History
aardvarchaeology | June 23, 2009I'm finishing writing a book and you guys will have the opportunity to review the manuscript some time towards late summer. The working title is Mead-halls of the Eastern Geats. Elite Settlements and Political Geography AD 375-1000 in Ãstergötland, Sweden.
The title alludes to the Old English epic poem about Beowulf. Set mainly in 6th century Denmark, it is all about the petty kings of the time whose political life was centred upon the feasting hall. That's where raids were planned, guests entertained, loot from raids shared out, religious rituals performed, epic poetry about raids listened…
aardvarchaeology | June 22, 2009
Dendrochronology is the study of tree-rings to determine when and where a tree has grown. Everybody knows that trees produce one ring every year. But the rings also vary in width according to each year's local weather conditions. If you've got enough rings in a wood sample, then their widths form a unique "bar code". Collect enough samples of various ages from buildings and bog wood, and you can join the bar codes up to a reference curve covering thousands of years.
Dendrochronology has a serious organisational problem that impedes its development as a scientific discipline and tends to…
ejohnson | June 18, 2009This review was originally posted by Steinn Sigurðsson on Dynamics of Cats.
As I was strolling through town a few weeks ago, I saw a flyer advertising a talk on campus by Prof. Barbara Oakley, talking about her book "Evil Genes: Why Rome Fell, Hitler Rose, Enron Failed and My Sister Stole My Mother's Boyfriend."
I couldn't go to the talk, due to a conflicting engagement, but the book was in my review pile, so I popped it up to the top and plowed through it.
The book is quite a fun read.
It starts off as a personal story, with the death of the author's sister, and her reflection on the life…
aardvarchaeology | June 18, 2009
Here's a cool thing from my buddy Claes Pettersson at Jönköping County Museum. He's been directing big excavations of the town's 17th century industrial precinct, and his team has found something that appears to be a forged gold coin. It consists of a soft grey metal (tin?) with a thin coating of a yellow metal. So far nobody's been able to tell quite what type of coin it was supposed to look like, only that one side features a crowned head. Any ideas?
terrasig | June 17, 2009Seen yesterday in the local AP feed: Looks like a great partnership to access historic images on the iPhone or iTouch to satisfy pretty much any scholar or history enthusiast:
Duke and Apple to join forces
DURHAM -- Scholars and students who once had to travel to museums or libraries to view collections of historic images can now do so by clicking on their mobile device instead.
With the launch of DukeMobile 1.1, Duke University Libraries now offer the most comprehensive university digital image collection specifically formatted for Apple's iPhone or iTouch devices. It includes thousands of…
aardvarchaeology | June 17, 2009I'm proud to announce that Fornvännen, Journal of Swedish Antiquarian Research, is now up to speed on the Open Access side. Our excellent librarian and information jockey Gun Larsson has just put the third and fourth issues for last year on-line. Fornvännen appears on-line for free with a six-month delay (due to concerns that the on-line version might otherwise undermine the print version). In the two most recent issues on-line, you can read new research on:
An Early Mesolithic settlement site in wooded Värmland.
A carved stone in a Bohuslän crofter's cellar that may be a Neolithic stele…
revere | June 15, 2009One of the premier and earliest flu bloggers and co-founder of Flu Wiki, DemFromCT is also a doctor. Not a young doctor, either, although somewhat younger than I am (most people seem to be, these days). In our young professional days, the American Medical Association was a real political power. When it spoke, politicians listened. Hell, everyone listened. Now? Well, who cares? Dem has a really excellent post up at DailyKos looking at the AMA's opposition to the "public option" in the Obama health care plan. I'm not so crazy about a public option either. If there's an option, it should be a "…
pharyngula | June 13, 2009Maybe. I see a bit more ahistorical melodrama in the trailer for Creation than I like…but it is a movie, after, even if it is about Charles Darwin.
I like that it puts the idea that Darwin killed god front and center, but we'll have to see if it waffles to make an accommodating ending.
The trailer is also on YouTube if you're having trouble viewing this.
oracknows | June 10, 2009One of the common topics I discuss on this blog is Holocaust denial. Indeed, I've been opposing Holocaust denial on various online forums for ten years now. I've castigated David Irving, mocked Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for his worldwide Holocaust denial conference, and made frequent comments about how Holocaust denial is inextricably linked with anti-Semitism and racism, often directly due to the white nationalist movement (or, as I like to refer to white supremacists, mighty white power rangers).
That's why I was very saddened to learn about what happened at the Holocaust Museum earlier today:…
aardvarchaeology | June 8, 2009
Kai and Anneli recently gave us a very welcome present: a cast of a lion mask from the Peerless Palace in Stockholm. North European Baroque is such a weird and lovely style. The wreck of the Vasa is a prime example, and there's a lot of it on the facades of houses in the Old Town too.
The Peerless Palace (Sw. Makalös) was on the spot currently occupied by the Carolus XII Plaza, within easy view of the Royal Castle across the water. It was built in the 1630s by Count Jacob De la Gardie who, among many other honours, was married to King Gustavus II Adolphus's old sweetheart Ebba Brahe. After…
terrasig | June 5, 2009
Just a quick note to dial up Ira Flatow's Science Friday show on NPR today at 3 pm EDT. Supporting information and the archived show can be found here.
Guy-who-I-would-kill-to-be, Tom Levenson, will be on with Ira to speak about his new book, Newton and the Counterfeiter: The Unknown Detective Career of the World's Greatest Scientist.
Here is also a link to other appearances Professor Levenson will be having related to the book.
For those of you who don't know Thomas Levenson, he is currently a Professor, Interim Program Head, and Director of the Graduate Program in Science Writing at the…
oracknows | June 5, 2009SETTING: A NONDESCRIPT CLINIC IN AUSTIN, TEXAS
TIME: AFTER DARK
It had been a long, hard day at the clinic. The man trudged to the back of the building and plopped himself down on a large, cushy leather office chair, causing it to spin around. He was fiftyish, but still boyish in appearance, possessed of a seemingly unflappable self-confidence. Even so, he was not happy.
Damn, I hate being here. He thought. I'd much rather be back in London than stuck in this hick state. At least Austin is about as good as it gets here. I suppose it could be worse; I could be in Arkansas.
He sighed. "Damn…
oracknows | June 1, 2009These days, I don't often participate in mass bloggings about various topics, at least not as much as I used to. I can't say if it's laziness or being jaded after having blogged on nearly a daily basis for over four years now, or an ornery tendency to want to go my own way these days. Whatever the cause, I'm making an exception today because I've been asked by Sheril Kirshenbaum, who writes:
Today begins a very important initiative called Silence Is The Enemy to help a generation of young women half a world away.Why? Because they are our sisters and children-the victims of sexual abuse who…
aardvarchaeology | June 1, 2009Living in a country that hasn't seen war for two centuries, and never having done military service, I'm completely baffled by war rapes and the post-war rapes that have become part of the cultures of certain African countries. Particularly the high incidence of child rape going on e.g. in Liberia and Congo.
The appeal of gambling I sort of understand.
The appeal of drugs and drink I sort of understand.
The appeal of corruption and personal enrichment I sort of understand.
And I sort of understand the strategic military value of demoralising the civilian population by ordering e.g. Japanese…
razib | June 1, 2009G.M. to Seek Bankruptcy and a New Start:
It also places the government in uncharted territory as a business owner, as it takes a 60 percent ownership stake in the company during its restructuring.
The commanding heights are back. We're socializing the means of production. Meanwhile, California is going back to the 19th century:
Nearly all of the billions of dollars in cuts the administration has proposed would affect programs for poor Californians, although prisons and schools would take hits, as well.
There wasn't even a mention of bankruptcy, but many American states did go into default in…
evolvingthoughts | May 19, 2009In addition to the "missing link" trope that is being dished out about the new primate fossil, is another one, more subtle and insidious: it's the ancestor of all primates. How do they know that? Consider a biologically realistic scenario: at the time there were probably hundreds of species of small bodied mammals with tails and feet like that. One of these species may be the ancestor of all primates, but what are the odds that a specimen from that species is the one that was preserved? Just as all primates now look remarkably similar overall, but one may be the common ancestor of a group in…
evolvingthoughts | May 18, 2009The wonderful Project Gutenberg has just released a fully HTMLised version of R. C. Punnett's (he of the famous "square") 1911 book Mendelism, which shows how quickly the implications of Mendelian genetics, rediscovered 11 years earlier, were worked through. It's a wonderful read, and anyone with a slight knowledge of biology and the interest to work through the examples can understand it, something one cannot say of texts on science for very much longer after this. I was particularly interested in the following passage, from page 150:
One last question with regard to evolution. How far does…
evolvingthoughts | May 17, 2009The custom of making abstract dogmatic assertions is not, certainly, derived from the teaching of Jesus, but has been a widespread weakness among religious teachers in subsequent centuries. I do not think that the word for the Christian virtue of faith should be prostituted to mean the credulous acceptance of all such piously intended assertions. Much self-deception in the young believer is needed to convince himself that he knows that of which in reality he knows himself to be ignorant. That surely is hypocrisy, against which we have been most conspicuously warned. [Ronald Aylmer Fisher, BBC…
pharyngula | May 14, 2009
She's beautiful and German. She's also naked, with very large breasts, and she isn't wearing any underwear — in fact, she's posing almost obscenely, and has rather prominent labia in view. She's also 35,000 years old and has no head.
A few other interesting details: she doesn't seem to be entirely naked— there are markings like bands and hatchmarks that are suggestive of some kind of clothing. More attention was paid to carving the hands, which have 5 and 4 fingers marked out, than to the head, which is nonexistent. In its place, there is a well-polished, carved loop, suggesting that she…
clock | May 13, 2009You may have heard about a recent Wikipedia hoax:
A WIKIPEDIA hoax by a 22-year-old Dublin student resulted in a fake quote being published in newspaper obituaries around the world.
The quote was attributed to French composer Maurice Jarre who died at the end of March.
It was posted on the online encyclopedia shortly after his death and later appeared in obituaries published in the Guardian, the London Independent, on the BBC Music Magazine website and in Indian and Australian newspapers
Yup. Journalists check their sources carefully. Especially the despised untrustworthy Wikipedia, only a…