Martin Rundkvist
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.
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Posts by this author
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!
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…
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,…
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…
August 27, 2008
The 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…
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,…
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…
August 21, 2008
My current ten favourite things:
Books
Boardgames
Podcasts
Tea
Sunshine
Archaeology
Sleep
Nookie
Music
E-mail
And yours, Dear Reader?
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…
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-…
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…
August 15, 2008
Naantali 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…
August 15, 2008
Noreen 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…
August 13, 2008
The 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…
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,…
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…
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:…
August 7, 2008
In 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…
August 7, 2008
The 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.…
August 6, 2008
I 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…
August 6, 2008
The 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…
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…
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…
August 1, 2008
Having 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…
July 31, 2008
Back 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…
July 30, 2008
Affärs- 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…
July 29, 2008
Big 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…
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…
July 28, 2008
Yesterday 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…
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…