NOIBN
aardvarchaeology | December 30, 2008A house I have been asked to check in on over the holiday season was burgled last night along with two neighbouring houses. I've been on the phone to the police and the window repairman, and then I've been showing them around. My acquaintances had a burglary alarm system with motion detectors -- on the first and second floors. The burglars somehow scaled the wall to the third floor, broke open the window to a bedroom and went in. There they rifled through all cupboards, wardrobes and drawers, left a laptop computer and a TV untouched, opened a second window and nimbly jumped out. Looks like…
aardvarchaeology | December 6, 2008My friend of twenty years, retired broadcaster Lars Erik Ãström, died the other day of cancer at age 69. Too soon by far: he has young grandchildren and he was a very good man without whom the world is worse. MaðR harða goðr. I will think of him every time I read of caves and flottholmar, floating islands.
Lars Erik's family posted a lovely secular obit notice headed by a big omega, symbol of caves and the final letter of the Greek alphabet. I translate:
With warmth we remember your wisdom, your high-precision sense of humour and your sonorous radio voice. We had such a good time and got…
aardvarchaeology | December 4, 2008
Kai reports from an on-going exhibition at the Stockholm Museum of Natural History on homosexuality among non-humans. It is based on Bruce Bagemihl's research.
I am impressed by the gay dolphins' invention of nasal intercourse. To pull that off, one human would have to be hugely endowed in the nose department and the other very petite indeed elsewhere. I wonder what happens if you sneeze?
In the title of his entry, Kai reminds us of the Flintstones, who of course had a gay old time. Now, the bit that I've been wondering about is "they go down in history". On whom?
In other news, I came up…
aardvarchaeology | December 1, 2008"In the morning I left voice mail messages to call me on my mother's and sister's numbers. As I came in to work I saw S still logged in to his Skype account, where he'd left it going for his final exercise round. More subdued phone calls during the day, there would be a viewing at the hospital the next day. I was unfamiliar with the term, but googling confirmed that it was an opportunity to see the body. When had this procedure been (re-)introduced?"
Read more over at Pointless Anecdotes.
aardvarchaeology | November 25, 2008
You know the Iggy & Stooges track "Penetration"? The one where Iggy sounds like he might be the penetratee rather than the penetrator? Now, I want you to imagine me singing that song, only with the word "affiliation" rather than "penetration".
For the second time, my friend and frequent collaborator Howard Williams provides me with valuable university affiliation. Through his good offices, I have been appointed Visiting Research Fellow of the University of Chester, students from which made up most of my fieldwork team back in September. This is really good for my troop morale. They may…
aardvarchaeology | November 12, 2008
I'm at the first Swedish Wikipedia Academy conference in Lund. Yesterday I did a talk on inclusionism vs. deletionism (vs. mergism) on the online encyclopedia (text available on-line in Swedish). Above is my audience who asked a lot of questions and were nice & friendly. Most participants are not themselves Wikipedians, they're largely librarians and teachers. I've chatted with a lot of people, notably Mathias Klang and Lennart Guldbrandsson and Lars Aronsson, and I look forward to future collaborations.
[More blog entries about wikipedia, Sweden; wikipedia, Lund.]
aardvarchaeology | November 2, 2008
Great images of my childhood are appearing on-line from an unexpected source. My dear Connecticut nanny Lynn Leavey is scanning choice pix from her time with us in Sweden in 1978-79.
Here's my India-goin', safety-match-pushin', ABBA-accountin' grampa Ingemar with a big fish and three small boys on the shore of Lake Lillsjön in Kungsängen west of Stockholm. If I recall correctly, the monster pike weighed 8.3 kg, and I still haven't seen a larger one get caught. Ingemar took it with his favourite method, dragrodd, where you trail a wobbler lure after your boat and row along the edge of the…
aardvarchaeology | October 21, 2008
Every once in a blue cheese, a son of Ming the Merciless invites me to speak at an advertising school in Stockholm, Berghs School of Communication. (Yes, they have adopted an English name to sound cooler. No, they didn't put the genitive apostrophe in. I find that really painful.) I talk about cyberculture, on-line communities and what advertising people need to know about the web.
As this entry comes on-line, I am standing in front of 30 fresh-faced Macbook-toting hipsters who will soon learn, to their horror, that Firefox allows you to kill all ad banners and flash clips.
During my talk, I…
aardvarchaeology | October 1, 2008
On an ammunition delivery run to Kai's place in Rågsved last Saturday, I found a grimy strip of photo negatives beside a lamp post at Stövargatan's southernmost point. Rain had obliterated two of the pictures, but two remained. So, as an installation in my irregular series of modern objets trouvés (lighter, PC, polaroid pic, gynaecologist's chair, soon an adjustable wrench) I present pictures of a nameless kid hiking in the mountains.
(To get the pics into my computer without specialist equipment, I taped them onto a sheet of white paper, taped the sheet to a window facing the sun, shot…
aardvarchaeology | September 26, 2008There is a discussion going on at Wikipedia regarding certain facets of the on-line encyclopedia's controversial notability policy. At heart, it's about where the line should be drawn between notable subjects (Arnold Schwarzenegger) and non-notable ones (Shitty Arnie, my wife's cat), articles about which should be deleted.
There are two main issues with WP:Notability that need clarification by the community.
Does every article need reliable third-party sources to prove it is notable, or can notability be inherited from another article?
To what extent can the General Notability Guideline be…
aardvarchaeology | July 23, 2008Alun tells me that Google Knol is now live. It's like Wikipedia, only written by experts and pwned by Google. Check it out!
Also, I happened upon Everything2, this other weird & interesting hypertext community where anything goes, not modeled on an encyclopedia.
aardvarchaeology | May 17, 2008I'm frustrated about Wikipedia. Cultists are slowly and surely readjusting the Falun Gong article to their own rosy and "oh-how-persecuted-we-are" perspective. The other day I watched some anonymous loon create a new user account for the single purpose of deleting an article about someone he doesn't like -- and he's succeeding. And Alun Salt is retiring from Wikipedia to redirect his efforts to the forthcoming Google Knol, whose name reminds me of the Swedish word for "fuck". Check out Alun's farewell speech!
aardvarchaeology | May 14, 2008
Yesterday I did 5.5 more man-hours of metal detecting at the "Hall of Odin" site in Västmanland with Per Vikstrand. No prehistoric finds: just a piece of a 15/16/17th century brass cooking pot.
Bob Lind's craziness is once more repeated uncritically by a local Scanian newspaper.
I had a nice chat with the panel of the Skeptic's Guide to the Universe podcast this morning. At 9 pm EST, i.e. 3 am local time. Which was not a very good idea, seeing as my wife was trying to sleep in the next room. But I think the show will be good. Hear Rebecca Watson say "Suckle the teat of the Mother Goddess"!…
aardvarchaeology | May 11, 2008
Logged my 600th geocache this bright May morning, took a picture of a treehouse ruin near the cache, then drove home listening to the Nashville Pussy. After lunch, me and the Rundkvist ladies took part in the annual street cleaning & planting day. I headed the cleaning of two sandboxes, cleared shrubbery that was engulfing one of the boxes and collected trash in the parking lot and front door bays. Unlike Blaine Cartwright, I am not lazy.
Lazy White Boy
By Blaine Cartwright of the Nashville Pussy
Got rhythm, just too cool to show it
Got a future, can't wait to blow it
Sit around getting…
aardvarchaeology | April 25, 2008
A number of prominent people in science and science fiction have had samples of their body tissues launched into space after they died. Thus Gene Roddenberry, thus Timothy Leary, thus Clyde Tombaugh, to name only three. Now, I've come up with a similar honour for particle physicists.
Currently, it appears that the matter being shot into particle accelerators -- protons taken from hydrogen nuclei, lead ions -- is just anonymous off-the-shelf stuff from chemical supply firms. This is boring. Instead, all the big old guys and gals in high energy physics should contribute tissue samples, from…
aardvarchaeology | April 12, 2008A week ago I complained that I couldn't find any good podcasts, and you guys responded with a wealth of recommendations. More to my surprise, a number of irate fans of the popular Nobody Likes Onions podcast showed up. They left a bunch of nasty comments to the effect that I am a stuck-up faggot who needs hair implants etc. This is kind of funny since what I had said in a possibly ironic way was that I don't like the top-10 podcasts, but that this was only to be expected since most people are morons and so anything with mass appeal is unlikely to be any good. I gotta say that the NLO…
aardvarchaeology | April 5, 2008[More blog entries about podcasting; podcasting, webbradio.]
I've been laid low all day with a cold. To entertain myself while unable to read, I've listened to podcasts, and when I ran out of shows I subscribe to I started checking out Podcast Alley's top-10. Unfortunately, most people being morons after all, the top-10 aren't any good. Take it from me: you needn't really bother with Keith and the Girl, Red Bar Radio or Nobody Likes Onions.
So, Dear Reader, you clearly aren't a moron: in aggregate, Aard's readers should be a much better authority than the unwashed masses when it comes to…
aardvarchaeology | March 17, 2008Wikipedia is not a paper encyclopedia and most of its contents are naked text that hardly takes up any disk space. Thus there is no reason to limit the subjects its contributors can write about. Fans have written hundreds of detailed articles about Pokémon characters. This is fine with me though I have no interest in the subject: the articles are not in my way and they are apparently of interest to a lot of other people.
When I started adding my first bits of stuff to the Swedish version of the encyclopedia, I was surprised to find that higher-up users would delete my short contributions…
aardvarchaeology | March 15, 2008Dear Reader DuWayne asked what I think about prostitution. By way of answer, here's a re-run of an entry on that issue from May 2006. Two years later, I am no wiser.
News reports from the German brothel industry pending the World Soccer Championship have set me a-thinking about prostitution. It's one of those tricky issues where I find it hard to make up my mind.
Is prostitution a problem? If so, who are the victims? Who are the perpetrators? What are the ethical aspects of prostitution? Quite apart from ideals, what is the best practical stance for society to take regarding prostitution?…
aardvarchaeology | February 28, 2008
When I was in Florida a month ago, right after having lunch with an elder statesman of the skeptical movement, I found the above polaroid photograph on the sidewalk outside the restaurant. The signs above the windows have allowed me to identify the building as a Williams Scotsman "section modular office building". It's a moveable house that you rent for temporary needs. Judging from the state of the board ramp to the left, this particular specimen has been sitting there for quite some time. There are some palm fronds in the top right corner, suggesting that the house is somewhere in Florida…