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 | September 1, 2008
Just back home from a lovely evening in the company of friends. Good food, good drink and good conversation with (left to right) Tor, Felicia, Kai, Ãsa, Pat, Anders and Lars & Thinker who left before I thought of whipping out my phone cam. Many thanks, guys!
aardvarchaeology | August 31, 2008
An hour and a half in the woods around little nearby lakelet Knipträsk garnered us a fine harvest of mushrooms. The last time I blogged about a shroom-picking expedition we had ten kinds. Today we had eleven, most of them hedgehogs and boletes:
Terracotta hedgehog, Rödgul taggsvamp, Hydnum rufescens
Birch bolete, Björksopp, Leccinum scabrum
King bolete, Stensopp/Karl Johan, Boletus edulis
Velvet bolete, Sandsopp, Suillus variegatus
Slippery Jack, Smörsopp, Suillus luteus
Gypsy mushroom, Rynkad tofsskivling, Rozites caperata
Common puffball, Vårtig röksvamp, Lycoperdon perlatum
Black…
aardvarchaeology | August 30, 2008
Continuing our military theme from the other day, I regret to inform you, Dear Reader, that the Axis won World War II. After Pearl Harbour, the US couldn't decide whether to concentrate its efforts in the Pacific or the Atlantic, and ultimately came to play only a minor role in the war. Britain, meanwhile, defended itself well and harassed the Axis in Northern Africa, but it lost almost all its overseas colonies to the Japanese and never gained a toehold on the Continent. After losing two huge battles against the Germans in the Ukraine, the Russian forces collapsed, and the Axis powers…
aardvarchaeology | August 28, 2008
A few weeks ago, Kai gave me an interesting book on a subject of which I am almost entirely ignorant: recent military history. Auf den Spuren des "Elbe-Kommandos" Rammjäger by Dietrich Alsdorf (2001) deals with an episode toward the end of the Second World War, the so-called "Sonderkommando Elbe".
Things were grim in the Third Reich in the spring of 1945. Germany had effectively lost control of her own airspace, allowing Allied bomber fleets to operate with murderous efficiency far into Eastern Europe. The Germans had ample numbers of fighter planes and pilots, but hardly any aeroplane fuel…
aardvarchaeology | August 27, 2008The forty-eighth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Tangled Up In Blue Guy. Archaeology and anthropology, and all about various aspects of Hrodgaud of Friuli!
Hrodgaud or Rodgand was Duke of Friuli from 774 to 776. Probably he was already duke under Desiderius, even if some Frankish sources, such as the Einhardis annales, say that Charlemagne put him in power after the Siege of Pavia.
Submissions for the next carnival will be sent to Brutha Carl at A Hot Cup Of Joe, not to the old submissions address. The next open hosting slot is on 22 October. All bloggers with an interest in the…
aardvarchaeology | August 25, 2008
Back in October I picked up a couple of wooden model kits in a mall near the Drum Tower in Beijing. Yesterday my daughter and I finished the first one, an Imperial Chinese dragon (count the toes), brought to life by a talented but uncredited kitmaker. I built one of these kits, an apatosaurus, when I was a teen. And now a grand-daughter of the Empire is eager to start building our second kit, the Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests at the Temple of Heaven.
[More blog entries about china, dragons, modelbuilding; kina, drakar, modellbygge.
aardvarchaeology | August 23, 2008
For many years, the Museum of National Antiquities in Stockholm was strictly a custodian and exhibitor of archaeological finds, performing no excavations of its own. Recently, however, its staff has resumed excavations on a small scale. The unusual nature of this fieldwork identifies it as inspired by post-modernist trends in museology.
I have already blogged a bit about the museum's reverse excavations, an "incavation". But my colleagues there are excavating as well. They started with their own back yard a few years back. The museum grounds are on the erstwhile site of a cavalry regiment in…
aardvarchaeology | August 21, 2008My current ten favourite things:
Books
Boardgames
Podcasts
Tea
Sunshine
Archaeology
Sleep
Nookie
Music
E-mail
And yours, Dear Reader?
aardvarchaeology | August 20, 2008
Ever since individual personal computers first came on-line in large numbers, they have been utilised as a huge opt-in distributed computing array by projects such as SETI at Home and Folding at Home.
But there are information processing tasks that can be distributed yet are still impossible to perform with computers. The Stardust at Home project uses the unparalleled image-recognition capabilities of the human brain to process data from an interplanetary sample collection mission. People all around the world take part in their spare time.
Auntie Beeb's weekly program on the worldwide use of…
aardvarchaeology | August 19, 2008
I get a small amount of crank e-mail, and I usually don't blog about it. In the case of Miroslav Provod, however, I've been mildly mailbombed for some time, and today he attached the above enigmatic image (titled "Kondenzátry 1"). Since his brand of whack physics is so whacky and also archaeology-related, I have now decided to inflict some excerpts from Mr. Provod's latest boilerplate missive on you, Dear Reader.
I gradually found in further research that the phenomenon that I describe as "Cosmic energy" is actually static electricity.
...
The imbalance of surface charge shows that objects…
aardvarchaeology | August 18, 2008
I got my driver's licence late, at age 22, because I wasn't interested in cars and didn't want to support automotive culture. When I finally did get myself a licence, it was because I was starting to feel embarrassed at being driven everywhere by my wife and my colleagues. I didn't buy a car of my own until I was 33.
But long before trying out any real cars, I learned a thing or two about them from the 1987 computer game Test Drive. Most importantly, I learned what the gears are for. They are there because a car's engine can't stand an infinitely high rate of revolution. And, I also learned…
aardvarchaeology | August 15, 2008Naantali is a small coastal town near Turku in Finland. The name is a fennicisation of Sw. NÃ¥dendal, which in turn stems from the name of a Bridgetine abbey founded there in the 15th century. Vallis Gratia, "Valley of Grace".
Naantali is best known as a picturesque summer resort of the Turku bourgeoisie in the late 19th century. But increasingly, it has also become associated with the Moomins, Tove Jansson's magical fantasy characters. A sizeable island right outside town is home to the Moominworld theme park. Today I visited it with my wife and kids.
The kids were reasonably entertained by…
aardvarchaeology | August 15, 2008Noreen Malone at Slate explains why Georgia and Georgia are both named Georgia. Basically it's:
George means "ploughman" in ancient Greek
Saint George dies in AD 303
Part of Central Asia (Georgia) becomes associated with the saint for unknown reasons
Crusaders bring the cult of Saint George to Western Europe in the 12th century
Saint George becomes England's patron in the 1340s
King George II grants part of North America (Georgia) a charter in 1732
But what does this all have to do with the Georgics of Virgil, published in 29 BC? Well, the poetry cycle's overt theme is rural life and farming…
aardvarchaeology | August 13, 2008The forty-seventh Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Almost Diamonds. Archaeology and anthropology, and all dedicated to a future merger of the Vaishnava Center for Enlightenment with the Backyard Bard!
The Vaishnava Center for Enlightenment (founded 1994) is an organization based in East Lansing, Michigan. It is a signatory to a wide range of public resolutions and petitions and works towards creating awareness on certain issues, such as promoting harmony and dialogue between Hindus and Muslims. The Backyard Bard is a Christian theatre company based in Melbourne, Australia. It…
aardvarchaeology | August 12, 2008
ScienceBlogs has a huge audience (largely thanks to Pharyngula), which attracts advertisers. However, though the site's hit rate is a good quantitative selling point when you're pushing ad space, it lacks a qualitative dimension. If you advertise here, you know a lot of people will see your ad, but you won't know who they are.
My dad the ad man has actually worked with this sort of thing for decades. He and his colleagues will help you classify consumers and media outlets so that you can identify your ideal customer and ways to reach her. Put simply, if you're in the business of selling yarn…
aardvarchaeology | August 11, 2008
Jeff Medkeff's friend, co-blogging under the pen-name Iatros Polygenos ("mongrel doctor" if my Greek serves me), offers a detailed account of our friend's last days. Turns out that Jeff died during a trip to England where he was having a blast, visiting Darwin's home, the Royal Observatory in Greenwich and other great sites! I'm very grateful to learn that Jeff died swiftly in the middle of having fun, not after weeks of wasting away in bed.
aardvarchaeology | August 10, 2008
Scrabble was first published in 1948. Shortly thereafter, it was ripped off for the Swedish market by a firm named Lemeco, under the tell-tale Anglophone title Criss Cross. The main difference between the ripoff and the original is that individual letters don't have point values in Criss Cross: instead you get five points per vowel and ten per consonant.
Criss Cross does not bear a printing year. I date it at about 1950, because my copy still contains the notebook where my dad and his kid sister recorded their games. A signature of my dad's in the notebook looks like the handwriting of a…
aardvarchaeology | August 7, 2008In many people's opinion worldwide, US detainment of terrorism suspects at Guantanamo Bay is legally iffy. I mean, hello, habeas corpus? It is thus kind of interesting to learn about the first sentence pronounced for a Gitmo detainee, that of Salim Hamdan, Osama bin Laden's driver. Hamdan was captured after a firefight in Afghanistan in November 2001.
Here is an example of what kind of people are actually being kept at Guantanamo. The court in question is a military one, and so can be expected to hand out pretty harsh justice, but still. The sentence should give us a rough idea of how bad a…
aardvarchaeology | August 7, 2008The forty-fifth and forty-sixth Four Stone Hearth blog carnivals are on-line at Remote Central and Testimony of the Spade. Archaeology and anthropology, two entire carnivals about the ancient uses of buergerite!
Buergerite, you will remember, is a mineral species belonging to the tourmaline group. It was first described for an occurrence in rhyolitic cavities near Mexquitic, San Luis Potosi, Mexico. It was approved as a mineral by the King-Emperor of Pannonia-Scythia-Transbalkania in 1966.
Submissions will henceforth be sent to my personal email address, not to the old submissions address.…
aardvarchaeology | August 6, 2008I just came across an unbelievably crappy argument in a scientific debate between two professors. I must keep the details obscure, but the basic form of the exchange follows.
X: I have discovered that tomatoes were grown in Ireland in the Neolithic.
Y: That is highly unlikely. The seeds and leaf remains that form almost the entire base of your assertions belong to turnips. Just check out these pictures for comparison.
X: Professor Y subscribes to an earlier Kuhnian paradigm than myself. Therefore his work is incommensurable with mine, and he is by definition unable to criticise me. I remain…