Aardvarchaeology
Dr. Martin Rundkvist is a Swedish archaeologist, journal editor, public speaker, chairman of the Swedish Skeptics Society, atheist, lefty liberal, board gamer, bookworm, and father of two.
aardvarchaeology | April 10, 2010In the context of religion versus atheism. Dear Reader Jason has expressed a need for moral absolutes that is quite common among conservatives. Wrote he,
"The bane of atheistic thought based on naturalism is that it cannot account for objective moral absolutes. All that is left is societal ideals and individual preference."
"There are two tribes, A and B. Tribe A is composed of hunters and warriors; however, within the community itself they are loving and caring to one another. Tribe is B is composed of farmers and gatherers; they are peaceful and loving to one another. Tribe A decides that…
aardvarchaeology | April 10, 2010In many of the world's most affluent countries, the population is shrinking because people aren't having enough children to replace the folks who die. This offers some hope to solve global overpopulation, though unfortunately the solution involves eradicating poverty and establishing global ecological sustainability, which ain't exactly easy.
These shrinking populations become demographically top-heavy, with few young people to support the elderly. Luckily, health care is so good in e.g. Japan and Scandinavia that old folks are in much better shape than they were two generations ago.…
aardvarchaeology | April 9, 2010The comment thread on the entry about the shroud of Turin grows daily and is (perhaps not surprisingly) mainly not about the shroud but about Christianity and atheism. Some people are praying for me and my family, others are calling me names, just because I identify as an atheist and offer the scientific consensus view of that piece of Medieval linen along with some hypotheses about its context of manufacture.
Henrik commented that anybody who is not agnostic about gods has an unscientific attitude to the question. Owlmirror simply and wisely replied "Parsimony". This is in my opinion worth a…
aardvarchaeology | April 8, 2010
Three cool pieces of science have been retrieved from the depths.
In the L'Atalante basin, one of the Mediterranean sea's deep hypersaline anoxic basins, anoxic metazoans have been discovered. That means multicellular beings like you, Dear Reader, who live without oxygen. They're loriciferans, Sw. korsettdjur, each less than a millimetre long. Instead of breathing like you, aided by endosymbiotic mitochondria, these beasties have another kind of power plant inside their cells similar to hydrogenosomes, that is, they're chemotrophic.
In a bog on the high wooded hills of temperate Hanveden…
aardvarchaeology | April 7, 2010After about twelve years of regular use my Braun 5515 sounded like a chainsaw, so I decided to buy a new electric shaver. Mind you, I had repeatedly replaced all the bits I could: the mesh, often; the knife, several times; once even the accumulator pack. But I figured that having someone replace the worn-out bearings (Sw. lager) of the motor would be more expensive than getting a new shaver. I poked around on the net, looked at reviews and ordered a mid-price Philips HQ7360/17.
The two shavers look pretty different. The Braun is designed to move only to and fro along one axis, preferably…
aardvarchaeology | April 6, 2010
I recently switched from a 2008 smartphone running Windows Mobile to a Samsung i5700 Galaxy Spica that runs the open-source operating system Android put out by Google. Here are some impressions after two weeks of use.
I really miss the old phone's hardware keyboard. Typing on the touch screen is slow and error-prone, especially since the Swedish layout has to cram in three extra keys. And for some reason the Swedish dictionary never makes any word suggestions. What's up with that?
Everything is so much prettier under Android than under the 2008 version of Windows Mobile.
The web browser…
aardvarchaeology | April 5, 2010
On Easter Saturday, many Swedish kids receive candy-filled cardboard eggs. Mine have to jump through a lot of hoops to get theirs. Often I have made paper trails around the house, "Under yellow table", "Inside broom closet", "In Dad's rubber boot". Then increasingly (as Junior grew) I have obfuscated the clues by swapping à for all vowels, writing them backwards or writing them in English. Sometimes I've prepared GPS-based outdoor egg hunts. And that's what Juniorette faced this year, without any help from her older brother who was with his mom. She found the egg soon enough, once she had…
aardvarchaeology | April 3, 2010I was annoyed and surprised to learn from a publicist that this weekend the History Channel is airing a programme named "The Real Face of Jesus" that takes a credulous approach to the shroud of Turin. The shroud is a 14th century fake relic, as has been well documented by historical sources and radiocarbon analysis. Here's a quick machine-assisted translation of a 2004 article I wrote on the subject.
The shroud of Turin, a linen cloth, 4.5 x 1.2 m, with the image of a wounded male body. The wounds are consistent with the New Testament's portrayal of the last days and death of Jesus of…
aardvarchaeology | April 2, 2010
As mentioned before I was a big Depeche Mode fan during my teens. Here's a cool cover from the 1998 tribute CD For the Masses.
In other news, a group of Swedish skeptics have started what may be the first dedicated skeptical podcast in Swedish: Skeptikerpodden. Good stuff, check it out.
And Simon Singh has won a major partial victory in the libel case!
aardvarchaeology | April 1, 2010Like Swedish Mail, many mail services worldwide, I believe, offer a service where you e-mail them a letter and a list of addresses and they do the paper mailing for you. But now Finnish Mail is trying something pretty badass: they're doing it the other way around to cut costs and CO2 emissions. Instead of delivering paper mail five days a week to the village of Andersböle-Anttila, they are opening all the mail, scanning it, sending it to the villagers by e-mail and then delivering the paper originals only twice a week. Participants opt in. Those without computers are given machines by…
aardvarchaeology | March 31, 2010When I was in school I read a great story about a man who took opium, felt that he had a great philosophical insight, wrote it down, and then found, after sobering up, that what he had written was "I perceive a distinct smell of kerosene", Jag känner en distinkt doft av fotogen.
Mucking around on the blessed web, I now find that the man was Oliver Wendell Holmes, an American 19th century physician and author. But it was ether, not opium, and turpentine, not kerosene. Here's what OWH writes in his essay "Mechanism in thought and morals : an address delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society…
aardvarchaeology | March 30, 2010Here's a paraphrase from memory of an instruction sheet that came with the main Swedish encyclopaedia back in the 90s. I treat all new books this way to keep their spines from cracking. And they just can't have enough of me.
1. Put book on table, spine down. Fold down left cover, smoothen inner edge, fold down right cover, smoothen inner edge.
2. Fold down 15-20 pages to the left, flatten firmly with finger along inner edge.
3. Fold down 15-20 pages to the right, flatten firmly with finger along inner edge.
4. Repeat steps 2-3 until the book is spread out flat in front of you and open at the…
aardvarchaeology | March 29, 2010
Joined Jrette on her first bike ride for the season. Had to raise the saddle 5 cm.
Emceed at the Swedish Skeptics' first full-day conference. We felt that it was time to have a bigger event to make it worthwhile for members to travel to Stockholm for it. Four talks, a mentalist, the annual business meeting plus lunch and coffee breaks. And a good time was had.
Played Agricola with friends. Had a pretty good combo of a pottery business and a clay delivery job, but what really saved my game was that I managed to become yeoman farmer. Still Swedepat won, that evil son of a Värmland.
And you,…
aardvarchaeology | March 29, 2010Asked Felicia:
"... those Viking saga kings, Ragnar Lodbrok and Björn Järnsida. I'd like to know if there exists any evidence at all that these persons ever existed?"
In the present, the categories "real person" and "fictional character" are pretty distinct. But when we look retrospectively at the first historically documented centuries in any given area, things get fuzzy. And it's even worse if we look at people who are supposed to have lived before the introduction of writing to an area, and who are mentioned in early or foreign texts. These centuries to either side of the introduction of…
aardvarchaeology | March 28, 2010On Friday the blackbirds opened their concert season. Here's what I wrote about them four years ago.
Oh, still my heart -- I just heard the year's first blackbird serenade! I opened the kitchen window a crack and listened to it while having my evening sandwich and cup of rooibos. I love the blackbird. It sings at the most unsettling time of the year.
These spring and early summer evenings, when the light never really fades and the blackbird sings its heart out... They fill me with a nameless urgency, a desperate itch for something I can't put words to. Watching myself dispassionately from…
aardvarchaeology | March 27, 2010The 89th Four Stone Hearth blog carnival will run at Greg Laden's blog on Wednesday. Submit great recent stuff to Greg, your own or somebody else's. Anything anthro or archaeo goes!
The next open hosting slot is on 9 June. If you're a blogger with an interest in the anthro/archaeo field, drop me a line! No need to be a pro.
aardvarchaeology | March 26, 2010
Spring is coming slowly, but it's finally coming. These squills have been awakened by heat radiating from our house, but still they reach for the sun.
In other news, Discover Magazine continues to buy over top Sb bloggers, and I have finally learned the story behind the state of Oklahoma's weird panhandled outline. Briefly put, it ended up that way because the state of Texas allowed slavery but the Union allowed it only south of a certain line. And so when Texas joined the Union, it ceded a ribbon of land that was north of the slavery line.