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aardvarchaeology | December 6, 2013Ikea’s typhoon rescue relief outguns China’s. Nope. Not surprised that their government does not care much. China Ends One-Child Policy.“Viking-age” ‘gold men’ unearthed in Sweden”. Actually, a bit older than the Vikings...When the workload grows too huge, I recommend a solution found in Terry Pratchett’s Pyramids. The pyramid engineer creates a time loop so different temporal versions of him can work in parallel. Literally “an army of me”.The Welsh language must be perfect for writing sagas about ancient heroes battling it out.Creepy White Guys and Asian Women” *shudders in disgust*Chinese…
aardvarchaeology | November 5, 2013This is the view from the staff break room in the humanities building at the Kalmar campus of the Linnaeus University. To the lower left is the university building. I haven't been here much during the 14 months since I began my stint as some-time lecturer at Linnaeus. Most of my teaching has been at the other campus in Växjö.
A few things surprise me about this break room. For instance, I am not used to having colleagues showing up and joining me for tea and a chat. It's nice! Also I haven't seen a training tower for sea captains anywhere else – top right in the picture. And perhaps most…
aardvarchaeology | October 4, 2013"Early Clovis knew their land and stone” -- Of course they bloody did! Finding a site with good obsidian would have been like striking oil today. People would have kept track of the site, and traded with far-off communities.For humans who want to make more random (or at least thoroughly scrambled) choices, try this advice: “LSD is good for you, say Norway researchers”Alpine archaeology reveals high life through the ages Something for the First Nations and other aboriginal Americans: “Getting here from there: Mitochondrial genome clarifies North American migration modelsMore baddies emerging…
aardvarchaeology | September 26, 2013Here are two pages out of this week's Swedish crime chronicle, showcasing the rare beauties of the small-town criminal mind. Both remind me of the movie Fargo in different ways.
The first one is awesomely stupid. Wednesday shortly after noon a young couple were driving through the outskirts of Fagersta. Two police officers recognised them and flagged them down as the driver was known to have no licence.
The couple gets out of the car and starts arguing with the police, and then the man grabs one of the officers in a stranglehold and starts banging her head against the car. The woman hits the…
aardvarchaeology | September 24, 2013Wolf warrior David Huggins reminded me of the greatest conundrum in finer etiquette: how a gentleman should behave when approaching the lower end of a narrow staircase while in conversation with a lady.
All men know that it is courteous to hold open doors and allow others to pass before us, not only ladies but anyone really. But the staircase imposes a separate and sadly little-known rule.
You do not walk behind a lady up a staircase, because this will give the impression that you are ogling her legs/posterior.
The problem has no solution unless you are willing to ask the lady every time…
aardvarchaeology | September 21, 2013I've suddenly and catastrophically gotten tired of most of my favourite podcasts, removing them from the subscriptions list in Podkicker on my smartphone. It's a lot like breaking up with friends of many years, except that the podcasters' feelings are unlikely to be hurt by my faithlessness. Dear Reader, you know me. Tell me what podcasts I should try!
aardvarchaeology | May 20, 2013Last winter I was amazed by the poor upkeep afforded to buildings in central Marrakech. I spent part of last week in fascinating Istanbul, and there it was again: plentiful ruins of recent buildings in the middle of busy shopping and hotel districts. Istanbul is in even worse shape than Marrakech. Many older houses are only maintained on the ground floor. There may be eight ruinous floors on top, eroding steadily and falling piecemeal into the street.
Many property owners in Istanbul fit their buildings with horizontal metal-grille shelves sticking out from the facade above the first floor.…
aardvarchaeology | April 23, 2013I've got a lot on my mind.
Bronze Age deposition book: visiting some sites on Friday, data collection almost done, have started doing stat analysis and writing interpretations, need to write gazetteer entries while I remember details of how I've managed to pinpoint find spots.
Also time to decide what my next project will be! I had hoped that a new place of employment would guide me in this decision. But no. Strategically, I should probably write something about the High Middle Ages or the Early Iron Age now to continue broadening my scope. Can't do Mesolithic, would have to learn to knap…
aardvarchaeology | April 17, 20132009. University of Lund publishes the PhD thesis Biodiversity and Ecosystem Functioning in Created Agricultural Wetlands, dealing with biological diversity and ecosystem services in ponds in the agricultural landscape (and commented on here).
2013: Same department advertises a post-doc in the field "Biological Diversity and Ecosystem Services in Ponds in the Agricultural Landscape".
Because in the Scandinavian countries' public sectors, you always have to go through these elaborate charades to suggest that you're really looking open-mindedly for the best candidate for a job, not simply for…
aardvarchaeology | January 31, 2013The Kachingle social micropayment site has been nagging me periodically for the past year. It's something along the lines of Flattr, and finally I thought OK, let's try this out. All they want from me is my email address and my permission. And would you believe it – I just got a US cent. Micropayment indeed. Looking at their web site it seems that there's a way to make those cents arrive more often by installing a clickable widget. But it looks a lot like the only way for me to get that widget is to start putting money into the system myself as a subscriber. Pyramid scheme, much?
So, Dear…
aardvarchaeology | January 16, 2013Damn, I must have ridden those very train carriages thousands of times! The crash happened just four stops up the commuter train line from where I live. My wife and I went there this morning with our camera. Details here.
.
Update 21 January: On the basis of first reports and information from a former railway employee, I thought this was an ostentatious suicide attempt. Now there are indications that it was a horrific accident caused by the unsanctioned habits of train drivers. Apparently they routinely jury-rig the safety apparatus for convenience, and in cold weather, to keep the brakes…
aardvarchaeology | January 11, 2013Two years ago I was dismayed to find that a pair of crank authors had managed to slip a pseudo-archaeological paper into a respected geography journal. Last spring they seemed to have pulled off the same trick again, this time with an astronomy journal. Pseudoscience is after all a smelly next-door neighbour of interdisciplinary science.* When I realised that the second paper was in a bogus Open Access journal, I drew the conclusion that the authors had fallen for a scam, paying the OA fee to get published in a journal whose academic standing they had severely misjudged. That's still my…
aardvarchaeology | December 13, 2012Science Publishing Group is another scam Open Access journal publisher or academic vanity press. Yesterday they sent me a form-letter invitation to submit papers or become member of an unspecified editorial board or become a peer reviewer. "Join us!" But they don't even publish an archaeology journal. The closest they get to one is a godforsaken excuse for a journal named Social Sciences. It allegedly caters to everything from law to anthropology.
The best part is that they sent the letter to my Academy address. The one I use when editing Fornvännen, a rock-solid paper and OA archaeology…
aardvarchaeology | October 22, 2012Riding the subway back into town today after a morning of looking at sites with an old course mate, I became aware of a loud woman a few seats away who would not sit still. Skinny, early middle age, simple clothes. At first I thought she was talking on her cell phone, but then I realised that she was talking to nobody in particular, keeping up a continuous monologue. What little I could make out was about DJs and clubs and 1990s pop stars. She was wearing a scruffy blonde wig, staring into space, her wide brown eyes quite beautiful in her lean face. At one point I thought she was trying to…
aardvarchaeology | August 20, 2012My professional goal since undergraduate days 20 years ago has been to divide my working hours between indoor research, fieldwork and teaching. And so I applied for my first academic job in June of 2003, shortly before my thesis defence. When I saw the list of applicants (this stuff is public in Sweden) and checked everybody in the bibliographical database, I was optimistic. I had way, way more publications per year after age 25 than anybody else! But the job went to a guy who was twelve years older than me. What counted wasn't your output rate but your output sum: the thickness of your stack…
aardvarchaeology | August 15, 2012I read a recent report from the Swedish Institute of Futures Studies titled Humanisterna och framtidssamhället, "Humanities Scholars and Society in the Future" (freely available as a PDF). I found some but not too much of the usual unrealistic sloganeering about how useful the humanities are to society, and a lot of pretty sobering statistics. In the following note that the typical basic degree in Sweden is the MA. I translate:
"… among those with a basic degree as highest qualification, humanities graduates clearly have the lowest annual incomes in 2008 ... Humanities graduates with basic…
aardvarchaeology | September 2, 2011The t-shirt deal is starting to look like a Nigerian scam. The original offer was that I would get some free printed t-shirts from Ooshirts.com if I advertised about their site. Now have a load of this:Do you have an American credit card? ... I know that you're getting the sponsorship amount off your order, but our site automatically charges every customer one cent as a security measure no matter what their total. Even my boss has to do this when ordering with the company card. I should have mentioned this earlier but did not think of it at the time. It's a feature that some people find…
aardvarchaeology | August 8, 2011
Last Wednesday this brig came past my mom's summer house off Bullandö in the Stockholm archipelago. It's the Eye of the Wind, built in 1911 at Brake in Lower Saxony and originally christened Friedrich. It's featured in the 1980 movie The Blue Lagoon.
Did you know that there's actually a ship spotting web site?
aardvarchaeology | August 4, 2011Littering really annoys me, indoors, in the streets, in parks - and particularly in woods and wilderness. My whole family often collects bagfuls of garbage on walks or visits to the lake. I can't understand the mind of a person who drops an ice cream wrapper on a forest trail, particularly one that they walk themselves all the time. To me, its like crapping on your own couch.
But thinking dispassionately about it, I realise that most litter is an aesthetic problem and not an ecological one. It isn't toxic. Few pieces of litter hurt wildlife in any mechanical way. Most of it quickly degrades…
aardvarchaeology | June 22, 2011
Geocaching is a GPS-aided combination of hide the Easter egg and orienteering for internet nerds. I have logged >700 caches since 2005 and had lots of fun.
Borås Tidning now reports about a not terribly thoughtful geocacher. He had placed a cache in a space locked with a combination lock. Part of the puzzle was to figure out the combination. So far so good.
But.
The locked space was a sealed 650-meter utility tunnel excavated through bedrock for a sewage line at a depth of up to 10 meters below ground surface. And the sewage tends to leak hydrogen sulfide, which makes the tunnel a…