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 | January 6, 2008In my recent blog entry "Skepticism and Informed Consensus", I pointed out that a real member of the skeptical movement is not universally skeptical (as may seem evident when you first think of it), but follows scientific consensus. The entry has spun off a lot of side effects: a long supportive reply by Orac, loads of comments at both our blogs, a blog entry of mine about the discredited idea that gays are nuts, and the first troll banned from commenting on Aard (not because he was one of several people who disagreed with me, but because he was being obstinately rude to myself and one of his…
aardvarchaeology | January 6, 2008Field archaeology has its perks, one of which is the interaction with the public. Most site visitors are simply full of polite interest. A few tend to be local patriots who wish to reaffirm that their neck of the woods was once enormously important. And then there are those who, well, possess more curiosity than knowledge, shall we say.
A colleague at the Stockholm Town Museum told me a story about this latter group. He was digging in the Old Town once, when a person approached his trench and looked intently at his spoil dumps. After a while this person stooped and picked a small stone out of…
aardvarchaeology | January 5, 2008The Swedish Skeptics Society (VoF) has just announced its annual awards. The Popular Enlightener for 2007 is none other than my friend Jonathan Lindström, the guy with the Neolithic kids' book! (I abstained from voting, being heavily biased in his favour.)
States the press release, "He receives the award for his pop-sci books where he relays, in words and images and with endless curiosity and stellar pedagogics, the latest advances in astronomy, cosmology, natural history and archaeology. Jonathan Lindström's books are a pure pop-sci pleasure for all ages to gather around."
The 2007…
aardvarchaeology | January 5, 2008Last night I suffered a less than hour-long bout of scintillating scotoma. It's a weird kind of snow crash in your visual cortex where part of your field of vision is replaced by sparkly geometric patterns. It happens to me once every few years and is sometimes associated with a headache, sort of migraine lite. The scotoma is quite disorientating, particularly when the affected bit is at the centre of whatever you're looking at, like last night. I was probably a pitiful sight, squinting out of one corner of my eye at the laptop as I laboured half blindly to download the latest Escape Pod -- I…
aardvarchaeology | January 4, 2008
Dear Reader, remember the remote-controlled Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity? How long is it since the last time you thought of them? Spirit landed on Mars four Earth years ago today, Opportunity on 25 January -- and both are still going strong! These machines were originally meant to work for three months, yet they continue to trundle around that cold, distant planet, taking pictures and analysing rocks. Check out the project's web site for news!
[More blog entries about astronomy, space, mars, nasa; astronomi, rymden, mars, nasa.]
aardvarchaeology | January 3, 2008A stoner friend (who is also a dedicated father of two and a successful computer consultant) sent me a link to a sad and thought-provoking story.
A Seattle teen girl takes ecstasy with her friends, the drug apparently triggers undiagnosed diabetes, she dies from ketoacidosis. The girl's friends tend to her for hours before she dies, but nobody dares call an ambulance, because in most US legislatures a drug user runs a great risk of a jail sentence if she reports an overdose.
Another casualty in the War on Drugs. Danielle McCarthy was sixteen.
aardvarchaeology | January 3, 2008The thirty-first Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Walking the Berkshires. Archaeology and anthropology, oh my!
Also, don't miss the 77th Skeptics' Circle over at White Coat Underground.
aardvarchaeology | January 2, 2008
Here's something for lovers and collectors of classic science fiction. Häpna! ("Be Amazed!") was the seminal Swedish sf fiction mag, published from 1954 to 1966, with many translations of the US Golden Age greats but also much work by Swedish writers. Now the Alvar Appeltofft Memorial Foundation is offering nearly the entire backlog of the mag very cheaply, and they have a healthy number of copies of each issue, all in pristine condition. Dear Reader -- even if you don't understand one word of Scandy, can you honestly say that your living-room table is complete without a fresh copy of a…
aardvarchaeology | January 1, 2008
I just learned that my blog entry Your Folks, My Folks in Prehistory has been selected for inclusion in the 2007 Open Lab science blogging anthology! Yay! I was likewise honoured a year ago when I had an entry about the field-archaeological paradox in the volume for 2006.
The 2007 volume is edited by Reed Cartwright of the De Rerum Natura blog and Bora Zivkovic of A Blog Around the Clock and will be available in bookstores and from Amazon.
aardvarchaeology | January 1, 2008Here are the ten most popular non-carnival entries on Aardvarchaeology for 2007.
Djurhamn Sword Excavated
Stockholm Art Shows
Scandinavian Attitudes to Nudity
Wish I Could Do That in Linux
Lamprey's Spinal Cord Modelled
Djurhamn Sword
Star Wars Lego Girls
Toys to Teach Little Girls Their Place
Indecipherable Punk Reactions
Subway Beggar Retaliation
These ten have been popular for very different reasons. I'm happy to see such interest in one of my archaeological finds, viz. an early-16th century sword (#1, #6). But I'm not too thrilled to find that most of the top-10 entries are only on the…
aardvarchaeology | December 31, 2007Over at Respectful Insolence, a lot of people have been discussing the relationship between skepticism and scientific consensus, a topic I brought up recently. And commenter Alvaro has pointed out a kind of counterexample, to whit, that the consensus among US psychiatrists had defined homosexuality as a psychiatric condition up through 1974. This is classic Michel Foucault territory, and I think Alvaro's point is interesting and apt. Being gay isn't always easy in an at best semi-tolerant society, but it sure isn't something that calls for treatment.
Reading up a little, I found something…
aardvarchaeology | December 29, 2007It's been a year now since I started blogging at Sb (after a bit more than a year at Blogspot). Looking at the server stats for December 1-28, Aard is ranked #31 out of 66 blogs here for traffic, with a daily median readership of about 650 uniques, including about 130 identifiable returning readers. (Meanwhile, my old site is still attracting a median of about 70 daily uniques.)
Looking at Technorati rankings, Aard is at about 16,000 worldwide with an "authority score" of 317 (28 December). There has been considerable re-shuffling among the top-10 Sblogs from a year ago. Of those ten, only…
aardvarchaeology | December 28, 2007
I've known for some time from the local papers that the site of the old Tollare paper mill is badly polluted. It's only 1.6 km from my home, on the opposite shore of the Lännerstasundet inlet (one of the main historic shipping routes into Lake Mälaren). A couple of years ago, a large area in the water outside the site was fenced off with floating länsar to keep the bottom sediments from moving. Apparently, this was one of those paper mills that used mercury in a big way. They've recently started covering the polluted sediment with geotextile, cement and crushed rock. (Hope no interesting…
aardvarchaeology | December 27, 2007Guest entry! Charles Redwine treats us to some really good finds porn with commentary: 17th and 18th century native American pottery from Kasita/Cusseta near Columbus, Georgia in the US. Unfortunately, Charles found out that there was some problem with the publication rights to the pix, so he asked me to remove them from the entry on 31 December.
Chattahoochee Roughened Ware: large jar
The town of Kasita was, at least as referenced in some sources, the "White" or "Peace" capital of the Lower Creek people from the early 17th century to their expulsion from Georgia in 1827-28. The Lower Creek…
aardvarchaeology | December 26, 2007Google Reader is an excellent blog reader, among whose strengths is that it resides somewhere off your computer. This means that you can read blogs from several machines without having to mark a lot of old entries as read. Nor do you have to subscribe to the same feed more than once. Looking at Aard on Google Reader, I've found that the blog has quite a number of subscribers there, but that they are spread across a number of different feed addresses.
Dear Reader, I have a request for you. Could you please make sure that you subscribe to Aard on Google Reader with the following official feed…
aardvarchaeology | December 25, 2007Town life in Sweden started small in the later 8th century with Birka. The country's capital, Stockholm, is a late town by Swedish standards, having been founded only in the mid-13th century. One of the oldest extant buildings there is the great church beside the royal castle, Storkyrkan. Here, Satan Santa was worshipped for nearly three centuries.
Most of Europe was Catholic until Reformation in the early 16th century. All Catholic churches are devoted to a patron saint, which is the reason that the urban parishes surrounding the Old Town of Stockholm are named St. Claire, St. James, St.…
aardvarchaeology | December 24, 2007A discussion in the comments section of the recent Skeptics' Circle reminded me of something I learned only after years in the skeptical movement.
A real skeptic always sides with scientific consensus.
This may sound really unsatisfying and self-contradictory at first. Isn't skepticism about critical thinking? About being open to any idea (or none) as long as it survives rational deliberation? Doesn't this consensus thing mean that the whole movement is actually just kowtowing to white-coated authority? Well, yes and no.
To begin with, let's remember that there are many people who are…
aardvarchaeology | December 23, 2007
Here's something for the gearheads.
At home, we've got a permanent Comhem broadband fiber connection offering 10 Mb/s down & up. Its actual performance is about 9 down and 10 up, which is OK. I like to have a swift uplink since I send a lot of large files and keep my data on a DAV server for easy access from the four computers I work with. This, to the majority who have never heard of a DAV server, means that with a slow uplink, it would take a lot of time for me to save my work when I press CTRL-S.
(A funny thing about permanent internet cabling in Swedish apartment houses is that its…
aardvarchaeology | December 22, 2007Scandy readers will be very familiar with this. As we learned from "Hatten Är Din", "Ansiktsburk", "Fiskpinnar" and other Turk Hits back in 2000, you can get wonderfully absurd results if you listen to a song in a foreign language and pretend it's actually sung in your mother tongue.
Now, a talented Ansiktsburk poet has subtitled, in English, a typically over-the-top music video from southern India. Unbelievable stuff!
"Have you been high today?
I see the nuns are gay
My brother yelled to me
'I love you inside Ed!'"
aardvarchaeology | December 22, 2007Two pieces of news to illustrate the state of the academic labour market in Swedish archaeology.
The good news is that an old coursemate of mine has secured a teaching job. He's 46, he completed his PhD in 1999, he's got a decent publication record, he has solid teaching experience and he has unusually ample formal training in university pedagogics.
The bad news is that the job he has been given is 30% of full time ... limited to a period of four months ... in a city located 580 km from where he lives with his wife.
Dear Reader, are you by any chance a professional academic? Would somebody…