3Develop Beeldblog / Image Blog

Close-up of a large number of bottle caps of Belgian and Dutch beers on a white wooden floor, together making a world map

16. November 2020

Bottle Caps on a Wooden Floor: the Beer World Map

Since I wrote an article about beer photography on this blog last year, I own a colorful collection of bottle caps. Its numbers are growing because my friends keep collecting caps for me and I also like to open the occasional bottle myself. I had the idea for some time to make a world map of all those beer caps. And the partial lockdown we’ve had in the Netherlands for a few weeks now was a good reason to implement that plan. As a kind of moral support for the Dutch bars and restaurants. Not that it really helps them,… Read More

Interior of a fictional museum with large photos of rusty schip's hulls on exhibition

Photography

4. November 2020

The Rust Museum

Let’s talk about rust today. In other words, about corrosion, the decay of metals caused by electrochemical reactions. There is a rule of thumb that says that with every scientific formula in a text you lose half of your readers. So for the detailed chemical explanation I refer to Wikipedia. But the bottom line is that iron is converted into iron oxide through the influence of oxygen and water. Bad news Rust is usually considered bad news. A rusty hull is regarded by the ship owner as costly and cumbersome damage. That’s understandable: the lifespan of a boat, or a… Read More

Detail of a world map made of facemasks, carelessly thrown away on the pavement, showing the distinct shape of North America

Cartography / Various

22. October 2020

Toilet Paper and Facemasks, Icons of the Pandemic

In times of crisis, people get creative. And in times of lockdown, people have time to spare. So it was to be expected that covid19 would lead to an explosion of art, as a way to make the best of the miserable situation we found ourselves in. This phenomenon struck me as well, in the form of two new world maps. Toilet rolls In March of this year, in the week we discovered that the corona pandemic would not pass the Netherlands completely unnoticed, I saw someone walking with three mega packs of toilet paper. And moments later another person… Read More

World map of a tiny section of a hypothetical Flat Earth, with the known oceans and continents in the center surrounded by various other land masses and bodies of water

Cartography

3. October 2020

The Flat Earth

One of the most bizarre conspiracy theories has to be that of the Flat Earth. There is even a society with hundreds of members who gather at conventions to discuss the “evidence” that NASA and other agencies, with malicious intentions or out of ignorance, maintain the idea that our planet is a sphere orbiting the Sun. In their vision the Northpole is the center of everything and the Southpole is a wall of ice around the world that prevents us from falling into the void. But the mere fact that it is not day or night everywhere at the same… Read More

Block's little Block, a tiny houseboat in a green environment with forest, water, shrubs, reeds, grass and geese

Design

14. July 2020

A Tiny Houseboat: Blok’s Blokje

About a year ago I designed Blok’s Block, a kind of tiny house XL. A compact home for adventurous urbanites, to be placed on roofs of tall buildings. That Blok was recently joined by a Blokje, a little Blok, a design for a tiny houseboat. One of the reactions I received on the Block: it is not really a tiny house. There seems to be an unofficial upper limit of 50 square meters for this. Although the Block is relatively compact, it still has a floor space of 65 square meters. Would a smaller variant be possible that does fit… Read More

Artist impression of the planet Venus in a remote future after terraforming, with oceans and continents, cloud patterns and an impressive ring system

Space art

4. July 2020

The Rings of Venus

Terraforming is the modification of a planet in such a way that terrestrial life can thrive there. One should not underestimate such an enterprise. The terraforming of Venus or Mars is a huge project that will take centuries, if not millennia. But on which of our two neighboring planets is such a project the most promising? They both have their pros and cons, but on this page I mainly want to talk about Venus. Sister planet This closest planet in our solar system looks suspiciously like Earth, at first glance. With a diameter of 12,104 kilometers, Venus is only a… Read More

The Ares, the spaceship on which the First Hundred travelled to Mars in Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy, arrives in orbit around the Red Planet

Space art

5. June 2020

Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy

The Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson is one of the highlights of American science fiction, as far as I’m concerned. Red Mars, Green Mars and Blue Mars were published between 1992 and 1996 and tell the future history of our neighboring planet over a period of almost two hundred years. In those two centuries, Mars is fully terraformed: transformed from a cold, dry, lifeless desert into a living world with seas, forests and cities. Not all main characters are happy with those changes: the battle between the Reds, who prefer to keep Mars as it is and the Greens,… Read More

A map of the inner city of Rotterdam, The Netherlands and surrounding neighbourhoods, made of digital scrapwood, plywood and chipboard

Digital art

1. May 2020

Scrapwood Cities: Groningen and Rotterdam

Mid-March, in the week that the corona panic began to take hold, my growing apprehension was somewhat tempered by a nice little job for the municipality of Groningen. They had seen my digital scrapwood map of the Netherlands and wondered if there were more maps like that. And more specifically if there was one of the city of Groningen. That would be a perfect gift for a departing alderman. Blocks That map did not exist yet, but could of course be made. The question was: do I make each neighborhood out of a separate piece of virtual scrapwood, as I… Read More

Pink blossoms of a prunus tree at Droogleever Fortuynplein in Rotterdam with in the background De Rotterdam building by Rem Koolhaas

Photography

20. April 2020

Corona springtime; nature gives and takes

Right now, especially in these turbulent times. We’ve all heard the cliché a thousand times over the past few weeks of lockdown, quarantaine and social distancing. And yet I will use it once again: particularly during this difficult time, nature can offer us comfort, hope and inspiration. Home To be honest, I don’t have that much to complain about my own situation. I have always worked at home and I don’t suddenly have to deal with children who I have to teach or who drive me crazy in other ways. There are undoubtedly better, but also much worse, places to… Read More

Gibberish: dozens of fantasy words in the bedroom colors yellow, blue and green, to easily fall asleep

Various

6. April 2020

Forget counting sheep: this is the way to fall asleep!

I’ve had a lot of sleeping problems in the past. To be able to fall asleep fast was a talent that seemed forever out of reach for me. Falling asleep in the evening was usually not the biggest problem, but when I woke up at about three o’clock in the morning, the tossing, turning and worrying began. As a result I had a hard time concentrating during the day, creating a lot of stress and making sleep even worse in the next night. Tricks I have come up with a lot of tricks over the years to get out of… Read More