Iceland

Jólasveinar og Jólakettir

catdynamics — Sat, 24 Dec 2016 04:10:55 +0000

Jólasveinar og Jólakettir

The origins and history of the Yule Lads with bonus Christmas Cat...

Even I did not know that peak Yule Lads was 82!
Criminy!

catdynamics Fri, 12/23/2016 - 23:10

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Iceland

Jól

Have a happy New Year Steinn!

Happy New Year, Irwin!
Long time, no hear... how is life?

Steinn,

Life is relatively good. I am teaching astronomy and math at a local 2-year college here in the Boise, Idaho area. My mom moved in with me about 1.5 years ago and we've been doing pretty well together. We share a beautiful, 6-year old female kitty named Nala.

I was updating some of my lecture notes, making sure that I had proper referencing for some figures I found online, when I came across your colleague Michael Eracleous, so I decided to look you up while I was on the PSU astro website.

BTW, tell Don I said hi.

Vikings, Santa & Jól

catdynamics — Mon, 12 Dec 2016 12:38:43 +0000

Vikings, Santa & Jól

Grímfrost in Sweden give their take on the Meaning of the Season

- the Goat of Þór is serious business though...

catdynamics Mon, 12/12/2016 - 07:38

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Blogging again, Steinn!

We'll see, in my copious spare time...

Stekkjastaur – the Elfs are Coming - Pt 1 Revisited

catdynamics — Mon, 12 Dec 2016 08:45:28 +0000

Stekkjastaur – the Elfs are Coming - Pt 1 Revisited

Today is the 12th of december, and there are 13 days until christmas.
This means, of course, that the first of the yule elves came to town this morning.

As you know, Bob, there are thirteen of the Yule Lads, or jólasveinar, as we call them.
And they are not really elves, since their mother is a troll.
The childstealing, cannibal Grýla, of legend.

Stekkjastaur

They come to town, one each day until christmas eve, and then leave in order, starting christmas day and finishing on the 6th of January.
They leave small treats or presents in the shoes of good children, if the kids know to leave their shoe out by the door or window. Strangely, our neighbour kids do not seem to have caught on to this, yet.
If you are naughty, you get a potato, or an onion.

Their arrival is critical, since any child who is so naughty as to not get a single piece of clothing, candle or a game before Christmas Eve, will be eaten by Jólakötturinn (the "Christmas Cat" – big as a house it is, silent, deadly).

Jólaköttur - feline solsticus

The lads are pranskters, and quite mean ones, none of your Ho, Ho Ho! Coke swilling softies. Stekkjastaur sneaks up on the ewes and sucks the milk out of their udders, though this is hard going as he is stilt-legged.

On the other hand, the munchkins find it very convenient to be in a multicultural family, especially since the Better Half is fond of the Feast of St Nicholas; my extended family feels presents should be given on christmas eve after dinner; while the in-laws go with the anglo-style stocking and christmas morning thing.

And the one time the Big Kid got a potato, she laughed so hard she fell over, and then came into the kitchen with a big grin and asked that we cook it for her… (it got donated to local wildlife as a compromise).

We are of course not talking superstition.
I mean, I don’t “believe” in elves.
I just know not to mess with them.
You leave their houses alone, leave a seat (1st class, natch) on the occasional flight for them, and maybe put out the occasional bowl of milk… elves don’t need your belief, and trolls of course don’t care, they just eat you.
I should note that Iceland’s one Nobel laureate treated the issue of elves in Icelandic culture extensively, so there.

Just remember, you must have an evergreen for the solstice festival, and you better burn it when you are done, after 12 days, of course.
If you do not, winter may never end!

Next one up, any hour now, is Giljagaur. Sneaky one.

repost from '08

catdynamics Mon, 12/12/2016 - 03:45

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Iceland

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Jól

Iceland Football Demographics

catdynamics — Mon, 27 Jun 2016 12:54:54 +0000

Iceland Football Demographics

In case anyone hasn't noticed, Iceland is playing England in the Euro 2016 Cup today, round of 16.

This is the first time Iceland has been in a major football tournament, the first time, obviously, they have progressed to the second stage, and as I write this they are unbeaten in tournament play.

Iceland has a population of just over 330,000.
It is about half the size of Wyoming, both in area and population.

For perspective, the mens' football team is drawn approximately from the 21-37 year old demographic, which has about 65,000 people in it. Or about 33,000 males.
The football squad has about 20 players, so the chance of someone in Iceland being on the national football team at any given time is about 1/1,500.
Your prior odds of making the national team growing up are order 0.1%, given turnover in the squad etc.

Now think about the fact that there are multiple national squads in different sports and activities and Iceland tries to represent fully at the international level...

A typical male in their early 20s tends to have a social network of about 1-200 people. These are relatives, friends, classmates and teammates.
There will be some overlap among the national team members, but as a good approximation, 10% of the population of Iceland are part of the national teams social network.
That is 1/10th of the country are the friends, relatives, lovers or co-workers of the football team.

Not coincidentally, about a 1/10th of the population of Iceland has gone to France for the Euros, a significant fraction of them are in the stands at any given time.
Enough were there that it significantly reduced the turnout for the Presidential Election this week when Iceland advanced out of the groups to the elimination rounds!

Icelands is unbeaten, England has never lost to Iceland.

Maybe it will come to penalties...

Game On.

PS: well, that was a jolly Good Game.

catdynamics Mon, 06/27/2016 - 08:54

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Iceland

Random

Skrekkur: feminist slam poetry and dance in Iceland

catdynamics — Wed, 18 Nov 2015 15:17:33 +0000

Skrekkur: feminist slam poetry and dance in Iceland

Skrekkur is an annual talent show for Icelandic schools, roughly 9-10th grade, and it has grown to become quite a big deal.

The winning act is usually stunning and original and very well executed, and I don't just say that 'cause my little cousins keep winning...

This year the winning performance, from Hagaskóli, was extraordinary, and not, as far as I know, featuring any of my cousins:

youtube video from Lára Hanna.

"I was ten years old when I was first called "whore"

I didn't understand why, now I understand

I was in the way, I was bossy,

I crossed the line, I tried to break out from my box,

But I was small, I was a girl.

Dear girls,

Be careful,

Don't take up the space reserved for boys..."

It is very powerful slam poetry with interpretive dance.

News feature from Iceland Monitor on winning act with more of the translation.

The second stanza is a recitation of a dress code for girls at school,

then they move on to sentences of admonition for young teenage girls, on how to "be proper";

the finish is a reminder of what has been gained the hard way for womens' rights and why it must not be lost.

This should be translated and performed in every middle and high school...

catdynamics Wed, 11/18/2015 - 10:17

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Politics

Iceland

say it like it is

catdynamics — Sun, 24 Aug 2014 09:41:34 +0000

say it like it is

good thing about Icelandic, it is phonetic, almost all the words are pronounced the way they are spelled, including Bárðarbunga

the extra few letters are just what they look like.
Fortunately Biggi Lögga is there to set you straight.

catdynamics Sun, 08/24/2014 - 05:41

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X-Volcanoes - Bárðarbunga

catdynamics — Sat, 23 Aug 2014 01:08:18 +0000

X-Volcanoes - Bárðarbunga

Bárðarbunga is arguably the scariest of the 30 or so active volcanoes in Iceland.

Extreme volcanoes don't always have extreme eruptions, but they are scary because they have the capability for extreme events, uniquely so.

Bárðarbunga - under the ice cap at the top left - from Google maps

It is not the most active, it is not the tallest, it may possibly be the biggest in some sense, but it is the volcano which gave us the largest eruption on Earth since modern humans started trying to get organized: the Þjórsárhraun eruption about 8,500 years ago.

[caption id="attachment_3871" align="aligncenter" width="256"] Þjórsárhraun - upper part, the lava flows all the way to the sea to the south west. The dark lava in the lower right hand corner towards the lake is the path (it is actually younger lava on top of the old flow, from same general system of volcanoes).
- from Google maps[/caption]

That eruption pumped out about 30 km³ of lava.

Bárðarbunga has erupted a number of times in historical times, and, given very limited data, seems to undergo a sequence of eruptions roughly every few centuries.
It is not a simple volcano, but rather a complex around a central crater on the north atlantic ridge as it runs across Iceland.

The central crater is a 2,000 m peak, the second tallest on the island.
It has a ~ 50-100 km² oval caldera, which is about 700m deep and covered with an ice cap.
The caldera seems to have last erupted in 18th century, it is hard to tell, since large volcanoes can have small eruptions, and if the lava does not breach the ice, it would not necessarily have been clear which volcano was erupting, or even that there was an eruption, before modern seismographs etc.

In addition to the main caldera, there is a system of fissures to the northeast, along Dyngjuháls, where there have been relative frequent, relatively modest fissure eruptions, and to the southwest, towards Veiðivötn, where the very largest historical eruptions have taken place, most recently in 870 and 1480 AD.
The latter are the bad, "everybody dies" kinda eruptions...

Starting a week ago a lot of small earthquakes started popping off under the ice cap at Bárðarbunga - about one per minute, still going, mostly magnitude 1-2, with occasional 3-4 shakers. These are mostly moderately deep earthquakes, 5-10 km below ground, and well localized, if you look at the maps in the links below you see they are in two groups and move in time.
One set of earthquakes is under the main caldera and seems to mover around the center of the caldera, the other is drifting northeast and up to the surface, forming about a 25 km line towards the edge of the glacier.
The earthquakes are accompanied by moderately strong harmonic tremors, roughly 1 Hz vibrations. There was also a small rise in conductivity in Jökulsá á Fjöllum, the main river running from the glacier to the north.
The volcano is also bulging, the whole area, maybe 100 km across, has ~~risen~~ moved [strictly speaking the area didn't so much rise as separate - it moved laterally - net movement is now more like 20 cm!] about 5 cm over the week, as measured by GPS sensors.

What is happening is an injection of magma, molten rock, from below the volcano into the chamber under it. There is not enough room for it, so it is cracking the rock and forcing it open. The caldera is blocked by a "cork" of solidified lava, and the weight of ice, some magma is trying to force its way up around the edge of the caldera other magma has flowed off through fissures in the rock to the north east forming a 25 km subsurface dyke.

The lava from this system is generally fairly fluid as icelandic lava goes and very gas rich, and usually particularly loaded with nasty toxic gases, including, notoriously, hydrogen fluoride.

The system is under metered - it has not been studied long, is hard to get to and is big. The amount of magma in this injection is 1-200 million cubic meters, or 0.1-0.2 km³. Not a lot on historical scales, but a lot compared to some recent eruptions in other volcanoes, and the total magma in the chamber is easily 10-100 time more than that.

Now what?

Well, it could just stop.
The new lava cools, and we wait for the next injection.

Or, it could erupt.
It could be a small eruption, even so small it does not even breach the ice, or it could be big.

An eruption would probably be immediately preceded by several magnitude 4-5 earthquakes as the lava cracked the final few hundred meters of crust and forced its way to the surface.

A reduction in the number of small earthquakes may be worrying if there is an increase in the number of bigger earthquakes and a change in the pattern of location of the quakes.
There'll be a lot of geologists peering at the 3D rotations of time slices of those earthquakes (see below) trying to figure out where this thing is going.

It could be an explosive eruption, from a caldera, with ice vapourizing a lot of lava and fine ash flung high into the stratosphere, or it could be a long fountaining fissure eruption.
Or both.

It could be over in a few hours or days, or it could go on for months or years.

The dangers, in order:

1) a flash flood from the ice melting.
This is most likely, and most likely to go to the north.
Warning time is hours, it could be spectacular or it could be catastrophic and landscape transforming, depending on how much ice melts and how quickly.
I helped build a couple of the hydrology stations (V289 is go!) along Jökulsá á Fjöllum - those would be toast in a flood... :-(

If the flood goes south and west, the hydroelectric power stations and dams are at risk as well as farms and roads on the more densely populated south coast.
Bárðarbunga can go either way, though the trend is looking north (except for a recent small turn to the west in the caldera tonight).

2) explosive eruption with ash spreading high and far.
This will happen if lava breaches the caldera or a new caldera forms along the dyke under the ice and a lot of lava contacts the ice above rapidly.
It could be as bad, or worse, than Eyjafjallajökull, though aviation authorities claim to understand the ash transport and risks better now and would not restrict flights as broadly as back then.
Ash can lead to temporary cooling and crop damage, and can be transported on continental scales.
Current winds would carry ash south and ~~west~~ east mostly, over the British Isles, France, Germany and either into eastern Europe or up into Scandinavia, though that can change.

3) prolonged fissure eruption - the main danger there is both extensive lava flow, but more seriously, very large volumes of nasty gases.
These can lead to multi-year temporary cooling on continental scales, with associated disruption of weather patterns, direct damage to crops and even acute toxicity in extreme events.

It is mildly reassuring that the tremors in this episode have been moving north east, suggesting any fissure eruption might be in the generally less extreme group of cracks on that side. It is hard to know though, since anecdotal accounts of historic eruptions suggest small eruptions in one direction can suddenly become large eruptions in different parts of the system with some lag time - we definitely see triggering in modern eruptions as earthquakes and pressure changes let other parts of adjacent systems release.

The bigger more extreme events are less likely in any given event, but one reason Bárðarbunga is one of the volcanoes Iceland keeps a very close eye on is that it is one of the few that is big enough to be extreme.

Interesting times.
Lets hope it fizzles, or just blows off a bit of steam with a nice little "tourist eruption" with some photogenic plumes and fountains of fire.

live update of earthquakes in the last 24 hours in Iceland

Bárðarbunga - eldgos.is

Bárðarbungu eldgos

Who was Bárður?

Harmonic tremors - click on the little red dots...

Vulkan blog - Haraldur Sigurðsson

Iceland Volcano blog - Dave McGarvie @subglacial

Icelandic volcano shakes ominously - Nature "news explainer" by Alexandra Witze

Iceland geology - jónfr - intense amateur volcanology blog

3D plot of earthquakes under Bárðarbunga - play with time slices and spatial rotation for perspective

The sounds of earthquakes...

webcam - Kverkfjöll

webcam - Grímsfjall

catdynamics Fri, 08/22/2014 - 21:08

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Thank you for the clearest explanation I've read so far. We're heading to Iceland from the US on September 15 so I'm reading everything I can find.

Good article. Thank you for posting it. You presented a lot of solid facts. As this situation unfolds I hope you will continue to post your views. With a little luck this may pass. maybe this is an uplift event or resurgence of the caldera floor.

Viga-Glum's Fits Of Murderous Laughter

aardvarchaeology — Mon, 09 Jun 2014 12:20:56 +0000

Viga-Glum's Fits Of Murderous Laughter

Sweden doesn't have much of a written record for the Viking Period. We have most of the rune stones but hardly any of the sagas. And thus among Swedish Viking scholars it is not uncommon to be rather poorly read, like I am, in the eddas, the sagas and the other written sources of the period. The Viking Period is pretty much prehistoric archaeology to us.

Still, even in Sweden you can't study the period without picking up a few fragments of the written lore. And in my reading, one of the best passages I've come across is this description of Viga-Glum's reaction to trespassing neighbours from the saga that bears his name. Glum is the son of Eyolf and Astrida and lives with his mother after the father's death. He is introduced thus:

Glum took very little trouble about household matters, and seemed to be somewhat slow in coming to his full faculties. He was for the most part silent and undemonstrative, tall, of a dark complexion, with straight white hair; a powerful man, who seemed rather awkward and shy, and never went to the places where men met together.

The up-and-coming young chieftain Sigmund and his father Thorkel are grabbing bits of Glum's family property.

One morning Astrida woke Glum up and told him that many of Sigmund's cattle had got into their home field and wanted to break in among the hay which was laid in heaps.

“I am not strong enough to drive them out, and the men are all at work.”

He replied, “Well, you have not often asked me to work, and there shall be no offence in your doing so now.”

So he jumped up, took his horse, and a large stick in his hand, drove the cattle briskly off the farm, thrashing them well until they came to the homestead of Thorkel and Sigmund, and then he let them do whatever mischief they might please. Thorkel was looking after the hay and the fences that morning, and Sigmund was with the labourers.

The former called out to Glum, “You may be sure people will not stand this at your hands – that you should damage their beasts in this way, though you may have got some credit while you were abroad.”

Glum answered, “The beasts are not injured yet, but if they come again and trespass upon us some of them will be lamed, and you will have to make the best of it; it is all you will get; we are not going to suffer damage by your cattle any longer.”

Sigmund cried out, “You talk big, Glum, but in our eyes you are now just as great a simpleton as when you went away, and we shall not order our affairs according to your nonsense.”

Glum went home, and then a fit of laughter came upon him, and affected him in such a manner that he turned quite pale, and tears burst from his eyes, like large hailstones. He was often afterwards taken in this way when the appetite for killing someone came upon him.

(Ch. 7, last paragraph, Edmund Head's 1866 translation with a few 21st century tweaks of mine.)

Thanks to Anne Monikander for helping me find the passage, which I had misattributed first to Gretti Asmundarson and then to Gisli Sursson.

aardvarchaeology Mon, 06/09/2014 - 08:20

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Thank you, great story, had never heard of that saga. Sounds like a prototypical Swede to me. I don't think it would be half as funny, though, if his name wasn't Viga-Glum.

Viga-Glum was obviously passing through Belgium last weekend: http://metro.co.uk/2014/06/07/belgiums-world-cup-warm-up-match-delayed-…

Which reminds me, how does one put inline links in these comment boxes?

It's hard to show HTML code in the comments because, well, it's interpreted as HTML code. I'll email you.

effects of extremes of economic outliers

catdynamics — Fri, 25 Apr 2014 11:29:30 +0000

effects of extremes of economic outliers

Why you might sometimes care about the sex lives of strangers.

A snarky comment over on an evanescent social media site lead me to shoot back from the hip, but on reflection, unusually enough, I decided I liked the retort enough to preserve it in more permanent intertoobz form.

The discussion was on oligarchy and extremes of wealth, and the comment was essentially that this was a private matter, and that the income, or wealth, of an individual was not a matter of public interest - that it was a prurient obsession of no more relevance than the identity of their sexual partners or preferences in sexual practises.

Yes, but...

So, begin many good arguments.

Now, where I come from, income is actually a matter of public record, because income tax is public, and hence, logically, the income tax record including the filing of taxable income is public. This is a very useful thing in a small homogenous society, and is common to three societies I know of.
Don't know that this particular Transparency will ever translate.

I grant, given the cultural context, that income and wealth has some expectation of being a private matter.
However, macroeconomic data is generally a matter of public interest - for example, the quantification of distribution of income is a matter of public interest, (eg. the Gini Coefficient - in the limit of a small population, or a very extreme income distribution, the Gini Coefficient becomes a matter of knowing the income of individuals - eg if a small number of people were receiving as income a macroeconomically significant fraction of the GDP of a nation, it would most certainly be a matter of public interest.
Interestingly, that is also where the US is headed.

In the analogy invoked in our discussion, an interesting parallel can be drawn: I don't care, for example, who other people marry - but, marriage is a matter of public record, and, if there were individuals who were each marrying, say 2,000 times, or more, the median number of marriage partners for the population, I would generally feel that this was a matter of public interest and ought to be knowable.

There is an interesting other parallel here - in the distinction between wealth and income, and whether the interest is primarily in high ratio of individual wealth to median wealth or individual income to median income (the two are, of course, correlated) - the social parallel is obvious and raises analogous privacy issues; there is a difference, and different in what public interest is served, in knowing spousal partners, and knowing who people had sex with and how - one is more private than the other, neither is necessarily absolutely private.

Oh, and lest one dismiss hypotheticals - ignoring the legend of Solomon, casual browsing suggests the largest number of married partners was 158 for a King of Persia - somewhere around 50-100 partners social mechanisms seem to kick in to force a limit on further partnering and breaking up of existing partners.
That might also be an interesting parallel to consider.

catdynamics Fri, 04/25/2014 - 07:29

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somewhere around 50-100 partners social mechanisms seem to kick in to force a limit on further partnering and breaking up of existing partners

Which is of course an important difference between the two: no similar mechanism exists for limiting wealth disparity. The threat of revolution from a populace that has nothing to lose is the primary check on the greed of the people at the top. As long as the peasants have enough economic resources to keep themselves and their families well fed, the oligarchs can get as rich as they want. That was the whole idea behind panem et circenses in the Roman Empire.

In today's world, there is nothing personal. It is quite hypocritical to say that income and wealth is public knowledge but sex partners isn't. Either both are, or both are not! The situations are parallel. It is for the same reasons the public thinks it deserves the right to know. So what is personal these days? Does the word still exist?

Thems that has would say so until they want to wave it in your face

Yule lads: it begins

catdynamics — Wed, 11 Dec 2013 22:56:31 +0000

Yule lads: it begins

Tonight it begins:

Stekkjastaur is headed for town.

Be good.

Believe!

catdynamics Wed, 12/11/2013 - 17:56

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