NOIBN
aardvarchaeology | June 6, 2011
2011
Having completed our first twelve years together today, my wonderful wife and I have agreed to go on for at least another dozen.
1999
aardvarchaeology | March 18, 2011I'm waiting to hear about jobs I've applied for in Norway and the UK. I'm waiting for responses to a few funding applications. I'm waiting for the snow to melt and the start of fieldwork season.
Dear Reader, what are you waiting for?
aardvarchaeology | January 22, 2011
I don't know about you, Dear Reader, but I think these lilac-coloured concrete hogbacks outside of the Nacka Forum mall's rear entrance look extremely gay. As Azar Habib put it in his hit "Hatten Ãr Din", Det tycker vi blir bögigt.
aardvarchaeology | January 4, 2011[More about architecture; arkitektur.]
View from the west, 9 January.
Back in November I blogged about how I helped put a roof on my dad's octagonal sauna. A reader asked to see the plans of the building. And here, with my dad's permission, are plans and elevations by architect Ulf Gillberg. Isn't this pretty damn neat?
aardvarchaeology | December 3, 2010
My old buddy, Aard regular Hi33y, spotted something worth taking a picture of Tuesday night in Birmingham. Not only have I apparently been canonised, I am also the owner of a Brummie rag market!
Yesterday at Landvetter airport near Gothenburg, I found a local wood-stove company demonstrating this fine gynaecological model. It'll keep you warm all night long.
Some weeks ago after the Kritisk Masse skeptics conference, I was interviewed by the Trondheim student radio. Listening to myself, I find myself sounding like the love child of my friends Tor and Jesper. I didn't even know those two…
aardvarchaeology | November 27, 2010
I'm angry and confused. Death has never hit this close to home with me before. Anders was one of my best friends, a frequent guest at my table. I knew him for over 20 years. And now he's dead at 45, apparently of a heart attack. I'm stunned and full of disbelief.
By profession an engineer and a programmer, Anders was also a prodigious traveller, a perennial student, an avid reader and a music lover. "Heart attack at 45" conjures the image of some hard-partying coke fiend. But Anders lead a quiet, even prim, bachelor's life and liked to play badminton.
I knew this guy from my mid teens on! We…
aardvarchaeology | November 17, 2010
My dad is building a guest house and an octagonal two-story sauna on the steep scarp from his house down to the sea. Things suddenly got very hurried, and I was called in as a building hand to help get the roof onto the sauna before winter. So in addition to a lot of travel, lately I have learned a few things about how to put an octagonal roof onto a two-story building. Crazy scaffolding...
I'm filled with respect for the builders of the past, like the ones behind the Medieval churches that dot the Swedish countryside. We have power tools, spirit levels, boards in exact dimensions... They…
aardvarchaeology | October 12, 2010In his fine new book Vanished Ocean, geologist Dorrik Stow uses the biography of one of our planet's vanished oceans to teach the reader a wide range of veeery long-term perspectives on geological history. The ocean that geologists call the Tethys came into being when the Pangaea supercontinent coalesced in the Late Permian, 260 million years ago. Its last vestige finally disappeared when one of the Mediterranean sea's forerunners dried up 6.5 million years ago.
Along the way, Stow explains plate tectonics, the birth and death of seas, deep-sea sedimentation (his research speciality) and a…
aardvarchaeology | June 18, 2010A thought about normal sexual behaviour. "Normal", in the statistical sense, has nothing to do with "healthy" or "morally sound". It simply means "the most common range of values in a variable". Now, across all of child-bearing age humanity, what is the normal attitude to getting sexually penetrated? Is it yes please or no thanks?
In the patriarchal tradition, getting penetrated hardly even counts as sexual activity. It's just acceptance: not thrashing about, kicking at balls or running away when somebody with an erect penis shows up. Being sexually active, in this view, means putting your…
aardvarchaeology | June 7, 2010Universities in many European and Asian countries offer an upgrade to your PhD that turns the owner into a "habilitated doctor", that is, someone who is allowed to teach PhD students. In Sweden, the recipient of the upgrade is called a docent, which is funny because "docent" means "museum guide" in US English. It's not a job: more like an academic scout badge. No salary.
To get the upgrade here in Sweden, you need to a) publish about a thesis-worth of new research after your PhD dissertation, and b) prove that you can teach. The latter proof can either take the form of a teaching portfolio…
aardvarchaeology | June 2, 2010
In February of 2007 I wrote about a giant sinkhole that had opened in Guatemala City. "The pit was emitting foul odors, loud noises and tremors, and a rush of water could be heard from its depths." These sinkholes are the same kind of geological feature as similar to the cenotes into which the Maya sacrificed people, gold, jade and copal resin.
And now it's happened again. Last weekend a tropical storm hit Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, killing at least 115 people and causing over 100 000 to be evacuated. And in Guatemala City,
another sinkhole opened, swallowing two buildings and…
aardvarchaeology | May 12, 2010Get this. Perennial provocateur artist Lars Vilks lectures about free speech at the University of Uppsala just an hour's ride from my home -- and is attacked by audience members chanting about Islam!
It's time for a re-run of my own likeness of Mohammed from February '06.
This is a picture I just drew of a guy named Mohammed. Millions of Mohammeds have lived and still live on Earth. In order not to get harassed by religious bigots, I'm not telling you which one of them I have made a likeness of. (Historically, a lot of artists greater even than me have had no such qualms.)
But I'd like to…
aardvarchaeology | May 9, 2010I've been staying away from Twitter for fear that it would eat my life. But I guess I have at least to try it. So, Dear Reader, feel free to follow my tweets! And tell me who I should follow. Ideally, I want people who tweet something really witty like every second day and who shut up when they have nothing worthwhile to say.
aardvarchaeology | April 13, 2010Dear Reader, you need to listen to the Drabblecast. I just listened to the latest episode and was completely blown away by the vast amount of work, wit and musical talent that goes into each episode. Norm Sherman is like this uncapped oil well that's constantly shooting a big fat unstoppable wad of creativity into the new media.
aardvarchaeology | April 7, 2010After about twelve years of regular use my Braun 5515 sounded like a chainsaw, so I decided to buy a new electric shaver. Mind you, I had repeatedly replaced all the bits I could: the mesh, often; the knife, several times; once even the accumulator pack. But I figured that having someone replace the worn-out bearings (Sw. lager) of the motor would be more expensive than getting a new shaver. I poked around on the net, looked at reviews and ordered a mid-price Philips HQ7360/17.
The two shavers look pretty different. The Braun is designed to move only to and fro along one axis, preferably…
aardvarchaeology | March 20, 2010Some time around 20 March each year, my part-time employers in The Royal Swedish Academy of Letters celebrate the 1753 foundation of the Academy. This gives me a rare reason to dress in tails. And I now look forward to performing for the first time that ultimate ritual of 20th century masculinity, leaving shirts to the dry-cleaners.
The image to the right allows anyone who is uncertain as to whether they are a girl to test this. Wise men teach us that every girl go crazy for a sharp-dressed man. Dear Reader, if you study the image and do not go crazy, then by simple logic you are not a girl.
aardvarchaeology | March 15, 2010Here's a question for all of you journal editors and editorial board members out there. Does every single manuscript that your journal receives get the same peer-review treatment? Is there no pre-screening before stuff gets sent to reviewers, where patently kooky or ignorant contributions are killed on arrival?
Is peer review 100%? Should it be? Would that be a wise way to use a journal's resources? Discuss.
aardvarchaeology | December 13, 2009A scary but pretty funny accident happened in central Stockholm the other day. A work crew was drilling for a geothermal heat pump when suddenly the drill went into an open subterranean cavity. There wasn't supposed to be one there according to the plans they had been given for the job. When they tried to get the drill out, it stuck.
And then a subway train full of people hit the dangling drill bit head on.
Nobody got hurt.
aardvarchaeology | December 12, 2009You know these contrived situations you're supposed to imagine yourself in prior to discussing some problem of ethics? I came across one in a recent Radiolab episode that reminded me of why I don't like thinking inside those boxes.
It's wartime. You're hiding in a cellar with your infant child and a bunch of other people. Soldiers are poking around and killing everybody they find hidden. Everyone in the cellar except the baby understands that you need to be quiet. You know that the baby is going to be noisy and you know that if the soldiers find you they'll kill everybody. The only way to…
aardvarchaeology | December 10, 2009
Around this time of year, Swedes like to throw little brief daytime parties with mulled wine and ginger bread cookies. Usually they're on weekends, of course. In my mother's family there's been a tradition for decades of organising mulled-wine parties for the descendants of my maternal grandfather's parents.
This year my mom sent out invitations for the family mulled-wine party to take place at two o'clock on a Wednesday. This made little sense to me at first, since it would mean that hardly anyone with a job or kids would come. But then I thought about it and realised that, yes, this is of…