July 3, 2009
Category: Children
Today is my last day as a daycare customer, provided that my views on having a third child don't change radically one day. I've enjoyed the fine service of the Igelboda daycare centre for six or seven years straight, but come autumn, Juniorette will become a 0th grade schoolgirl. She's not yet six years old but already an avid reader. And she's an experienced public speaker after over a year as a daycare representative on the school's environmental board. Spatially speaking, the change will be negligible as her new classroom is in another building on the same school grounds.
Posted by Martin R at 7:11 AM • 3 Comments
July 2, 2009
Category: Archaeology • Blogging
The seventieth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Afarensis. Catch the best recent blogging on archaeology and anthropology!
Submissions for the next carnival will be sent to me. The next open hosting slot is on 12 August. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me for hosting. No need to be an anthro pro.
And check out the latest Skeptics' Circle!
Posted by Martin R at 3:00 AM • 0 Comments
July 1, 2009
Category: Politics • Sweden
Dear Reader Tom Stinnett alerted me to a really doom-laden article about Sweden in yesterday's Guardian. Says Ruben Andersson (apparently a Swedish expat and anthropologist),
Sweden's conservative coalition government has stood still as the financial crisis has engulfed the country. Jobs, social services and healthcare are eroding. The Sweden Democrats - the equivalent of the BNP - are on the rise. The social state is failing. The Swedish dream is no more. ... Sweden's homemade financial meltdown of the 1990s ... finally killed off the dream. Poverty was added to the pessimism. Savage cuts hit schools, unemployment rocketed, the krona sank - leaving the social system in a disarray from which it has not recovered.
Now, I certainly don't pretend to have a very comprehensive or updated view of the state of my country's social security system and national economy. But I've lived here for decades, and I do know that our society is very far from "eroding", "failing" and "in disarray".
Swedish media have been discussing the uncertain future of our high-taxes, cheap social services system for about twenty years now. They have been unfailingly gloomy about it. But it still costs me only $19 to see a doctor (no, the queue is never long as Andersson claims) and $260 a month to have a child in daycare. Swedish universities still don't charge students a fee, and anybody can still have six years' worth of government loans to support them through their studies.
Andersson's piece appears to be the first he's sold to the Guardian. My impression is that in order to make the sale, Andersson fed his editor a scary interesting story that happens not to be true. His choice of words suggests that he has pretty extreme libertarian opinions that cause him to want the Swedish system to fail. He would dislike it simply on first principles even if the system showed no weaknesses whatsoever.
Psychiatric care, the source of many ... scandals, has a near-medieval penchant for authoritarianism with few European equivalents. People are locked up for months for not taking medicine, given no therapy, and spat out of the system into despair and destitution. The mentally ill die in wards and in outpatient isolation. And they do not even have charities to turn to
This is bollocks. The main problem with the Swedish psychiatric care system is that out of misguided respect for their integrity, patients who can't really take care of themselves are allowed to roam free and homeless. And note the guy's highly suggestive love of charities. He simply doesn't like high taxes and collective solutions. He then goes on to talk about "Sweden's second-rate public services", which is just a joke.
Dear Reader, to get a fair large-scale grip on current Swedish society, you shouldn't listen to me, because I spend most of my time in the 1st Millennium AD. And you certainly shouldn't listen to Ruben Andersson, because he is an axe-grinding anti-collectivist who is more interested in influencing society than describing it.
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 10 Comments
Category: Humour
I really like the spam letters I get with the subject line "Hello Dear". Sometimes the spammer is even named Hello Dear. Here's the latest example.
Hello dear
how are you today i hope that every things is OK with you as is my pleasure to contact you after viewing your profile which really interest me in having communication with you if you will have the desire with me so that we can get to know each other better and see what happened in future. i will be very happy if you can write me back for easiest communication and to know more about each other.i will send you my picture when i receive your reply,i will be waiting to hear from you as i wish you all the best for your day.
yours new friend.
Miss Faith Rashid
Miss Rashid! Hello Dear! I'm sorry, I do not "have the desire with you so that we can get to know each other better".
Maybe I should reply to her letter, telling her "Yhneb".
Posted by Martin R at 5:30 AM • 0 Comments
June 30, 2009
Category: Tech
The Rundkvist family's aging computer collection is in a sad state.
Our newest machine is also the only one that's still working flawlessly. A little 2008 LG netbook, it runs Win XP and Ubuntu linux and is mainly used by Junior as a gaming machine. When travelling, my wife and I like to bring it along for its handy dimensions and slight weight, but the dinky screen doesn't lend itself to everyday computing.
My dear 2005 Dell laptop, on which I type these lines, is barely holding together. Its recently renewed Win XP installation is flaky, booting up with an arcane error message and unable to complete the installation of service packs. It just bluescreened on me for the first time. The machine's also starting to become amnesiac about its hardware, having forgotten that it has built-in wifi and sound circuitry. And its battery life is all too brief these days. But there's something about a computer you've used so much that the case's white plastic is showing through the silver-metallic coating in a pattern that mimics your hands...
The family workhorse, a 2004 Dell desktop machine, is currently in a coma after I tried to upgrade to a larger main hard drive and install the most recent Ubuntu version. All our data are apparently still intact on the machine's original smaller hard drive, but neither of the two is bootable at present and there's something weird going on that causes Ubuntu to freeze half-way when I try to boot from a CD. To migrate that data I'll probably have to install the smaller drive into my dad's old computer and then jury rig some ethernet cable connection to the computer's successor. Or install Win XP on the large new drive, which would be a short-term solution since that operating system has an alarming tendency for each installation to degrade steadily in performance until the machine becomes unusable. And the overhead of the fucking virus protection software is a nuisance. Luckily I have all my important stuff on a dav server elsewhere.
The computer that nobody ever uses is my extra mom's 2001 Dell laptop. It's actually not that bad though. Its battery is completely dead so every time you start it you have to tell it what year it is, and it couldn't use its wifi card after I installed Win XP, so I put the card in the 2005 laptop to replace the circuitry that machine's forgotten that it has. But as our computers go, and considering its age, the 2001 laptop is pretty good. It's actually our second-quietest machine, and the operating system shows no apparent glitches.
I find it a bit infuriating the way old computers become unpredictable. I could sort of understand them breaking down catastrophically due to corrosion of the power supply's wiring or failing of the ball bearings in the hard drive. But shouldn't the microcircuitry be kind of WORK or NOT WORK, instead of starting to act capriciously? Maybe it's a question of operating systems co-evolving with the hardware, so that when you run the on-line upgrades to your old machine it gets saddled with an OS that is actually intended to run on a slightly different (and much faster) machine. But just as the mechanical parts tend to work or not work at all, I expect the electronics to do likewise.
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 17 Comments
June 29, 2009
Category: Blogging
Afarensis left to go solo, but starting today we can instead enjoy the evolutionary anthro goodness of The Primate Diaries right here on Sb! Pop on over and give Eric some of that bonobo group-cohesion-reinforcing lovin'.
Posted by Martin R at 3:34 PM • 1 Comments
Category: Biology • Food
An idle thought struck me. Let's say you're on the latitude of Northern Europe and you've become a locavore, someone who avoids foodstuffs that must be transported far from their production site. Let's also say that you don't like greenhouses. And finally, let's say you're hooked on coffee or tea. Is there a caffeine source that can be grown outdoors in Northern Europe?
Most psychoactive substances only occur in a small group of closely related plants. But caffeine pops up in widely divergent branches of the floral kingdom. Does anybody know of a caffeine-producing plant that, say, a Dane or a Canadian could grow in his back yard?
Posted by Martin R at 9:53 AM • 7 Comments
Category: Archaeology • Language
Current Archaeology's July issue offers a lot of good reading, of which I particularly like the stories on human origins (see below) and garden archaeology at Kenilworth Castle. But I have two complaints.
First point of criticism. The editors of CA have this weird habit of doing "media tie-ins" without any clear indication of authorship. In the past three issues were excerpts from a forthcoming book by Barry Cunliffe. They weren't billed as written by Cunliffe. Instead you got the impression that a nameless writer had read his book manuscript and paraphrased it for the magazine. "Cunliffe believes this", "Cunliffe says that".
In the current issue this gets taken even further. Here's a really interesting eight-page feature on the predecessors and origin of Homo sapiens. It has no by-line, but its intro hints that it's got something to do with a BBC documentary hosted by University of Bristol anthropologist Alice Roberts. The piece is illustrated i.a. with three pictures of Roberts. But she isn't the author of the piece, nor is one Chris Stringer who is mentioned in a box at the end as advisor to the series. Roberts hardly gets to say a word in the text, and Stringer isn't quoted at all. To learn who is talking in this magazine article, you have to flip to the table of contents where we finally learn that CA features editor Neil Faulkner wrote it. But whose opinions is he relaying? His own? Alice Roberts's? Chris Stringer's? Other people's mentioned in the piece?
Dear CA editors, it would strengthen the credibility of your excellent work if every piece in the mag had a clear indication of authorship.
Second point of criticism. On p. 26 editor Lisa Westcott gives a garbled (folk?) etymology of the word "bereaved". In modern English it means "recently struck by the death of a loved one". Westcott traces the origin of the word to Early Modern raiders on the Scottish border, "reavers", suggesting that "bereaved" entered the English language as meaning "having been attacked by reavers". This is a case where correlation does not entail causation. Both "reaver" and "bereaved" instead hark back to a common ancestor, the ancient verb "to reave" (cognate with Sw. röva), meaning "to rob". The entry of "bereaved" into English thus has nothing to do with Early Modern Scottish robbers in particular.
Posted by Martin R at 8:21 AM • 3 Comments
June 28, 2009
Category: Having Fun
It's been one of the warmest and sunniest weeks in a long time. Saturday I invited friends old and new over: we played a game of Tigris & Euphrates, two games of kubb (no, it is not an old Viking game), made a lovely barbecue dinner and took an evening walk to Lake Lundsjön. Our kubb court was laid out meticulously with the aid of two tape measures and Pythagoras' Theorem, just like when you lay out an excavation trench or grid. Later that night I watched a 2006 concert by Max Raabe & Palast-Orchester on TV.
Sunday me & Juniorette visited some old friends of mine: we had lunch in their garden and walked to Lake Järlasjön where the kids went swimming. I type these lines sitting in our yard, hoping that Junior will show up soon. Though I think I'll have a nap first.
And your weekend, Dear Reader?
Posted by Martin R at 12:05 PM • 12 Comments
Dr. Martin Rundkvist is a Swedish archaeologist, journal editor, public speaker, skeptic, atheist, lefty liberal, bookworm, and father of two.
