The defence ministry has intervened to stop the construction of a wind energy park involving four wind turbines in East Flanders, claiming the turbines would disturb the radar installation at Semmerzake, south of Ghent. The park would have provided enough green energy for 3,000 households. The military operates a 15km exclusion zone around radar installations, with the exception of three windmills in Melle, which were built before the measure came into force.
The government has ordered containers to house up to 700 asylum-seekers, after it was announced that Fedasil, the asylum agency, can no longer find accommodation for applicants. The “containers” are in fact prefabricated housing modules (which bear a passing resemblance to the cargo containers in which many asylum seekers found their way to Belgium in the first place). But the modules may not be available until July next year, while a 125-place asylum centre in Ekeren has to close by January.
The number of passengers passing through Brussels Airport fell by 9.6% in the first nine months of the year, representing 1.4 million fewer people than the same period in 2008. European flights lost the most traffic. Cargo flight tonnage, meanwhile, fell by 27.7% in September alone, and by 35.9% for the year to September.
A 54-year-old teacher who attacked a boy during a brick-laying class and pushed his head into a bucket of mortar walked out of court in Leuven last week with no sentence. According to the judge presiding, the media attention was punishment enough. But the teacher, Carl Arnauts, will haveto pay damages to the boy, now aged 15, and his father: a total of €1,000 in all. He will also have to stay out of trouble for five years and undergo psychological counselling.
The spheres of the Atomium are not round, according to an engineer writing for Eos magazine, and confirmed last week by the outgoing chairman of the Atomium non-profit organisation. According to engineer Samuel Verbiese, at least one of the balls has become distorted, a fact that is visible to the naked eye from the restaurant. But the renovation of the monument that took place in 2006 at a cost of €27m was not shoddy work, according to ex-chairman Bruno De Lille. “I’d be amazed if the balls had been perfectly round,” he said. “If you work with the primitive materials they used in 1958, it’s virtually impossible they could be round.”
De Standaard newspaper last week launched an iPhone application for its popular mobile online site. The site is now the most visited mobile site in Belgium, offering traffic information, a TV guide, weather and news. The application, or “app” as they are known among the neteratti, will cost €3.99 and give one year’s full access.
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Atomium
Samuel Verbiese writes:
I'd like to stress here that if indeed I found the discrepancies reported joyously in the latest issue of Eos by my friend Dirk Huylebrouck in exactly the right way to suddenly and luckily draw the sleepy attention to some highly interesting geometrical aspects of the Atomium, these latter indeed are the ones to be remembered in the first place, the former others belonging to mere funny interest-triggering gossip.
As an engineer, I thus fully agree with Bruno De Lille : me too, I'm astonished there are not more obvious discrepancies in this structure ! And as an artist, I welcome the existant ones as reminders of the human origin of the fine monument. Finally as a would-be mathematician (because I'm not, unlike Dirk Huylebrouck !) I find it truly amazing that the Atomium happens to be for us and for our children an open textbook on mathematics, more precisely on geometry, and yet more precisely on polyhedra and their duality relationships, just as the soccer ball also constitutes such an open textbook, as I like to explain to schoolchildren during workshops and animations.
Modern science and mathematics and their spinoffs have gained enormously in the last years thanks to theoretical discoveries like those saluted by the prestigious Abel Prize co-attributed to Belgo-French Jacques Tits and to the dramatic increase of computer power such that simple laptops can presently display dynamically at the highest speeds very complex polyhedra to help our comprehension of their features.