Pieces of Mind
aardvarchaeology | January 29, 2016People who got some very bad ideas drummed into them during the postmodern 1990s are now writing policies for Swedish schools.
New study of twins documents that indeed, pot smokers aren't as smart on average as other people. But most likely they become a) stupid and b) pot smokers because of their social environment. Pot smoking is a symptom, not a cause.
Of course my new pun "The posthuman always rings twice" turned out to have been already invented.
Fiction writer Michael Reaves gets AD and BC mixed up, claims that Akkadian was the lingua franca of the Arabian world until AD 700. Context…
aardvarchaeology | January 20, 2016One reason that it's so hard to talk to believers about alternative medicine: the sharing of alt-med advice is largely a social, friendship-reinforcing activity. It's not just irrelevant to believers, but quite rude, to question the medical efficacy of someone's advice. This is not the case when you're talking about tax forms or sewing machines.
Amazes me to think how varied and nutritious food we have in rich countries. All year round I can pretty much afford to eat whatever I want. And I'm not anywhere near being rich.
I'm happy to do stuff for people. Just don't expect me to remember if…
aardvarchaeology | January 9, 2016 Our kitchen window
When we go out for dinner my wife wants to sample everyone's dishes. And I want to make sure no food is wasted. So we both end up sampling everyone's dishes.
Danish metal detectorists refer to their finds as "cousins". "Can somebody please ID this cousin?"
I'm a typical Swedish atheist. I'm uncomfortable with people having strong feelings about religion. Pro or con.
When reading about 17th century Swedish historians in the Rudebeck vein I can understand that they would uncritically repeat whatever a trusted authority had said. But I'm amazed by their willingness to just…
aardvarchaeology | December 21, 2015Wearing my early-90s Tolkien Society outfit for tonight's Viking yule feast with the students. Been so long since I wore it that I'd forgotten where I'd put it. It was neatly stacked in the back corner of my closet's top shelf.
I'm slow on the uptake. It took me long to realise that the subway gets me through town faster than does the airport bus. It took me even longer to realise that this is somehow true in both directions.
Prepping students' yuletide Viking feast is exactly like at a Tolkien Society event c. 1990!
No more teaching this year. Only one lecture left in January, then a spring…
aardvarchaeology | December 10, 2015 Detail of Signe Persson-Melin's & Anders B Liljefors's facade decoration on the Natur & Kultur publishing house in Stockholm.
Found the secret passage between the humanities building and the library. Now I can go eat lunch without braving the elements.
I flew to Umeå today along the contrail left by the aircraft when going south earlier in the morning. Contrails are really pretty up close. Once I saw two parallel ones, really thick and marshmallowy, glowing pink in the sunrise.
LinkedIn informs me that very few people have looked at my profile recently, and that one of those who…
aardvarchaeology | November 30, 2015 Irish trad session at Wirström's pub in Stockholm's Old Town
One of the most annoying and amateurish things a graphic designer can do, in my experience, is to insert hard hyphens.
I make a policy of keeping conservative and libertarian people in my Facebook feed and not muting them even though I don't agree with them. But lately I've had to add a subclause: I'm only keeping the smarter, better-reasoning ones. Because really, it's just unproductive for everyone if I allow my image of my political opponents to get skewed by the stupidest and angriest members of their camp.
A lot of people…
aardvarchaeology | November 20, 2015 Soon people will be living on the site of Lännbo school that some kids torched in 2006.
Oh, will you look at that? Ten weeks into the term I find the staff lunch room with microwave ovens and free tea. Typical academic precariat long-distance commuter.
Last year I started to let the students suggest questions for the exam. The more I think about this idea the more I like its ramifications.
Free editorial advice: before you as much as touch the copy editing, check over and edit the images. Because those are the bits that will delay your whole product if you need the authors to get stuff…
aardvarchaeology | November 10, 2015 The Saltsjöbaden Co-Ed celebrates 100 years with an open house. I've been here only once since graduation a quarter of a century ago.
I just saw toilet roll draped over a tree for the first time since 1977 when I lived in Connecticut. Hallowe'en has recently been imported into Swedish culture. It's brought the tricks with it. Is somebody going to cover my dad's car in shaving foam again?
Lack of sunlight is a cause of vitamin D deficiency. It is also a cause of seasonal depression. Now I'm seeing vitamin D touted as a folk remedy against seasonal depression. This is like trying to clear…
aardvarchaeology | October 31, 2015 Birger Jarlsgatan 11, Stockholm
Nice ad here on my blog for once. It does have a pretty woman in it, but she's not a white Russian mail-order girlfriend. She's a black potential student on the course "Swedish for programmers".
Movie: Taikon. Documentary about Swedish novelist and Roma activist Katarina Taikon. Grade: Pass With Distinction.
The guy who installed the wiring for our new kitchen appliances wasn't forced on us by some dictatorial decree. He was an elect rician.
Dad brag: guess whose kid teaches HTML pro bono to disadvantaged 11-y-os in his spare time!
Dropped off this year's…
aardvarchaeology | October 15, 2015 Satanic Men At Work in Umeå. (Actually, there's condensation on the other side of the sign, and the sun is boiling it off.)
Me: "subject". Autocorrect: "Sibbertoft".
Hey everyone who names your daughters "Chatarina"! I just want you to know that you're stamping your kid with this big label that says "From A Home With No Language Skills". It's like naming her brother "Piliph".
Huh? There's an online service named Plurk. I have no idea what it does but it sounds extremely funny in Swedish. Plurk plurk!
Whenever I see a schnauzer dog I wish I could give its face a buzz cut.
Android. The…
aardvarchaeology | September 30, 2015 I'm a closeted boardgamer.
Is the gents' loo in the new Stonehenge visitors' centre fitted with Aubrey holes?
Heh. Here's a nice piece of home-made Scandy English: "the people living in the castles would spend their days doing chores, quarrelling, sleeping and eating". The author probably means that castle dwellers would often "quarrel" with attacking troops.
The Kings of Leon have a very odd singer. I can't decide if he's interesting or just bad.
Borrowed one of the more recent Pratchetts that I haven't read yet. Realised that it's about a quarter-century old.
Twitter just suggested that…
aardvarchaeology | September 17, 2015Google Play Music's randomiser has recently served me up with two songs about extremely talkative girlfriends. In the Spongetones' "My Girl Maryanne" the singer finds the woman's chattiness adorable. In Gap Dream's "Immediate Life Sentence" he finds it annoying and concludes the song "I don't need to get laid that bad, I'll just stay home and get high".
The crappy one of Sweden's two big pop-sci monthlies has been using freebie trinkets in its marketing for at least 30 years now. They sent me the alarm clock I used in high school. Now they're trying to entice me to subscribe with a little…
aardvarchaeology | September 2, 2015 Registering the bones from this summer's fieldwork at Landsjö.
Getting rid of excess stuff. Azerbaijani dude with a huge beautiful beard showed up on his wife's orders and collected both bike baby seats, the rolling baby stool, the dinner table lamp and the microwave oven. *happy*
My wife's workout app is giving her orders. It sounds like a very, very strange satnav.
User interface fail: our new microwave oven has not only start/stop buttons, but also on/off buttons that control whether the start/stop buttons are responsive or not.
Oh great, LinkedIn. You tried to find a job for me and…
aardvarchaeology | August 15, 2015 Sailing the skiff my dad built for us when I was a kid felt surprisingly familiar even after 30 years.
For the first time I got an ebook instead of a paper book to review for Aard. I like it. Less pressure to push through and read + review a boring book when all they've given me is a copy of a file.
Jehovah's Witnesses really have a self-defeating theology. Their cap on the number of people who go to heaven is already way below the global number of members. And of course it gets worse over time.
Chocolate makers want to make the whole world Lesbian with secret candy additives! It's right…
aardvarchaeology | July 31, 2015Jrette wandering around watching TV on the iPad, overturning and breaking things in the kitchen. *sigh*
Thorin sits down and starts singing about gold.
Jrette stole my zombie novel -- Carey's 2014 Girl With All The Gifts -- and proclaimed it to be the best book she's read in ages. Now I am bookless.
Mistakenly read two global catastrophe novels in a row. Now everything around looks temporary.
Jrette is twelve today! I asked her if she doesn't find the Vampire Diaries scary. "I would, only with a dad who's a scientist, I'm not afraid of supernatural things."
Pittentian in Perthshire is a fine…
aardvarchaeology | July 20, 2015 A Vaisala RS92 probe has dropped onto Landsjö Castle in the past year. No mark of ownership, but it probably originates with the Swedish Weather Service in nearby Norrköping.
I tried to call my son. No reply. I tried to call my boss. No reply. This must mean that I have no responsibilities until they call me.
Learned from Melvyn Bragg's programme today that Frederick the Great of Prussia was most likely gay and his brother, the exceptionally successful general Prince Henry, was openly so.
Never noticed before that "I Love Rock 'n' Roll" has this really basic drum machine.
There's a guitar…
aardvarchaeology | July 6, 2015
Archive finds strike me as a weak kind of empirical discovery. OK, so you've found a piece of writing that had been forgotten. Now you're writing a paper about it. How long will it take before your paper is forgotten? When will it be found again, as an archive meta find? Or conversely: is any piece of extant writing really in a state of forgottenness? On a planet with 7 billion people, is there an important difference between no living person knowing about a piece of extant writing -- and seven specialists knowing about it?
As in any strong democracy, you have the right to voter…
aardvarchaeology | June 17, 2015 Despite the chaos of our kitchen renovation, I have managed to build myself a little reading nest.
Gotta love German. Try saying it out loud: "Die Beobachtung ferner Quasare, das holografische Prinzip und der Quantenschaum der Raumzeit".
Resolutely put away my phone in order to read a book instead. Then remembered that the book is in the phone.
Ever wonder what the scarf-wearing Somali girls are going to do with their lives? Judging from two of Jr's classmates in junior high, they're going to be software engineers.
The question of archaeology's practical usefulness should be treated as an…
aardvarchaeology | June 1, 2015 Tree house ruin, Saltsjö-Boo
Listening to the classic rock station in the car, I turned it off in the middle of the Red Hot Chili Peppers' "Under The Bridge". Two days later I turn it on again and find myself in the middle of their "Scar Tissue".
Heh. American podcaster talks about someone named Rothschild (pronounced "roared-shilled"), consistently pronounces it "rots-child".
Norwegian reggae: Bo Mærøy and the Whalers.
I love Google Inbox’s snooze feature. Takes a huge load of stress off to be able to decide at what date and time I want to attend to a given letter, and then just forget…
aardvarchaeology | May 14, 2015After some instruction I've given Jrette & buddy free range with the little row/motorboat. They're having lots of fun, learning lots and are clearly pleased with themselves.
Eider males swimming around in a little posse going "woo-OOO, woo-OOO".
The villain in the endless Neal Stephenson novel I'm reading is named Abdallah Jones. This causes the Counting Crows song "Mr. Jones" to play on repeat in my head.
Jrette and her buddy are filling out a questionnaire about bullying for a Master student. Jrette keeps saying stuff like "but that's a different category" and "proofing error". Buddy,…