LOLCat Bible

1 Oh hai. In teh beginnin Ceiling Cat maded teh skiez An da Urfs, but he did not eated dem.

2 Da Urfs no had shapez An haded dark face, An Ceiling Cat rode invisible bike over teh waterz.

3 At start, no has lyte. An Ceiling Cat sayz, i can haz lite? An lite wuz.

4 An Ceiling Cat sawed teh lite, to seez stuffs, An splitted teh lite from dark but taht wuz ok cuz kittehs can see in teh dark An not tripz over nethin.

5 An Ceiling Cat sayed light Day An dark no Day. It were FURST!!!1

www.lolcatbible.com

54 wine scholars fail to distinguish white from red

In the first (part II of the article), he gave 54 subjects (students in the wine program at the Bordeaux university, experienced with wine tasting, I believe) two wines, both at room temperature: a white wine and an identical white wine dyed red with flavorless food coloring. The vast majority of subjects described the white wine in typical white wine terms (e.g. pear, apricot, fresh, floral), while they described the red-colored wine in typical red wine terms (e.g. raspberry, black currant, plum, tannic). In the second (part II.2), Brochet gave 57 subjects two identical wines to taste (separated by a week); they were told that one was a Grand Cru and the other a table wine. In fact, the wines were identical. The vast majority of subjects described the supposed Grand Cru with laudatory adjectives (e.g. complex, well-balanced, full-bodied) and described the supposed VdT with critical adjectives (e.g. thin, flat, flawed).

UN involved in Africa

Real Matrix Style Wall Walk

My childhood dream just came true...

I stopped a stopwatch at the one hour mark! With a precision of 10 ms, WHOOOHOOOO!!!!

Best Invention Evar

For when you want that good treadmill exercise but don't want to be indoors all the time.

Buy one here!

Lets ban.... Ocular Penetration

Pandas Aren't Cute All the Time

Most of us on the blog despise pandas, but this one gets a little respect from me.

My Eye

I was playing with my new camera and tried to picture my eye. I couldn't get too close because that blocked all the light, I should retry with sunlight. In the top of my eye was a reflection of the lamp so I mirrored the bottom half of my eye, a bit fake, but it looks way better.

The title links to some professional photographers eye pictures, but you probably can't click that yet because our blog is somewhat fragged.

Benazir Bhutto Killed

(RAWALPINDI, Pakistan) — Pakistan opposition leader Benazir Bhutto was assassinated Thursday in a suicide attack that also killed at least 20 others at a campaign rally, aides said. [link]

Rainbowboysblog post statistics 3

Since i wanted to sort the pictures in the left sidebar to post-rank, I extracted the post statistics from blogger (I hope you're not mad at me, Annom). May 2007 August 2007 Annom 231 cybrbeast 265 Douchebag 61 pimp-a-lot bear 145 dekus 85 wiggles 4 exa 38 wiki 58 I also changed the font of the archives in the sidebar, and added a new box with all our labels. unfortunately the labels don't autoupdate, but updating them is a piece of cake. I took them from the 'edit posts' page in the blogger dashboard.

Christmas, Mithras?

Flash header

/\ /\ /\ /\ /\ Look at what we've got now...... click it to make it go again. P.S. There is an easteregg in there. Don't use the tab button, use this hint instead: Evil will reveal itself within an idle brain.

Happy XXX-mas Rainbow Boys!

Also, Douche you are doing some great flash work on the blog!

Woohoo I've stood on ice

It's been a while since there has been sufficiently thick ice in Utrecht to stand upon. But today I ventured out into the park on a beautiful winter's day. Too bad the thaw will set in tomorrow.

21st century Iwo Jima

Cheaper Solar Cell Power

Solar Cell energy production is 4-10 times more expensive than fossil fuel energy. That's what I calculated some time ago if I remember correct. Yesterday I read this hopeful article. It sounds like a decent breakthrough.

"The company, which has raised $150 million and built a 200,000-square-foot factory here, is developing a new manufacturing process that “prints” photovoltaic material on aluminum backing, a process the company says will reduce the manufacturing cost of the basic photovoltaic module by more than 80 percent.
Nanosolar, which recently hired a top manufacturing executive from I.B.M., said that it had orders for its first 18 months of manufacturing capacity. The photovoltaic panels will be made in Silicon Valley and in a second plant in Germany.
Nanosolar’s founder and chief executive, Martin Roscheisen, claims to be the first solar panel manufacturer to be able to profitably sell solar panels for less than $1 a watt. That is the price at which solar energy becomes less expensive than coal.
“With a $1-per-watt panel,” he said, “it is possible to build $2-per-watt systems.”
According to the Energy Department, building a new coal plant costs about $2.1 a watt, plus the cost of fuel and emissions, he said." - New York Times
It is not very efficient, but very cheap. Let's hope their optimistic words are somewhat true! Solar power can explode when it becomes cheaper than normal coal plants.

I'm blue daba dee daba da.

I told you Pappa smurf was real.

blogtest

Ok,

it seems to work in IE now as well. It still looks a bit crap.....and for some reason we don't have a footer in IE.

It was hell btw, I had to manually re-nest the entire code.

(on douches request) IE v6.0.29 screenshot (ignore the gif compression effect):

Look what I'm getting you guys for Christmas

Nanowire battery holds 10 times the charge of existing ones

Stanford researchers have found a way to use silicon nanowires to reinvent the rechargeable lithium-ion batteries that power laptops, iPods, video cameras, cell phones, and countless other devices. The new version, developed through research led by Yi Cui, assistant professor of materials science and engineering, produces 10 times the amount of electricity of existing lithium-ion, known as Li-ion, batteries. A laptop that now runs on battery for two hours could operate for 20 hours, a boon to ocean-hopping business travelers. "It's not a small improvement," Cui said. "It's a revolutionary development." The breakthrough is described in a paper, "High-performance lithium battery anodes using silicon nanowires," published online Dec. 16 in Nature Nanotechnology, written by Cui, his graduate chemistry student Candace Chan and five others. The greatly expanded storage capacity could make Li-ion batteries attractive to electric car manufacturers. Cui suggested that they could also be used in homes or offices to store electricity generated by rooftop solar panels. Full article...

Wow, this could really make electric cars viable. You could drive all day without recharging and let it recharge overnight.

<--just look at it

I've added a few changes. We now have our own flash animated starry rainbow. Click it to make it go again.

How To: Make Pancakes Like a Crack Head

Blog design

Care bear psd feel free to tinker with it all you like. All you need to do is replace the image called carebearsitedesign.jpg in the image-directory of our ftp-server.

Intriguing doors

138.99 m high doors for the Saturn 5 rocket at the kennedy space center. The largest doors in the world.

The disappearing car door.

ak47 vs m16

I prefer a m16 after all.

Top Ten Signs You're a Fundamentalist Christian

10 - You vigorously deny the existence of thousands of gods claimed by other religions, but feel outraged when someone denies the existence of yours. 9 - You feel insulted and "dehumanized" when scientists say that people evolved from other life forms, but you have no problem with the Biblical claim that we were created from dirt. 8 - You laugh at polytheists, but you have no problem believing in a Triune God. 7 - Your face turns purple when you hear of the "atrocities" attributed to Allah, but you don't even flinch when hearing about how God/Jehovah slaughtered all the babies of Egypt in "Exodus" and ordered the elimination of entire ethnic groups in "Joshua" including women, children, and trees! 6 - You laugh at Hindu beliefs that deify humans, and Greek claims about gods sleeping with women, but you have no problem believing that the Holy Spirit impregnated Mary, who then gave birth to a man-god who got killed, came back to life and then ascended into the sky. 5 - You are willing to spend your life looking for little loopholes in the scientifically established age of Earth (few billion years), but you find nothing wrong with believing dates recorded by Bronze Age tribesmen sitting in their tents and guessing that Earth is a few generations old. 4 - You believe that the entire population of this planet with the exception of those who share your beliefs -- though excluding those in all rival sects - will spend Eternity in an infinite Hell of Suffering. And yet consider your religion the most "tolerant" and "loving." 3 - While modern science, history, geology, biology, and physics have failed to convince you otherwise, some idiot rolling around on the floor speaking in "tongues" may be all the evidence you need to "prove" Christianity. 2 - You define 0.01% as a "high success rate" when it comes to answered prayers. You consider that to be evidence that prayer works. And you think that the remaining 99.99% FAILURE was simply the will of God. 1 - You actually know a lot less than many atheists and agnostics do about the Bible, Christianity, and church history - but still call yourself a Christian.

From Evilbible.com, what a great URL

A more modern crib scene

Fon

This is an idea of a wifi connection around the world. You can open your wireless modem/router so other people can connect with your modem. If you do do this you can join other fon connections for free. Otherwise it cost you 3 euro a day. This way they wanna give a world cover of wifi Internet. They already got some big investers like skype and google, and 100.000 connection points world wide (mostly USA and spain). The netherlands is a bid behind but we got already 1.700 members still prety good for a small country. On google maps/ earth or the fon mapssite you can find the connection points in the Netherlands/Utrecht or around the world.

Ames Room

The so called Ames Room optical illusion.

Top 20 Coolest Guitar Riffs

Of course lists like these are hugely subjective, but I enjoyed it.

Train Snow Plow

We bitch about leafs on the railroad.... The plow gets stuck: video And is derailed: video

Daffy Duck vs the Nazis

Overall it's a quite boring cartoon, the end however, really makes up for it.

YTMND = random bizarre weird shit

YTMND, an initialism for "You're The Man Now, Dog", is an online community centered on the creation of hosted web pages (known within the community as YTMNDs or sites) featuring a juxtaposition of a single image or a simple slideshow, which may be animated and/or tiled along with optional large zooming text and a looping sound file. Images used in YTMNDs are usually either created or edited by users. Most YTMNDs are meant to expose or reflect the more inane facets of pop culture, and some can be considered inside jokes.

Here is a small compilation

Check out YTMND for more weird shit and tons of crappy shit.

Users are losers!

I just found a sixteen page public school handout to California Middle and High School students in 1970 on drug use. If you ever plan to use drugs, make sure to read this handout :D.

Atheists and Anger

"One of the most common criticisms lobbed at the newly-vocal atheist community is, "Why do you have to be so angry?" So I want to talk about: 1. Why atheists are angry; 2. Why our anger is valid, valuable, and necessary; And 3. Why it's completely fucked-up to try to take our anger away from us." A beautiful rant, maybe a bit long, but worth reading.

Monkey in Ecuador opening my bag

I just started filming when the little monkey (wild but domesticated) came close. Very skilled in opening zippers. It was the only organism that tried to pickpocket me.

Robert Mugabe's suffering

He came to power in Zimbabwe 27 years ago, Robert Mugabe. With an inflation of 8000% Zimbabwe is not in the best situation at the moment. He was declared candidate for the presidential elections and said "Their welfare is my welfare. Their suffering is my suffering. I dare not abandon them.". The country does not have enough goods in the shops to calculate the inflation rate since last month. I wanted to know in what house he sleeps and in what car he drives while "suffering".

Here is one of his private residences, under construction, I found:and his football field sized presidential palace since 1980:
his car:

Weird Nature - The Wheel

Harlequin Ichthyosis

Came across this while wasting corporate time, didn't think much of it until I saw the picture. Harlequin-type ichthyosis (also harlequin ichthyosis, ichthyosis congenita, or keratosis diffusa fetalis), a skin disease, is the most severe form of congenital ichthyosis, characterized by a thickening of the keratin layer in fetal human skin. In sufferers of the disease, the skin contains massive, diamond-shaped scales, and tends to give off a reddish color. In addition, the eyes, ears, mouth, and other appendages may be abnormally contracted. The scaly keratin greatly limits the child's movement. Because the skin is cracked where normal skin would fold, it is easily pregnable by bacteria and other contaminants, resulting in serious risk of fatal infection.

---

!!! Please be advised, I personally think these pictures are quite disturbing!!! (you might need to turn google filter off to see them)

He always wanted to live near the sea

Trout Stage Daring Breakout at Fish Farm

Owners of a fish farm near the village of Alresford have been raising fish for nearly 30 years. Recently they noticed some of their brown trout appeared to be missing. Then a local wildlife photographer and friend of the fish farmers made an amazing discovery.
Dennis Bright captured images of the trout leaping 3 feet out of the water into the mouth of an 8 inch wide metal feeding pipe. The pipe leads to a tributary of the River Itchen about 30 feet away. To get to the water, the trout had to leap into the tiny metal pipe then swim against the swift current.

Dutch weird shit

I mostly see this when i'm drunk i'm so glad somebody finally caught this on tape. Discobal on his head and you got a standalone drive in DJ! Hmmm weird shit without being Japanese or haveing midgets in it.

First Digital Clock

The first and most primitive digital clock online

Human Statue of Liberty

Human Statue of Liberty formed by 18,000 US soldiers , taken in 1918 in Iowa, as part of a promotional campaign to sell war bonds during the first world war.

Random image 1.0

I added a random image generator to our blog. I rewrote a crappy script and can add large amounts of pictures semi-automatically now. It is, as far as I know, impossible to write a javascript that picks a random file from a folder. You can not just add the pictures to our randomimage folder at rainbowboys.org.

Douchebag needs to add a coloured title and you can send me any images you want in there or I'll just add some blog images from time to time.

The "new" C-String

They did it! A bunch of rocket scientists have made womens underwear even more uncomfortable! Introducing: The new C-String!

No Panty Lines! No Tan Lines!
The C-String is a completely new and exciting innovation in lingerie. Say goodbye to panty line and uncomfortable straps. Say hello to a sexy new freedom.
The C-String can be worn under all your favorite clothes:
• Dresses • Skirts • Jeans
The C-String can also be worn alone:
• Swimwear • Lingerie

My colleague told me that it's not new but at least 20 years old, I couldn't find a source to confirm that.

New logo uploaded

And it looks crappy! (I'm so proud)

I had to shop it on top of the old logo, but because the new logo rests on a "glass" plate you can still see the old one... Can anyone (douche?) get me the original rainbow background without the old logo?

I'm also not sure of the glass plate, still working on what to do with it.

Hombré

Moviez and TV showz on Demand

Stage6 is kind of like YouTube, but with DivX quality and unlimited length video clips. This has led to a lot of reasonably high quality DivX movies, TV shows and documentaries being uploaded to the site. The site streams the movies on demand which makes it pretty handy if you just feel like watching a movie or show without downloading or turning on the crappy TV with commercials. You can try searching for yourself but I recommend using a site which tracks them like Joox, Nabolister or this forum. You also need DivX web player. Watch a few episodes of Weeds for example. Or start watching Farscape, awesome sci-fi!

Educational Rap

Over on the Freakonomics blog I read a bit about educational rap music.

Rhythm, Rhyme, Results, LLC was founded in 2006 and is located in Cambridge, MA. We produce supplementary educational music in academic subjects such as mathematics, language arts, science, and social studies. The content-rich lyrics adhere to state and federal curriculum requirements and flow to thumping, original music. People remember song lyrics. When combined with music, lyrics embed themselves into our memory in a fundamentally different—and sometimes more enduring—manner than text alone. Our contemporary twist helps students remember important concepts by transforming them into memorable rap lyrics and combining them with thumping hip-hop tracks. We value the ability of music, specifically hip-hop music, to transcend social contexts.

Demand, Supply

Lyrics here.

Here is one relevant to my study on the water cycle.

Full playlist here...

Trick of the brain count the F's

Read this sentence: FINISHED FILES ARE THE RESULT OF YEARS OF SCIENTIFIC STUDY COMBINED WITH THE EXPERIENCE OF YEARS. Now count the F's is that sentence. Count them ONLY ONCE. Do not go back and count them again. Then see the comment:

Does a deer splash when hit by a car?

Liberation Army Against Freedom

note: Can't embed it within 10 seconds, sorry...

Next Gen Paint Brush

At first glance, it looks like your standard brush, but upon closer inspection you’ll find integrated LEDs, touch sensors, and a camera. This gadget basically “lifts up and captures photons”, allowing artists to draw with “special ink” picked up from their immediate environment.

Parabolic Flights

Three parabolic flights with hilarious consequences :)

Physics game

Dwarf party

Picture diary ;)

This morning I grabbed my camera when I left home for Delft. I was bored and wanted to make some random pictures. Here is the AMAZING result ;) A photo diary of my way to Delft. It is extremely boring, but then you know what I have to go through when I go to Delft!

Click here for a slide-show of this amazing route :)

Gotta love Jehovah's Witnesses!

A Jehovah's Witness who for decades refused all surgery on his horrific facial disfigurement has been given hope by a British doctor and new medical technology.

Unwilling to accept a blood transfusion, Jose Mestre has allowed the bloody tumour that first appeared on his lip in adolescence to obliterate almost all of his face.

Now 15 inches long and weighing 12 pounds, it has blinded him in one eye and made eating a daily ordeal. As it begins to block his airways, doctors fear his life could be in danger.

O Aliens, where art thou?

When consulting the wisdom of probability, one finds that the universe ought to be teeming with technology-toting aliens; but aside from a couple of interesting-but-inconclusive detections, no discernibly intelligent patterns have ever been observed by Earth's space-listening instruments. One might surmise that the conspicuous silence is "evidence of absence," but such a conclusion might be a bit premature under the circumstances.

[...]

If, hypothetically, A) a race of extra-intelligent extraterrestrials happened to reside in the nearby Alpha Centauri star system, B) they happened to broadcast a 5 Megawatt UHF television signal, and C) we were fortunate enough to be pointing the mighty Arecibo telescope directly towards the source when it arrived four years later, we would still be unable to enjoy the zany capers of the Alpha Centauri equivalent of Mork & Mindy. In order to detect such a signal from this relatively proximate star, a dish with a diameter of 33,000 kilometers would be required. Even using Very Long Baseline Interferometry to link two Arecibo-style radio telescopes on opposite sides of the planet– thereby providing a virtual radio telescope the size of the entire Earth– our antenna area would still be 20,244 kilometers too small.

Read the rest of this damn interesting article. It also contains an interactive Drake equation which calculates the number of probable communicating civilizations in our galaxy based on a variety of parameters.

Flocking Behavior of Starlings

A clip that shows off the really beautiful flocking behavior of starlings. It's a bit longwinded and the best footage starts at 3:20.

What Revolves Around the Earth?

Some pictures of my Europa mission project

Maybe you remember I 'worked' full time for 10 weeks with a group of 9 on a feasibility study of a mission the Europa, a moon of Jupiter, to look for an ocean. I'm not going to bother you with all the details (the report is under the title), but I have some pictures to show you:

A general overview of our designed mission. One spacecraft orbiting Europa and one Jupiter A concept 3D model of the Europa Orbiter The Relay SatelliteMy job: choosing and simulating the orbit of the Europa Orbit in great detail A ground plot of the Europa Orbiter, for a period of a few hours

Plots of altitude versus time of the Europa Orbiter, for different inclinations (90 is a polar orbit)

The predicted time to impact (crash) of the Europa Orbiter for different initial altitudes. The prediction of my model is the orange line, ESA's simulation is the blue line.

Wat wil de PVV nou eigenlijk?

Een paar hoogtepunten uit het verkiezingspamflet van de Partij voor de Vrijheid:

• Hogere straffen voor crimineel gedrag en invoering minimumstraffen voor misdrijven en overtredingen
• Na drie zware geweldsmisdrijven levenslange gevangenisstraf
• Preventief fouilleren in het hele land
• Einde gedoogbeleid: sluiten coffeeshops, krachtige aanpak thuisteelt en drugsoverlast, geen vrije heroïneverstrekking
• Geschiedenis en nationale identiteit prominent in het curriculum van alle scholen
• Invoering quotum asielzoekers van maximaal 5.000 per jaar, opvang in eigen regio
• Immigratiestop
• Nieuw artikel 1 van de Grondwet: christelijk/joods/humanistische cultuur moet in Nederland dominant blijven
• Preekverbod buitenlandse imams, verplichting tot spreken van Nederlandse taal in gebedshuizen
• Verbod hoofddoekjes in publieke functies
• Geen medische zorg voor illegalen behoudens spoedeisende hulp
• Introductie nationaal alarmnummer voor dieren: 113

Feynman Quotes

I like to read almost everything from Richard Feynman. He truly is a great, inspiring and interesting person in my opinion. Maybe you really don't care about this dead physicist though :) Richard Feynman phrases my fundamental view on science and religion pretty good in this quote:

"I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it is much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers that might be wrong. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of certainty about different things, but I'm not absolutely sure of anything."

"Some people say, "How can you live without knowing?" I do not know what they mean. I always live without knowing. That is easy. How you get to know is what I want to know."

"Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool."

"I don't have to know an answer. I don't feel frightened by not knowing things; by being lost in a mysterious universe without any purpose — which is the way it really is, as far as I can tell, possibly. It doesn't frighten me."

Helium Superfluid

Superfluid @ wiki.

Vervolg: Welk Utrechts gebouw staat er nog in 4007.

Welk Utrechts gebouw staat er nog in 4007.

Sorry dat jullie ik jullie zolang in "spanning" heb moeten laten wachten.

Maar hier zijn de drie gebouwen: het Rietveld-Schröderhuis, Dom kerk, en het postkantoor op het neude.

Rietveld-Schröderhuis.(1924)

Enige gebouw uit Utrecht dat is opgenomen in de Unesco werelderfgoedlijst. Waarschijnlijk omdat het een van de uniekste bouwwerken is in de de “stijl”. En hiermee gezien kan worden de voorganger van de moderne architectuur. Was ooit een woning van de familie Schröder en is nu een museum object. De 4 Karakteristieke eigenschappen van het Rietveld schröder huis:

1) Wat flexibiliteit betreft scoort het Rietveld-Schröderhuis niet hoog het gebouw is eigenlijk alleen geschikt als woning/ of museum object. Zelfs als woning voldoet hij ook niet meer aan de eisen van deze tijd. Museumobject tel ik niet mee als gebruiksfunctie. Omdat je voor museum object geen functie nodig hebt maar moet voldoen aan de esthetische of de historische waardering die van dat moment.

2) De vormgeving bepaald overduidelijk de waarde van het huis, het materiaal en de locatie zijn allemaal verwaarloosbaar met de waarde van de vorm.

3) Wat sfeer, uitstraling, vormgeving betreft zal dit gebouw door de jaren heen gewaardeerd worden. Omdat het een uniek voorbeeld is van de stijl en omdat het voorganger is van het moderne bouwen.

4) Renovatie kosten vallen relatief mee omdat het een klein gebouw is en omdat de bouwmaterialen metselwerk met stuclaag en gewapend beton goedkoop te renoveren zijn.

3 van de 4 karakteristieke eigenschappen scoren voldoende. Dus een redelijke kans dat er in 4007 nog steeds bussen met Japanners langs het Rietveldhuis rijden.

De domkerk (1254)

Grootste kerk van Utrecht. In de gotische bouwstijl gebouwd. In 1580 overgenomen door de protestanten en daarbij zijn veel beelden verloren gegaan. Een deel van het midden schip stortte in elkaar in 1674. Desondanks een van de best bewaarde gotische gebouwen, en de hoogste kerk toren van Nederland. De 4 Karakteristieke eigenschappen van de domkerk:

1) Als over 200 jaar de achter achter kleinkinderen van Andre Rouvoet zijn gestorven en daarmee hopelijk ook het christendom. Is er dan nog behoefte aan de domkerk? De kerk kan met een beetje fantasie omgebouwd worden tot een schil voor een urban-villa met luxe appartementen, of tot allemaal anderen verschillende utiliteitsbouw (uitgaanscentrum/cultureelcentrum/ museum etc). Wel blijft de gotiek altijd nadrukkelijk aanwezig. De toren heeft echter niet veel flexibiliteit in functie en kan alleen gebruikt worden als klokkentoren en museumobject.

2) De waardevolle materialen zijn al uit de dom gehaald en wat materiaal betreft blijft er weinig over wel is de locatie zeer gunstig. Maar over het algemeen is de vormgeving kostenbepalend.

3) Wat sfeer, uitstraling, vormgeving betreft zal dit gebouw door de jaren heen wel wat fans hebben blijven hebben. Uniek aan het gebouw is dat het een van de weinige grootschalige gotiekgebouwen in Nederland is. Maar vergeleken met de rest van Europa is de dom niet zo uniek. Als de globalesering doorgaat in het tempo wat ze de laatste honderd jaar doet. Kan dat ten kosten gaan van de uniekheid en dus de waardering van de dom.

4) Renovatie kosten zullen heel hoog zijn omdat er veel detail werk bij komt kijken en omdat het gebouw gigantisch groot is. Doordat ze in de tijd van de dom redelijk overberekend bouwde denk ik dat de constructie het wel zal volhouden tot 4007

Denk dat de dom het nog moeilijk gaat krijgen om 4007 te halen. Als de gotiek en het christendom uit de mode raken (of zelfs gehaat gaan worden). Is er een kans dat mensen het geld niet meer waard vinden om de dom te renoveren en er besloten word het gebouw te slopen. Ook met de globalesering en de moderne techniek is het waarschijnlijk makkelijker om snel naar anderen buitenlandse steden te gaan om daar kerken te bezoeken die nog veel bijzonderder zijn dan de dom.

Hoofdpostkantoor op het Neude 1924

De underdog in deze competitie, maar mijn persoonlijke favoriet . Gebouwd in de stijl van de Amsterdamse school. Het postkantoor is een van de grootse en openlijke gebouwen in de Amsterdamse schoolstijl. De 4 Karakteristieke eigenschappen van het hoofdpostkantoor op het neude:

1) Met de structuur van 1 grote hal in het midden en daaromheen allemaal kleinere ruimtes is het gebouw zeer flexibel. Zie hier verschillende gebruiksfuncties voor me van woningen tot een warenhuis.

2) Doordat het postkantoor midden in de stad Utrecht staat is de waarde van de grond economisch aantrekkelijk zijn. Het gebouw zelf bestaat niet uit dure materialen maar en wordt de economische waarde al snel bepaald door de vormgeving.

3) Wat sfeer, uitstraling, vormgeving betreft is dit gebouw een twijfel geval. De wat grimmige/donkere en eigenzinnige uitstraling zal sommigen wat minder aanspreken. Maar zal denk ik te allen tijde wel mensen in hun hart sluiten. Zo is de grote zaal van een zeer bijzondere detaillering en esthetisch uitstraling. Rens is een dikzak. De uniekheid van het postkantoor is op wereld niveau gezien groter dan de dom. Het is een van de weinige grote gebouwen in de Amsterdamse schoolstijl. Ook combineert het gebouw de grimmige en beknepen stijl van de Amsterdamse school met een vorm van grootsheid en luchtigheid. Waarin het volgens mij het enige gebouw is ter wereld die dat doet.

4) Renovatie kosten zullen redelijk hoog zijn omdat er veel beeldwerk in zit en omdat het een groot gebouw is. Wel heeft het een stevige constructie die het waarschijnlijk wel haalt tot 4007

Er is natuurlijk een kans dat gemeente bestluit wegens succes van de neude flat een neude flat 2 te maken en daarvoor het postkantoor te slopen. Maar buiten dat zie ik de kans redelijk groot dat het postkantoor in 4007 nog bestaat.

De toekomst is niet te voorspellen door de domheid van de mensen. Maar ik geef het een redelijke kans dat al deze 3 gebouwen het overleven tot 4007.

Over dit vraagstuk kan nog uren worden doorgepraat.
Zo kunnen verschillende toekomst scenario’s worden bedacht. Zoals welke gebouwen zouden het overleven als: Utrechtse bevolking aantal vertienvoudigt, er een energie schaarste komt, er oorlog uitbreekt, de zee spiegelstijgt, er een tweede beeldenstorm komt, als we een derde wereld economie worden, etc etc.

Ook kunnen we ons afvragen of: we het wel willen dat er gebouwen van nu nog in 4007 bestaan?
Feit is dat bijna al de gebouwen die we nu bouwen niet als doel hebben om 4007 te halen.