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 | August 6, 2008The R.U. Sirius Show is/was a great weekly counterculture podcast that aired 88 episodes until about a year ago. Then it went on unannounced hiatus. I miss the show! Can anybody offer information on what R.U. is up to, and whether he has any plans to recommence his podcasting?
The latest interview with Sirius that I've been able to find dates from February. There he offers no comment on his silence.
Update 10 February '09: In an interview on the Right Where You Are Sitting Now! podcast from June '08, R.U. Sirius explains (about 10 minutes from the file's end) that his podcasting halted…
aardvarchaeology | August 5, 2008
To how many technological civilisations is our galaxy home at this moment? It would be nice to know, so we could estimate our chances of ever coming into contact with somebody out there. In 1961, astronomer Francis Drake suggested a number of parameters relevant to this issue, and summarised them in an equation that bears his name to this day. One of the parameters is the mean life-span of a technological civilisation.
In issue 2008:2 of Skeptic Magazine that reached me today, Michael Shermer has an interesting paper where he states that of Drake's parameters, the mean life-span is actually…
aardvarchaeology | August 4, 2008
One of Aard's regulars, Jeff the Blue Collar Astronomer, died yesterday. He was diagnosed out of the blue with spontaneous ("cryptogenic") liver cancer in early June. Jeff was 39. I learned the sad news from Wikipedia contributor Kwix this morning. Derek of Skepticality confirmed it on the JREF forum: "Jeff started to have some internal bleeding a couple days ago and was taken to the hospital. He died last night while sleeping."
I met Jeff at The Amazing Meeting 5.5 in Fort Lauderdale in January. We became friends and I read his blog within hours of each posting. He was a programmer, an…
aardvarchaeology | August 1, 2008Having read what I had to say about Orsinian Tales, Ursula K. LeGuin's 1976 collection of short stories set in an alternative Balkans, Dear Reader Tty suggested that I read Avram Davidson's Doctor Eszterhazy stories. For this I thank him warmly: I have just finished the 1975 collection The Enquiries of Doctor Eszterhazy, and I loved every word of it.
As we meet him in the early 1900s, Engelbert Eszterhazy, seven times a doctor (counting two honorific titles), lives in the city of Bella, imperial capital of the Triune Monarchy of Scythia-Pannonia-Transbalkania. This realm covers parts of our…
aardvarchaeology | July 31, 2008Back in November of 2006 I blogged about new research into the Antikythera device, a Greek 1st century BC astronomical simulator. The news at the time was that:
... computer-aided X-ray tomography ... has allowed a team of scholars to understand better how the thing worked and to decipher more of its many inscriptions. Using a large number of cogged wheels and gears, the mechanism was designed to simulate and predict the movements and interrelationships of the more important heavenly bodies.
Now, a new paper in Nature presents further insights: the device
... unites abstruse astronomical…
aardvarchaeology | July 30, 2008Affärs- och Kapitalnytt reports that the Scanian bank Sparbanken Syd has given an $8300 grant (SEK 50,000) for archaeological fieldwork and research: "a first instalment for excavations" at a cemetery in Ravlunda parish. Well done!
Unfortunately, the bank has chosen to give the money to our old friend Bob Lind, a homeopath and amateur archaeoastronomer with really wigged-out ideas. Bob has neither formal qualifications nor any excavation experience. On the contrary, he was recently reprimanded by the County Archaeologist for unauthorised de-turfing and addition of stones to the cemetery in…
aardvarchaeology | July 29, 2008Big Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet heads today's edition with a two-page story about surgical hymen (re-)construction. The news is that a number of tax-funded Stockholm clinics offer the procedure for a fee of about $40 (SEK 260), and ample space is also devoted to an explanation of why the whole thing is controversial. (Patriarchy, honour-based society, control of female sexuality, I don't need to explain it to you, Dear Reader.)
This recalls the issue whether public health care should offer male circumcision. As I have argued before, all genital mutilation of minors should of course be…
aardvarchaeology | July 28, 2008
So it's the 80s, Estonia is under Soviet rule, and your job is to direct movie commercials. And when you get the assignment to promote kana-hakkliha (processed chicken meat), you know exactly what it will take to make the product a big seller. You need nightmarish imagery, a heavy, psychedelic sound track and dramatic cutting. Because after all, you want to convince the viewers that anyone who overdoses on kana-hakkliha will spend days or weeks out of their freaking mind.
(Though I suppose this must be a humorous re-mix of what the real commercial looked like.)
aardvarchaeology | July 28, 2008Yesterday my glorious daughter turned 5. Today my radiant son turned 10. In the maternity ward five years ago I quipped to the nurses, "The kids being born one day apart, I suppose I'm only fertile for one week each year".
Replied one of them, "I think you're probably only romantic for one week each year."
aardvarchaeology | July 27, 2008
Once in the early 90s two Stockholm girls went to college to major in Chinese. They became friends: one was half-Chinese, the other had spent part of her childhood in China. They would one day become the Architect and the Sculptress. But first they went to China to pursue their studies, and made friends with an expat Chinese Stockholm girl who had come there for the same purpose. She would later become the Journalist.
In China the Architect picked up a local Painter whom she brought along when all three girls returned to Sweden. In the end it didn't work out, but Architect and Painter…
aardvarchaeology | July 26, 2008Anybody got a copy of Chaosium's 1980 game-rules booklet Basic Role-Playing? And the 1982 Worlds of Wonder boxed set, specifically the Magic World booklet? I'd love to have a look at them (photocopies or a brief loan would be fine), since combined and translated they became the first Swedish role-playing game, Drakar och Demoner (1982). It turned me on to gaming when I was twelve. I haven't played DoD in years, but It would be great to get to compare the Swedish rules with the original Chaosium products.
aardvarchaeology | July 25, 2008Here's a cool update on the old Programmer Mel story, a tech-nerdy short story by George Dyson on Google as an emergent AI. It's sort of a fantasy-fulfillment tale for the boomers who seem to make up the bulk of the Edge crowd. This time Mel is named Ed, probably in honour of Ed Nather who wrote the Mel story.
"By the time Ed turned 65, fifteen billion transistors per second were being produced. Now 68, he had been lured out of retirement when the bidding wars for young engineers (and between them for houses) prompted Google to begin looking for old-timers who already had seven-figure mid-…
aardvarchaeology | July 24, 2008
On my evening walk, while listening to a Skepticality interview with secular humanists Mel Lipman and Lori Lipman Brown, I took some pix of fireweed growing in weird places. (That's Epilobium angustifolium, Sw. rallarros, mjölkört, "railroad man's rose", "milk plant"). The plant propagates by wind-borne seeds like thistledown, and they can apparently sprout anywhere. Some were growing out of a crack in a vertical cliff face.
Others appeared to have been planted on Mr. Kight's, my ground-floor neighbour's, balcony.
As it turned out, he had simply left a little planting soil with his…
aardvarchaeology | July 23, 2008Alun tells me that Google Knol is now live. It's like Wikipedia, only written by experts and pwned by Google. Check it out!
Also, I happened upon Everything2, this other weird & interesting hypertext community where anything goes, not modeled on an encyclopedia.
aardvarchaeology | July 23, 2008A Trondheim colleague has kindly invited me to head a session at the Nordic TAG conference next May. T.A.G. means "Theoretical Archaeology Group", and denotes a series of annual conferences rather than a defined group of people. The invitation hinted that I might perhaps want to contribute something provocative. After a moment's thought, I realised that my attitude to TAG (Nordic or otherwise) goes beyond provocative: I am simply hostile to it. Archaeological theory, in my opinion, belongs within the context of real specific archaeological research and is useless in an abstract form, which…
aardvarchaeology | July 22, 2008
Pandemic is a new board game for 1-4 players. The players take on the roles of field operatives for the Centres for Disease Control in Atlanta, GA, as four simultaneous pandemics threaten global life and civilisation. It's a collaborative game: either you find cures in time and everybody wins -- or everybody loses. And it's really exciting!
I recently learned the term "game fluff" from my old buddy and long-time Aard regular Akhorahil. The fluff is the story that hangs on the abstract framework of a games' rules. In order to win a game, you need to understand and exploit the game mechanics…
aardvarchaeology | July 21, 2008
I'm a big fan of sculptress Maria Lundberg, particularly her work in hardwood. Now, I can't afford to buy her stuff. But being a good friend of the family, she's agreed to a somewhat unusual arrangement. I've rented one of her pieces for a year.
Most artists have a large backlog of unsold work sitting around their homes and studios. This way, Lundberg has one less bulky piece to house, it earns her a modest amount of money, and she retains the option of selling it at any time with a simple partial refund for me.
I'm not a hoarder. This is actually an ideal arrangement for me: I get to keep a…
aardvarchaeology | July 20, 2008
A man in northern Sweden recently found a giant vertebra in a lake at 210 meters above sea level. A preliminary statement from the National Museum of Natural History suggests that it may belong to a whale. The find spot hasn't been near the sea since the end of the latest ice age. I'm looking forward to a radiocarbon date.
Via Aftonbladet.
Update 18 September '09: Verdict: recent sperm whale.
aardvarchaeology | July 19, 2008A much-publicised trial in Falun, Sweden is giving me a funny feeling. The man on the stand has confessed to the murder of a woman and a small girl, and is also charged with the violent rape of both and of a second woman. The case makes me feel queasy in more ways than one.
Anybody half sane will of course feel incomprehending revulsion when faced with the fact of men with the drive to beat, rape and murder. But there's something more to it for me. And I think I know what it is. This insane sadistic sex murderer was just following his strongest urges. And so have I done for all my adult life…