Dr Martin Rundkvist is a Swedish archaeologist, journal editor, public speaker, skeptic, atheist, lefty liberal, bookworm, and father of two. This is the world's #1 archaeology blog according to Technorati.
I just came across an unbelievably crappy argument in a scientific debate between two professors. I must keep the details obscure, but the basic form of the exchange follows.
X: I have discovered that tomatoes were grown in Ireland in the Neolithic.
Y: That is highly unlikely. The seeds and leaf remains that form almost the entire base of your assertions belong to turnips. Just check out these pictures for comparison.
X: Professor Y subscribes to an earlier Kuhnian paradigm than myself. Therefore his work is incommensurable with mine, and he is by definition unable to criticise me. I remain convinced that tomatoes were grown in Ireland in the Neolithic.
The R.U. Sirius Show is/was a great weekly counterculture podcast that aired 88 episodes until about a year ago. Then it went on unannounced hiatus. I miss the show! Can anybody offer information on what R.U. is up to, and whether he has any plans to recommence his podcasting?
The latest interview with Sirius that I've been able to find dates from February. There he offers no comment on his silence.
To how many technological civilisations is our galaxy home at this moment? It would be nice to know, so we could estimate our chances of ever coming into contact with somebody out there. In 1961, astronomer Francis Drake suggested a number of parameters relevant to this issue, and summarised them in an equation that bears his name to this day. One of the parameters is the mean life-span of a technological civilisation.
In issue 2008:2 of Skeptic Magazine that reached me today, Michael Shermer has an interesting paper where he states that of Drake's parameters, the mean life-span is actually one of the few that can be given an estimate from empirical evidence. Shermer calculates the mean length of historical civilisations on Earth and arrives at a figure of 420.5 years. This is in my opinion all backward. Shermer has mixed up the uses of the word "civilisation". Says he:
"... I compiled the lengths of 60 civilisations (the number of years from inception to demise), including: Sumeria, Mesopotamia, Babylonia, the eight dynasties of Egypt, the six civilisations of Greece, the Roman Republic and Empire, and others in the ancient world, plus various civilisations since the fall of Rome, including the nine dynasties (and two Republics) of China, four in Africa, three in India, two in Japan, six in Central and South America, and six modern states of Europe and America."
What Shermer has collected is the lengths of political blocks in the chronologies of areas with continuous complex societies. As he starts his list, "Sumeria, Mesopotamia, Babylonia", he is simply dealing with phases in an unbroken sequence of civilisation that continues to this day in Mesopotamia. Likewise with the dynasties of Egypt and China. They weren't independent new starts from a repeatedly cleaned slate, they were simply phases in the lives of cultures that are still with us today. (Strangely, Shermer quotes Thomas R. McDonough of the Planetary Society on this very point in an endnote, but makes no mention of it in his text.)
Extraterrestrials working on the Drake equation won't be interested in the political details of small parts of Earth's surface over time. They want to know the likelihood of being able to catch a transmission from somewhere in our solar system. So in fact, Earth's world history offers us only a single data point to judge what Drake's mean life-span might be like. If by "civilisation" we mean an agricultural society with cities, then we're at about 11,000 years and counting. If instead, and more reasonably, we mean a society with radio broadcast technology, then we're less than 107 years into our window of interstellar visibility, counting from the first trans-Atlantic transmission.
Anyway, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence by means of radio astronomy appears quixotic to me. Let's say somebody in a far-off solar system is transmitting in our direction. Would we we even be able to separate such a little ghost of a whisper from the roar of that person's sun?
One of Aard's regulars, Jeff the Blue Collar Astronomer, died yesterday. He was diagnosed out of the blue with spontaneous ("cryptogenic") liver cancer in early June. Jeff was 39. I learned the sad news from Wikipedia contributor Kwix this morning. Derek of Skepticality confirmed it on the JREF forum: "Jeff started to have some internal bleeding a couple days ago and was taken to the hospital. He died last night while sleeping."
I met Jeff at The Amazing Meeting 5.5 in Fort Lauderdale in January. We became friends and I read his blog within hours of each posting. He was a programmer, an astronomer, a pro-bono science educator, a hard-nosed skeptic and an atheist. This random blow against a friendly and generous guy is a typical example of the non-plannedness of things.
I'm only three years younger than Jeff. His passing reminds me to live as if I had little time.
Having read what I had to say about Orsinian Tales, Ursula K. LeGuin's 1976 collection of short stories set in an alternative Balkans, Dear Reader Tty suggested that I read Avram Davidson's Doctor Eszterhazy stories. For this I thank him warmly: I have just finished the 1975 collection The Enquiries of Doctor Eszterhazy, and I loved every word of it.
As we meet him in the early 1900s, Engelbert Eszterhazy, seven times a doctor (counting two honorific titles), lives in the city of Bella, imperial capital of the Triune Monarchy of Scythia-Pannonia-Transbalkania. This realm covers parts of our world's Austria, Hungary, Serbia, Romania and Bulgaria: Bella coincides roughly with Belgrade or Timisoara. The Triune Kingdom is (like its real-world counterpart) a kaleidoscopic mix of peoples and creeds, including many that are no longer with us in the real world and others that have yet to appear. So, for example, one of the three united kingdoms is dominated by Goths, another one by Avars, and up by the Austrian border live the Hyperboreans, headstrong country folk who will at the least provocation refuse to pay the imperial head-tax.
The stories are not easily sorted into a genre. There is some supernatural content, much history, even more alternative history, some sleuthing, ample humour and a wealth of rich world-building. Somehow it reminds me of Terry Pratchett. Eszterhazy is a more aristocratic, academic and easy-going version of Holmes, and instead of Watson he has all manner of funny characters out of the highest and lowest echelons of imperial society. Davidson's style is shamelessly literate and effortlessly archaic with much erudition, all done in such a skilful way that the reader does not feel excluded by the many references to unheard-of-things. Half of them are fictional; the other half obscure bits of real-world history that will leave readers with that sort of inclinations feeling mighty smug and smart when, once in a while, they get it.
It's been a long time since I read a book and didn't want it to end. These eight stories on their all-too-brief 206 pages made me want to grow a mustache, wax it, buy a vintage pre-WW1 travelling suit-and-hat and take the first sleeper-train to Bella, there to join Doctor Eszterhazy in his enquiries.
Back in November of 2006 I blogged about new research into the Antikythera device, a Greek 1st century BC astronomical simulator. The news at the time was that:
... computer-aided X-ray tomography ... has allowed a team of scholars to understand better how the thing worked and to decipher more of its many inscriptions. Using a large number of cogged wheels and gears, the mechanism was designed to simulate and predict the movements and interrelationships of the more important heavenly bodies.
Now, a new paper in Nature presents further insights: the device
... unites abstruse astronomical determinations of time with the calendar of civic society. Another ancient Greek calendar cycle, called the Metonic cycle, was established to cope with the incommensurability of the lunar cycle and the solar year -- the period of Earth's rotation around the Sun, as determined, say, by the time between successive summer solstices. One Metonic period is equal to 235 lunar months, which is almost exactly 19 solar years. The Metonic cycle, thought previously to be used only by astronomers, is represented on a dial on the Antikythera Mechanism. But this dial now turns out to be inscribed with the names of months in a regional calendar used in Corinthian colonies in northwest Greece -- providing evidence that the device was used for mundane reckonings, and giving a surprising clue to its origin.
The team has even identified a dial that tracks a four-year cycle, most likely that of the Olympiad!
Affärs- och Kapitalnytt reports that the Scanian bank Sparbanken Syd has given an $8300 grant (SEK 50,000) for archaeological fieldwork and research: "a first instalment for excavations" at a cemetery in Ravlunda parish. Well done!
Unfortunately, the bank has chosen to give the money to our old friend Bob Lind, a homeopath and amateur archaeoastronomer with really wigged-out ideas. Bob has neither formal qualifications nor any excavation experience. On the contrary, he was recently reprimanded by the County Archaeologist for unauthorised de-turfing and addition of stones to the cemetery in question. So there is no way that Bob Lind will ever be given an excavation permit.
I wonder if the bank people realised that they were giving the grant to a person who will never be able to put it to fruitful use.
Big Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet heads today's edition with a two-page story about surgical hymen (re-)construction. The news is that a number of tax-funded Stockholm clinics offer the procedure for a fee of about $40 (SEK 260), and ample space is also devoted to an explanation of why the whole thing is controversial. (Patriarchy, honour-based society, control of female sexuality, I don't need to explain it to you, Dear Reader.)
This recalls the issue whether public health care should offer male circumcision. As I have argued before, all genital mutilation of minors should of course be illegal -- but as long as male infant circumcision remains legal, it should be part of public healthcare to avoid a proliferation of amateur circumcisionists.
Hymen construction is a silly pointless procedure in demand among certain immigrant groups with traditional customs. It is far more controversial in Sweden than male circumcision, despite the facts that it a) is performed on sexually mature young women instead of small children, b) does not involve the removal of any tissue. The difference is of course that male-circumcising minorities have been part of Swedish society for centuries and have reached positions of the highest influence, while the groups that mess with female genitalia have only been arriving for a few decades and are still low on the ladder.
Contrary to widespread popular belief, the hymen is not like the cap of a bottle. The vaginal tract always has an opening from birth, or your menstrual discharge would have nowhere to go before you started having sex. The hymen, rather, is a ring-shaped swelling of the vaginal lining, and not always easily discernable at all. Women do not invariably bleed after their first penetration.
The newspaper story cites several cases where minority girls have sought hymen reconstruction after having been raped by men of their own ethnic group. Both the rapists and the victims have understood that it would be unthinkable to report the crime as this would damage the honour of the girl's family. In the worst cases, this honour would only be repaired by the murder or suicide of the girl!
So, should public health care offer hymen reconstruction? In my opinion, yes, because hymen obsessives pay taxes too. But the procedure should only be available to people over the age of 18, who have the right to vote and must be assumed to make their own decisions about their fannies. The latter assumption is of course highly debatable in situations where a young woman runs the risk of being murdered by her uncles and cousins.
So it's the 80s, Estonia is under Soviet rule, and your job is to direct movie commercials. And when you get the assignment to promote kana-hakkliha (processed chicken meat), you know exactly what it will take to make the product a big seller. You need nightmarish imagery, a heavy, psychedelic sound track and dramatic cutting. Because after all, you want to convince the viewers that anyone who overdoses on kana-hakkliha will spend days or weeks out of their freaking mind.
(Though I suppose this must be a humorous re-mix of what the real commercial looked like.)
If I like what I see, I'll receive 5 more issues (6 in all) for just $14.95. That's 50% off the cover price! If I'm not completely satisfied, I'll simply write "cancel" on the invoice and owe nothing. The free issue is mine to keep.
Dr Martin Rundkvist is a Swedish archaeologist, journal editor, public speaker, skeptic, atheist, lefty liberal, bookworm, and father of two. This is the world's #1 archaeology blog according to 
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