bicycles every time.

I guess Dutch researchers need warning signs, too

A triumph for Dutch police quickly turned out to be an embarrassing mistake after they destroyed what they thought was a field of cannabis plants.

Police announced they had discovered a plantation of some 47,000 illicit cannabis plants with a street value of $6.3 million.

They had destroyed much of the crop when they were told the plants belonged to a respected school of agriculture. They were a type of hemp, being grown as a fibre for use in textiles.

They were being grown in the field near Lelystad, Flevoland province under licence by researchers from Wageningen University who were studying the hemp variety as a potential sustainable source of textiles.

“The street value from a drug point of view is less than zero,” the university’s Simon Vink told AP news agency.

A bit more than an Oops! when you think about it.

Nebahat Albayrak
Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

The Dutch Justice Ministry plans to shut down eight prisons and cancel new prison building programs to deal with what it calls a capacity surplus, according to Dutch Justice State Secretary Nebahat Albayrak.

The move will lead to the scrapping of 1,200 jobs and is expected to save 164 million euros.

“Currently, there is detention capacity of some 14,000 cell places, while according to the estimates there is a need for about 12,000 cells. This overcapacity is expected to continue for some years,” Albayrak said in a policy document on national prison system sent to the Dutch parliament Tuesday.

The cell surplus is caused by falling crime rate, Albayrak said.

Here we are – studying a nation perpetually castigated by Law and Order nutballs for being too soft on drug users, too free and easy on sex, having too many unions and too much personal freedom in the face of a large immigrant population and the danger of terrorism – ending up with empty beds in the prison system.

What’s wrong with this picture of freedom, tolerance – absent Christian morality? Apparently, damned little.

Thanks, McCullough, a co-conspirator at DU