NOIBN

I'm enjoying one of my infrequent laptop days, that is, days during which it actually makes sense for me to tote such a device around. I type these words from the Konradsberg campus of the University of Stockholm. Konradsberg is a name that resonates in my city's history, because it used to be one of the main mental hospitals, known colloquially as the "Castle of Madmen". I haven't been committed (yet). I'm here for the second day of the Wikipedia Academy 2009 conference, representing my employer, the Royal Academy of Letters. In order to get on-line I had to solve a decidedly analog problem…
If I had to take a paper newspaper, then I would like Dagens Nyheter's news section, Svenska Dagbladet's arts & entertainment section, no sports section and no business section. SvD is a conservative rag and some of its political columnists are really distasteful, but DN never gets anywhere near SvD's coverage of the historical humanities. DN's arts section is mainly preoccupied with pretentious modern crap, installation artists and poets who will be forgotten three months from now. So I was very pleased when the editor of SvD's arts essay page (through the good offices of Ãsa Larsson of…
Autumn is starting to get nasty in Sweden, and immediately the Fake Advertising Mom pops up on billboards and in magazines. Sometimes she's even part of a Fake Advertising Family. Here's what I mean. I don't claim 100% accuracy, but I believe I can usually tell on sight whether a woman has given birth and nursed a baby or not. It's part of the difference between girls and women. There is also the simple issue of at what age women usually have kids in the West. So when the travel agencies want to illustrate parenthood and show us a cute 7-y-o kid being held by a really pretty, pert, skinny…
Yesterday's paper sessions offered eleven presentations. I almost fell asleep several times. This was not mainly because four of the papers were in German and French which I have a hard time understanding when spoken quickly. The main reason was that few of my colleagues know how to perform an engaging presentation. Yes, you need to perform it. So here are a few suggestions. Never ever read a prepared text out loud. Speak from brief notes or a slide show. It is better to have five lines of summary text in ball-point pen on the back of your hand than a manuscript. Do you have reason to…
Yesterday I joined my friend Dendro-Ãke, his cousin and their charming wives to check out an example of an old exotic building technique near my home. On Skutudden Point near Baggensstäket (an area I keep writing about, it's just full of history) are a number of little 19th century buildings along the shore, and at least one of them is a cordwood house, Sw. kubbhus. This building method enjoyed some popularity in Sweden (and a much greater one in Norway) in the 19th century and until the end of WW1. It's a bit like brick masonry, only you use cordwood instead of bricks and clay daub instead…
On my way to the Library of the Academy of Letters today I spied something unusual. Somebody on the second floor of Storgatan 30 is having pigeon trouble. They've studded the window ledge with nails and stuck a plastic owl to the front of the house. Those owls are pretty popular. My mom once found one washed up on the seashore near her summer house.
Yesterday I had a clear illustration of how the brain determines the direction of a noise. I was listening to a podcast in ear buds when my wife asked me something. I took one bud out and talked to her for a while as the podcast continued to chatter in my left ear. Then the cordless phone rang. And I kept spinning around, trying to hear what direction the phone was in, but I couldn't! You need two ears to pinpoint direction just as you need two eyes for stereoscopic vision.
One of my pastimes is writing on Wikipedia. It's almost unavoidable since I use the encyclopedia daily and keep running into stuff to correct -- facts, spelling, stylistic mishaps. In the past, though, I've been really discouraged when trying to improve the articles about Falun Gong (a.k.a. Chinese Scientology). They used to be a battleground between Chinese Communist Party loyalists and Falun Gong devotees, both sides trying to cram as much propaganda into the articles as possible. Then the FGers managed to get the CCP guys banned from editing, which was excellent in itself. Unfortunately it…
A woman in New Hampshire allegedly bludgeons her eight-months pregnant friend to death. Then she performs an amateur C-section on her victim, delivers the baby and assumes maternal responsibilities for it. After a week she and the baby girl, who is in fairly good health, are apprehended by the police at a homeless shelter. There is no report as to whether baby-stealing was the motive of the murder or just a humanitarian afterthought.
Geocaching is a fun nerdy outdoors hobby where you hide tupperware under boulders in the woods and publish their GPS coordinates on the web for other geeks to go look for the tupperware. Sometimes when you look for geocaches in public spaces such as parks, you get funny looks from passing non-geocachers ("muggles", in potteresque geocacher parlance). Lone guys hanging around in parks and acting as if they're looking for something are probably interpreted either as drug customers or gay cruisers. Thus, back in 2005 I came up with the ultimate gay nerd pastime: geocruising, where you publish…
On 30 April I asked, "Dear Reader, how old was your parent with the same sex as you when they had their first kid? How old were you when you had your first kid? Is the length of your education significantly different from that of the parent in question?" As of 7 May, I had 20 responses that covered all three parameters I asked for. Proportion of respondents who have a significantly longer education than their parent: 55% Median difference of age at first child for the entire population: 5 years Median difference of age at first child for respondents whose education is significantly longer/…
I intentionally stay away from Twitter. Too many internet-related things already fracture my concentration and keep me from reading books. I go only so far as to update my Facebook status a few times a week. But for those of you who have made Twitter part of your lives, or would like to try it, check out the new Sb Twitter feed.
My dad had me (his firstborn) when he was 28. I had my first kid when I was 26. I'm a second-generation university graduate, first generation PhD. Dear Reader, how old was your parent with the same sex as you when they had their first kid? How old were you when you had your first kid? Is the length of your education significantly different from that of the parent in question?
Yesterday I inadvertently offended the Sb Overlords in an interesting way. Since I came on board 2½ years ago we've had a series of handlers or "community managers" who have all been competent, charming women. Punning a little, I have fondly called them my Ovarylords. To my knowledge this has not raised any hackles before. But yesterday I used the pun while criticising one of our overlords for a traffic-boosting effort that was in my opinion misguided and a little naive. Wrote I, "my Ovarylord suddenly turns into a cheerleader". This didn't go over well at all. But to my surprise it…
I have previously noted that 10% of the applicants get money for humanities research from the Swedish Research Council, 6% of applicants get general research positions at the University of Linköping, and 4% get jobs at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies. Today I've learned that less than 6% of applicants get grants from the Swedish National Bank's Centenary Fund, though 13% are invited to submit an expanded proposal.
I've been working as a consulting editor for the Royal Academy of Letters for almost a decade, most of that time from home. But since 2006 I've had an office at Academy headquarters in a quiet part of Stockholm. This is very good for alleviating the isolation of a non-affiliated scholar. But the actual room I've been in had its upsides and downsides. It's part of a museum on the premises, which meant that while I did have the world's gayest tiled stove, I unfortunately also had to use a little 19th century writing desk designed for a petite lady. Furthermore, I always had to get out before…
Who is responsible for a package? The sender or the volunteer messenger who carries it? Do they perhaps have a joint responsibility? This issue has led to quite a number of arguments between me and my wife over the years, and we still haven't resolved it. Here's the deal. Let's say that Jenny's in bed with a cold and asks her partner Anne to take out a book for her from the library. This Anne does, but on the way home she loses the book. Maybe she absentmindedly puts it on a shelf in the grocery store and it gets stolen, or she forgets to close her backpack and the book falls into an open…
On a whim, I've grown one of my infrequent beards, and it's starting to itch. The beard hairs are hard and bristly, and the mustache feels like having the skeleton of a herring glued to my upper lip. Kissing and snuggling my loved ones isn't at all as nice a usual, since the 'stache makes contact with them long before I do. Judging from the compliments I've received, though, a beard seems to be the way to go if you're into ladies born in the 1940s. Another possible explanation for the data I have is that women of all ages love my beard, but that only ones of a certain age are daring enough…
Eight years ago I sold half an apartment to my former wife and found myself, for the first time, with a sum of money to invest. I did what conventional wisdom recommended at the time: stuck all the money into a mutual fund. I chose an "ethical" one, that doesn't invest in the arms trade etc., but I don't think that's the reason that the whole move proved to be a financial mistake. (The fund in question has a good Morningstar rating.) My share in that fund has never to my knowledge even been worth what I originally paid for it, and the simple reason is that apparently I bought near the top of…
From my buddy Jonas Nordin, retiring head editor of Sweden's main historical journal, a well-argued paper about the problems of applying bibliometric assessments and Open Access practices in the humanities.Historisk tidskrift, present and future Reflections on readers' reactions, bibliometrics and Open Access In this article the author recounts his experiences as editor of Historisk tidskrift. The starting point is a poll of the journal's readers presented at the triannual meeting of the Swedish Historical Association in Lund in April 2008. Readers told that they read Historisk tidskrift…