homeownership

Worth reading: Maternal mortality and the engine of economic inequality

lborkowski — Mon, 15 May 2017 08:19:21 +0000

Worth reading: Maternal mortality and the engine of economic inequality

A few of the recent pieces I recommend reading:

Nina Martin and Renee Montagne for ProPublica and NPR: The Last Person You’d Expect to Die in Childbirth

Elizabeth Dawes Gay at Rewire: Could Increasing the Number of Black Health-Care Providers Fix Our Maternal Health Problem?

Vann R. Newkirk II in The Atlantic: The American Health Care Act's Prosperity Gospel

Matthew Desmond in The New York Times Magazine: How Homeownership Became the Engine of American Indquality

Jay Reeves for the Associated Press (at STAT): Generations later, the effects of the Tuskegee syphilis study linger

lborkowski Mon, 05/15/2017 - 04:19

Tags

Public Health - General

homeownership

maternal mortality

research ethics

July Pieces Of My Mind #2

aardvarchaeology — Fri, 31 Jul 2015 12:20:50 +0000

July Pieces Of My Mind #2

Jrette wandering around watching TV on the iPad, overturning and breaking things in the kitchen. *sigh*
Thorin sits down and starts singing about gold.
Jrette stole my zombie novel -- Carey's 2014 Girl With All The Gifts -- and proclaimed it to be the best book she's read in ages. Now I am bookless.
Mistakenly read two global catastrophe novels in a row. Now everything around looks temporary.
Jrette is twelve today! I asked her if she doesn't find the Vampire Diaries scary. "I would, only with a dad who's a scientist, I'm not afraid of supernatural things."
Pittentian in Perthshire is a fine place name. Means "Willie No 10" in Swedish.
No, Google Music's randomiser, the fact that I like Queens of the Stone Age and a few tunes by Eagles of Death Metal does not mean that you should play me lots of songs by the various bands that Josh Homme sings in, and little else.
The vagueness of Medieval land ownership is infuriating. You could buy a farm, then years later for some reason receive a document from the former owner emphasising again that you did indeed buy the farm, and then his cousin would show up and demand that you hand the farm back because it used to belong to his granddad. Or the Crown. Or a bishop's see. It had to do with ancient ideas about land belonging to lineages, where one's relatives could have right of first purchase, or where land could simply be inalienable.
Jrette wore my denim jacket to the movies!
Check out my guest entries in Swedish on the Östergötland County Museum's blog about the Stensö and Landsjö digs.

New kitchen finally almost done after over two months of awkwardness!

aardvarchaeology Fri, 07/31/2015 - 08:20

Tags

In the Americas, many places derive their names from the various First Peoples languages. This sometimes produces unintentional entendres, such as a certain village in Washington state. There is disagreement as to what the native phrase means (either "hard to pole", referring to the nearby river, or "chilly region"), but it is generally rendered in English as Humptulips.

Erik, it can be worse than that. Some of the early British settlers gave places in the Appalachians names which people with Anglophone middle-class taboos have had trouble repeating ever since. See (I think) "How the Scots Invented the Modern World."

Eric, I wonder how the townspeople of Humptulips deal with tall tulip types.

Northern Sweden is full of place-names that try to sound like the original sami names, and they make no sense at all.
Speaking of kids: -I just watched a crappy B film on channel 6 and realised every horror film featuring teenage school kids is a clone of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. No one cares about logic. Lost in a forest full of mutated crocodiles? No one thinks of climbing up those woody things with green stuff. And the non-promiscuous girl survives. I ended up rooting for the crocodiles.
Pittentian in Perthshire is a fine place name. And, as Swedish comic writer Martin Kellermann recently noted, Jack Shit would be a cool name. "Freeze! Jack Shit, agent, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms!" (pounces on a drunk smoking a cigarrette)

Birger@4: There is a minor character named Jack Schitt in the Thursday Next novels.

Some trees are not so easy to climb. Many pine species have their primary branches well above ground level, so unless you are skilled and/or in possession of climbing equipment, you won't be getting very far up one of those. Some of the maple trees I can see from my kitchen window don't look very climbable, either. And some tree species have poisonous bark--OK, maybe that's more survivable than mutant crocodiles with a taste for human flesh, but it's still unpleasant.

Also on the topic of things not to do in movies: If it's a murder mystery and the person who just walked into the room is not within view of the camera, do not say, "Oh, it's you." The person will inevitably turn out to be the killer, and you will be the next victim.

Suggested reading: "Killer of Little Shepherds"
it is about how Alexandre Lacassagne almost singlehandedly created modern forensic science in France a century ago, -often only having skeletal remains- and helped convict one of the worst serial killers in history.
A true science hero, and this non-fiction work is much better than the many novels and Tv shows about forensic science.

Maja Francis' "Last Days Of Dancing" has a lot of DNA from Kate Bush.
Headlines found at British satire sites:
"Neighbour celebrates 10 years of hammering the shit out of something
“Sniffer dogs ‘being set up as migrant crisis scapegoats’
Summer confirms ‘bold, original’ ending
“Cheaper to commute from Moon than live in London”
Nazis ‘furious’ over links to British Royal Family
Also: “Resolution of Minaj-Swift crisis beamed to Kepler 452b
http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/celebrity/resolution-of-minaj-swift-…

Your kitchen looks great! Love the stories today about the reading and scary books. Hilarious!

I am still working on the ideas that we once discussed. I'm not much closer to proving my systems of time, however, I haven't let that stop me from submitting a paper to a conference LOL

I am a presenter at the upcoming Cormac McCarthy Conference in Memphis this October. The name of my paper is "The Human Clock". I may not be able to meet the level of evidence I need to convince you of the system I propose (yet!)....but nonetheless, you have influenced my attitude and style. I am very grateful for for minds like yours to keep me struggling to write and argue.

I hope all is well with you.

Cheers,
Candy

Great to see you around the blog again, Minxie!

Finally we have a tool to translate the Ogham script, the Indus valley glyphs and the Olmec inscriptions! http://kutv.com/news/local/lds-church-releases-book-of-mormon-printers-…

Sorry Birger, the seer stone only works on a certain angelic dialect from the time of the second fall (the less well known one, it gave rise to Cleveland).

John Dee used an Aztec obsidian thingie for his communication with the angelic plane.

the seer stone only works on a certain angelic dialect from the time of the second fall

Is there any evidence that an angel other than Moroni could write in this script?

I always thought that was a hell of a name for an angel. I mean Gabriel, fine. Michael, OK. But Moroni?

The angel was actually named Macaroni, so Joseph Smith cleaned it up a bit.

Well, in Joseph Smith's day, "moron" either didn't exist as an English word or didn't have the meaning it does today. I suspect that, if Smith were alive today, the angel would have some other name.

And no, I don't know where Smith got the name. It doesn't even sound remotely like a Hebrew name (whence Gabriel, Michael, and many other Biblical names, including John and its many variants in other European languages, came). Martin's theory is as good as anything I could come up with.

If the major religions allowed us fantasy fans to do "retcons" of their teachings, the results would be much more logically consistent, and more interesting....

" the time of the second fall (the less well known one, it gave rise to Cleveland)."
-By this time it was obvious Yaweh was in over his head, and the stress manifested as multiple personality disorder, which accounts for the contradictory statements in the Bible. One divine fragment triggered the Flood in a fit of rage. This god-shard was evicted from heaven, and the scandal was glossed over. The ex-god got named Sauron, which explains a lot. The name could not be written in ancient hebrew script, hence the incorrect spelling "Shaitan".
--- --- --- ---
"Now I am bookless". -I am expecting a copy of the latest "Laundry" novel. I can send it once I have read it.

Thanks but I'm OK now. Reading Miéville's "City & City".

I find Mieville hard going. Everything is so weird the "wilful suspension of disbelief" usually remmains dormant.
The Bible part 3:Return of the Prophet https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WEj8LqTMIhY&index=3&list=PLryPqqOCXKy-o…

multiple personality disorder

People who know more theology than I tell me that, in one of the two versions of the Creation story in Genesis, the Hebrew word rendered in English as "God" is elohim, which is the plural form. YHWH got where He is today by signing an exclusivity deal with the Israelites. But traces of their polytheistic past remain in the Old Testament.

http://eurogenes.blogspot.com.au/2015/08/european-archaeological-associ…

The second abstract caught my eye - a major Bronze Age conflict (hundreds of combatants). Very unusual.

Yet another remarkable stone. Maybe I can use this to purge the palantir of Minas Thirith from the contamination by Denethor? http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2015/08/06/computer-security-i-c…

More abstracts.

http://eurogenes.blogspot.com.au/2015/08/the-proto-indo-europeans-came-…

is there any possibility the indo-europeans mentioned in the abstract might be affiliated with or identical with the Kurgans? OK, I am speculating too much from too little data.
--- --- --- ---
If Juniorette is developing along a Lisa Simpson trajectory, I can see this in her future: http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=3371

Kurgan means "barrow". There are many other cultures than Gimbutas's various kurgan cultures that build barrows.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurgan_hypothesis

In Highlander the villain is named "The Kurgan". Hello, scary Mr. Barrow.

Hello, Martin! Here is something for linguists. "Can You Solve The Mystery Of This Medieval Sword?" http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/sword-mystery-magna-carta_55c83173e…

Harry Houdini and Arthur Conan Doyle: a friendship split by spiritualism http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2015/aug/10/houdini-and-conan-doyle-im…
Houdini, hero of skeptical thought. Not a role many associate him with.

#25 - Birger, yes, absolutely. There is now a large and growing collection of genetic and linguistic evidence that cultures like the Yamnaya who built very richly furnished kurgans were close to the original Proto-Indo-Europeans.

It is looking like a certainty now that Proto-Indo-European originated on the West Eurasian steppe - and that you, me and Martin are all partly descended from those people.

I was particularly taken by the idea that the 'white race' is just a social construction, and that the white skinned (and sometimes blonde and blue eyed) Kalash, a pagan tribe in northern Pakistan, are a case of convergent evolution - they have no 'European' ancestry at all, although they have an origin myth (not true) that they are descended from Alexander the Great and his army:

http://www.unz.com/gnxp/white-people-are-a-homoplasy/

Here's one for YuSie:

http://www.unz.com/gnxp/south-chinese-north-chinese-vietnamesedai/

The Kalash: a case of convergent evolution of skin, hair and eye colouring.

https://www.google.com.hk/search?safe=off&hl=en&site=imghp&tbm=isch&sou…

I chose girls because they show the most colour variation, and generally have paler skin than men.

Take a good look - the Kalash are a doomed people, increasingly being threatened with conversion to Islam or death.

Medieval stuff:Here’s Guy Windsor talking about the things movies and books get wrong about swords.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=9LrUPFx7qSM

I'm currently watching the series "Spartacus" on Netflix, basically because I am a sucker for anything to do with ancient Rome. Plot spoiler/warning to anyone thinking of watching it - it is basically soft pornography, verging on the not so soft in places, the dialogue is full of vile language (I don't know how realistic this is - I imagine gladiators might have used pretty lurid language (actually, I imagine gladiators were not big talkers, but then there wouldn't be much of a series), but a constant stream of the most extreme expletives from the Roman elite seem unlikely), and the fight scenes are ridiculous - hyperviolent, and there is such a ludicrous amount of fake blood being thrown around that the combatants should all die of blood loss long before anyone actually gets killed. They tolerate injuries that no human could tolerate, get up and go on fighting - just ridiculous stuff.

I'm finishing it because I started it, but I wish they had made it much more realistic, instead of taking everything over the top.

They tolerate injuries that no human could tolerate

"It's only a flesh wound."

Of course Monty Python played that for laughs, but could that movie have been a serious influence on "Spartacus"?

(Remember, it's because of a Monty Python sketch that we call unsolicited commercial e-mail "spam".)

It is beyond Pythonesque, but too visually gruesome to be funny. Although, having now sat through umpteen episodes (some of which I admit to fast forwarding through due to both tedium and disgust), I think I detect some progressive moderation of the grotesque extremes; maybe in response to viewer feedback. I don't know.

June Pieces Of My Mind #1

aardvarchaeology — Wed, 17 Jun 2015 12:20:05 +0000

June Pieces Of My Mind #1

Despite the chaos of our kitchen renovation, I have managed to build myself a little reading nest.

Gotta love German. Try saying it out loud: "Die Beobachtung ferner Quasare, das holografische Prinzip und der Quantenschaum der Raumzeit".
Resolutely put away my phone in order to read a book instead. Then remembered that the book is in the phone.
Ever wonder what the scarf-wearing Somali girls are going to do with their lives? Judging from two of Jr's classmates in junior high, they're going to be software engineers.
The question of archaeology's practical usefulness should be treated as an empirical issue, open to unprejudiced investigation. Nobody will believe us if we just claim that what we do is self-evidently useful. I believe that almost all archaeology is useless from the practical perspective, but fun. In the unlikely event of any practical benefit, it must be solidly documented before we make claims.
Headphones with meaty bass. One of the best investments in sheer enjoyment I've made in ages.
I have no gravitas. Students keep asking me how old I am. Oh well, an archaeologist is never older than the last grave she excavated.
In about 1280, French sculptors worked on both the Cathedral and the main synagogue of Cologne.
My wife's the hardest-working woman in the sunflower seed shelling business.
Strange to read this R.E. Howard bio by Mark Finn. He has considerable stylistic ambition, but shaky ability, and very emphatically no copy editor. I rarely read books that feel this home-made.
I'm starting a Christian splinter group. I teach that God is omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent. And that he acts in the world. And that this means that it is neither possible nor useful to influence his actions through deeds or faith. He careth not for praise, prayer, ritual nor sin. He is busy running every aspect of the world in an optimal way.
Movie: Mad Max Fury Road. Post-apocalyptic grotesque road warrior story with extra everything. Grade: Pass with distinction.
Middle age: when you no longer keep track of your grownup points, but of your youth points.
I'm deeply hostile to any research strategy that aims to propagate a pre-formulated view of a matter rather than investigate whether that view has empirical support. Even in cases where I find the viewpoint politically sympathetic.
In the 11th and 12th centuries, French and English cemeteries were often inhabited, particularly by war refugees. You find lots of pottery and other household waste.
Robert E. Howard created Conan the Barbarian and wrote hundreds of stories. His neighbours thought he was crazy: while writing he would shout the dialogue.
June sun woke me at 05:15. These swings in day length are why Swedes have such a bipolar national character.
Jrette reads stuff she wrote four years ago in 1st grade and is embarrassed about her spelling. I'm like dude, my spelling hasn't improved one bit in the past four years.
Jrette's entire school sings to us. Only one of the teachers has a mike. She's the only audible participant.
Wonder if L.S. de Camp ever tried LSD.
I'm rapidly becoming post-parental. I left for work before Jrette and her buddy had even woken up. Jrette called me to ask for some money zapped onto her visa card so she can buy a birthday present for another buddy. She's buying the present and going to the party by public transport without any help from grownups. The girl is still eleven! I guess this is what you get when you aim to raise capable and independent kids.
Gómez is a Gothic loan word and cognate with Lat. homo.
Falafel is fried pea soup.
Robert E. Howard lived all his life with his TB suffering mother and killed himself when it was clear that she had only hours left to live. This has often been interpreted as him being unable to live without her. In his REH bio, Mark Finn makes an interesting and well-supported argument that turns this on its head. REH had been suicidal for years, but lived on because he was his mother's primary care giver. He had in fact waited to be released from his duties.
Jrette's 30-week run as a Swedish kids' TV celebrity has started. The show is called Superhemligt.
The tooth layout of my jawbone is completely asymmetrical. One half is regular, the other half all curved and squiggly. Good thing the soft stuff covers it up and evens things out, or I would never have been able to reproduce. People have a hard-wired attraction towards symmetrical partners.

Holy Humvee, our house has a new door! Window! Door!

aardvarchaeology Wed, 06/17/2015 - 08:20

Tags

homeownership

Pieces of Mind

Something I picked up somewhere: "You are middle aged if you, when faced with two different temptations, choose the one you will come home earliest from..."

Useful German science phrase: "Nicht eben falsch".

She’s buying the present and going to the party by public transport without any help from grownups. The girl is still eleven!

Quite a contrast to the US, where she would not be allowed to ride Amtrak by herself. Amtrak will not sell tickets to unaccompanied minors under age 12. Airlines will, but you have to designate an adult at each end of the journey for drop-off and pickup (it's one of the few exceptions to the rule that only passengers and airline/airport employees can enter the secure zone). And don't get me started on the subject of helicopter parenting--just be thankful that it's rare to nonexistent in your country.

Useful German science phrase: “Nicht eben falsch”.

The version I've heard is, "Das ist nicht recht; das ist doch nicht falsch." The second clause is usually translated to English as, "That is not even wrong," although "nevertheless" would be a closer translation of "doch" in that context.

You know, I always wonder why the skeptical movement does not talk more about de Camp. He was happily poking away at misconceptions in the 1950s, even if his approach was less “let us smite and scorn the wicked conmen” than “aren't we humans funny creatures! Look at some of the ways we deceive ourselves. But the surer we are that we are the civilized and rational ones, the more likely we are doing something even sillier.” He did a lot more than using bad pop psychology to write two biographies.

Eric, Amtrak is the interurban lines I believe. Kids are allowed to ride those like anybody else in Sweden, except the overnight services. The trains that Jrette uses are the commuter train into town and the Stockholm subway.

I've read some Lin Carter but never to my knowledge any LSD Camp.

Amtrak does run the interurban and long-distance services in the US. But they also run quite a few regional services. The Amtrak service in my town is the Downeaster line, from Boston North Station to Portland and Brunswick in Maine. (To go beyond Boston I would have to take the subway to either South Station or Back Bay Station, which serve the lines going south and west from Boston.) Scheduled time from here to Boston is about 80 minutes, not that much different from commuter lines to outlying areas. Your daughter would not be allowed to go from here to Boston on her own. And there are many parents in the US who would be shocked to hear that a kid her age was allowed to use a big-city metro system on her own. Not that I agree with those parents, but the threat that one of those busybodies might call Child Protective Services is something that parents of kids that age cannot ignore. And yes, that means we have been raising a generation of kids so coddled that they would have a hard time getting around on their own.

Part of it is racism. There is an assumption among many Americans (especially those who aren't from big cities; those who are can readily see that this isn't true) that buses and subways are for people with darker skin than you and I. A big part of what drove suburbanization in this country from 1945 into at least the 1990s was the desire of many light-skinned people to move away from people with darker skin. Public transport options in most of those suburbs are between paltry and nonexistent, and in many of them the prevalence of automobile traffic (often at high speed--many US local streets have wider lanes than German Autobahns) coupled with inadequate or nonexistent sidewalks makes walking a not-very-safe option as well.

To be fair, Scandinavia has no big cities. At 1.4 million, Stockholm is the biggest one we've got. But why whould the size of the city correlate with risk to children? Sure, there are more homicidal maniacs in New York than in Stockholm. But there are also a much greater number of potential victims, so the risk of any one child getting attacked probably isn't significantly different.

My wife and I saw the bus-and-skin-colour thing in Minneapolis once. Everybody on the bus looked either African American or Native American. A friend of mine reports that if you cycle to work in Mississippi wearing middle-class clothes, then you are assumed to belong to another demographic: the mentally ill.

Martin, you would like him, especially his nonfiction. He was an educated layman in several humanities fields, publishing in “Technology and Culture” and volunteering on archaeological excavations. This created problems when he read an earlier generation of writers who were better storytellers but were not so widely travelled or well-educated. His wandering swordsmen tend to worry about their budgets, get day jobs between adventures, and survive through technical knowledge or equipment not by sheer prowess. But popular books on ancient engineers, the Atlantis myth, and the Scopes trial have a shorter half-life than cracking good yarns about cossacks waving sabres and colours out of space.

Not so may of de Camp's novels were translated. I seem to recall that he was good at getting the nuts and bolts right, but was not always inspiring.

Of course archaeology has no practical value! But that statement ignores its true importance. Practical things are important because they give us food, shelter, better ways to kill each other... in other words, the same basic things every animal wants and needs.
Archaeology is different. It (and some other disciplines) are like art and sculpture. They fill a place in our lives that enriches us emotionally. They define us as human, and we like them because we are human. They are part of us. Any attempt to describe them in purely practical terms must fail, because it assumes that humans can be valued in strictly practical terms. We can't. If you take away our fascination with art, music, literature, archaeology, palaeontology etc, you no longer have a human. Just a rather poorly insulated ape.

But why whould the size of the city correlate with risk to children?

I suspect the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy is at work. The combination of lead-based paint in older housing stock and emissions from vehicles burning leaded gasoline is now believed to have played a major role in the rise of crime rates in the 1960s-1980s (crime has been dropping since the 1990s), and of course the impacts were heaviest in larger cities, which had more traffic. But the lead poisoning angle is something that has only gotten attention in the last few years, so the gullible tend to associate crime with big cities. The association doesn't hold up under a detailed look: Baltimore, New Orleans, and St. Louis are significantly more dangerous than New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago. (This isn't only true of the US either: many Brazilian and Mexican cities are more dangerous than São Paulo and Mexico City, the two largest cities in the Western Hemisphere.)

The 24/7 cable news cycle doesn't help here. Today, people throughout the US hear about incidents that 30 years ago would have been at most local stories. But there is more to it than that. I lived in Miami during the era of the cocaine cowboys, when the city had the highest murder rate in the US. But it was generally understood that if you weren't in one of the high risk groups (drug dealers, Mariel refugees, or people in families where domestic disputes were settled with guns), you were unlikely to be murdered unless you were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

As if we didn't already know - but this seals it for good:

http://dienekes.blogspot.hk/2015/06/kennewick-man-was-native-american.h…

This is a funny one:

http://shanghaiist.com/2015/06/19/cfa-apologizes-racist-posters-blames-…

At the Asian football cup, the Mainland football association put up posters warning players and supporters to watch out for the "Black skinned, yellow skinned, white skinned team." They were of course talking about the Hong Kong team, which has some African and European players who are eligible to play for Hong Kong by virtue of length of residency, along with a majority of local Chinese players.

Hong Kong football supporters took deep offence at being described in this manner, and so did the Hong Kong football federation.

So at the first match, when Hong Kong were playing Bhutan (who we beat 7 - 0; no real surprise), when the Bhutanese national anthem was played, the Hong Kong spectators all politely applauded. But then when the Chinese national anthem was played (representing Hong Kong) all of the Hong Kong spectators booed.

Mainlanders were horrified.

Yes, Hong Kong people really are different from their Chinese compatriots over the border in the Mainland, and Mainlanders keep not understanding why.

This is another funny one.

I wanna go to the Spratly Islands for my next holiday - they have tropical weather, fresh tomatoes and eggplant, pork chops and...and...and some really menacing looking PLA soldiers stationed down there.

http://shanghaiist.com/2015/06/19/south-china-sea-paradise-of-veggie-ga…

No wonder the Americans have been flying spy planes over the place - they're trying to figure out whether it's safe to land so they can engage in some erm joint military exercises.

Martin, here is a language lesson for how to dismiss charlatans. While the US National Review is conservative, it wastes no time chewing out nominally Republican presidential contender Donald Trump in a "colourful" way. http://freethoughtblogs.com/dispatches/2015/06/19/national-review-goes-…

Whole paper: "Massive migration from the steppe was a source for Indo-European languages in Europe" by Haak et al.

http://www.nature.com/articles/nature14317.epdf?referrer_access_token=X…

Their samples included Scandy HGs, BTW.

Splinter group? Martin, Baal/Offler is too busy running things at Zeta Reticuli to be bothered with other stuff.
-More entrants in the presidential race make the field a target-rich environment for skeptics and comedy professionals alike...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=KTz0zuhGeE8
Trump’s speech has a Chinese in it. And some raping, drug-trading Mexicans (but no racism at all, honest). At the end of the segment, the comedians who will be watching the election unfold are sent into orgiastic bliss.

China obviously invested a lot in that island air base. But that kind of infrastructure can get old fast. During the cold war, the major powers showed interest in STOL/VTOL aircraft since airfields are such obvious target for nukes. When USSR collapsed, so did the interst in short-field performance.

-But with the recent invention of circuit boards that can scale up neural networks for massive parallel processing, we have the specter of cheap missiles that can interpret video input in real time.
Imagine a single missile who homes in on that island, and sends sub-munitions on to every aircraft while ignoring decoys, plus cratering the runway.
The American hardware is just as vulnerable, they depend on big fat aircraft that need a couple of miles of runway.
(Sweden used to be prepared for this kind of war, but the underground hangars and most of the road airfields have been decommissioned)

“Neutron scattering helping conserve the world's great historic monuments” http://phys.org/news/2015-06-neutron-world-great-historic-monuments.html
Actually it is just a diagnostic tool, but it shows which artefacts are in danger.
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"He is busy running every aspect of the world in an optimal way".
But some of the demands contradict the others. The software cannot always handle this, leading to system crashes. We now have theo-cybernetic explanation for disasters and war!

Pardon me for adding so many comments, I just had to get this in before Sunday:
The summer solstice will occur 21 june kl. 18:38 (Swedish time) (Beware of hippies crowding Stonehenge). Then we will face winter again.
In some countries, Sunday is also father's day.
"Being a father finally pays off" http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/society/being-a-father-finally-pays-…

More entrants in the presidential race make the field a target-rich environment for skeptics and comedy professionals alike

Tell me about it. I get to put up with these loons gallivanting about the region for the next seven months or so. Gov. Christie's campaign (he hasn't announced yet, but that doesn't mean he's not running) seems to have mistaken me for someone likely to vote for him, so they send me e-mails which I promptly move to the junk folder, along with those from the slimy jerk who allegedly represents my district in Congress, and various other political missives in a similar vein. The scary thing is that one of these idiots is going to win the Republican nomination for President, and have a non-negligible chance of winning. That kind of politics sometimes works--see what happened in Denmark this week.

#19 - Birger: No. China has a sizeable domestic fleet of large trailer suction hopper dredgers (like Holland and Belgium) because it has to do a large amount of annual maintenance dredging to keep ports like Shanghai and Tianjin open to deep draught container vessels. A bit of reclamation like that is just a short, quick job - not costly at all.

The West (apparently including you) are assuming it is intended as an offensive military base. But as you observe, viewed that way, it makes to sense at all - very easy to attack and destroy, with no defensive capability at all. The Chinese are not total fools - they wouldn't build such a vulnerable base if they intended it for offensive military purposes.

The Chinese have been saying all along that it is (a) a forward base for marine search and rescue operations, and (b) research.

Having seen the thing completed, I conclude they are telling the truth. It is little more than a landing strip and vegetable garden. It is not intended for military dominance of the South China Sea at all - it is an advance base for peaceful purposes. The most sinister purpose (if that is the right word) is that it could be a forward base for oil and gas exploration in the South China Sea, something they have been doing for decades.

Just occasionally, it pays to suspend cynicism and just listen to what people are actually saying. The Americans are grand-standing, sabre rattling and trying to make political capital out of what is just a forward air base for peaceful purposes. The only real point of contention is that the ownership of the Spratly Islands is disputed by several different countries, and China has just unilaterally taken ownership - but not for the purpose of attacking other countries. If that had been the purpose, then they have just built the most stupid, useless, vulnerable air base imaginable.

The Allentoft et al. paper is here:

http://scienceblogs.com/aardvarchaeology/2015/06/17/june-pieces-of-my-m…

This and the Haak et al. paper both come to broadly the same conclusions, using different data sets.

Haha! No it's not.

Here it is:

http://www.nature.com/articles/nature14507.epdf?referrer_access_token=z…

I had to laugh at this, from Birger's link:

'But George Logan, aged eight, said: “Christ, I’ll be glad when it’s over. There’s no gratitude, that’s what gets me. He struts around all day like Billy Big Bollocks, acting like a handmade card and being served toast in bed is his absolute due. First thing Monday morning I’m going to make him wish he’d had the snip. If I have to pay my Father’s Day tax that bastard’s going to earn it.” '

It makes me glad my daughter has almost always totally ignored Father's Day, with the sole exception of last year - and there is no rational explanation for that rather odd departure from her normal behaviour.

The most sinister purpose (if that is the right word) is that it could be a forward base for oil and gas exploration in the South China Sea, something they have been doing for decades.

The context here is that there are overlapping territorial claims in those waters. Vietnam and the Philippines have claims here in addition to China's claims, and before that base was built, the other two countries had much stronger claims than China's. So I would expect reasonable people in Hanoi and Manila to take exception to this base. I agree that it's not primarily intended as a military base, but there is a large military force available to back up the claims China is making in the area. Rather, the effect of this base (and perhaps its intent, though I don't claim to be able to read the minds of China's leaders) is to strengthen the Chinese claims. It feels a bit like Russia taking the Crimean Peninsula from Ukraine: no (or not many) shots fired, but an annexation all the same.

China is now the world's #2 military power. If someone takes a cynical view of what the US and Russian governments do, it's also rational to take a cynical view of what China's government does.

China is not the world's #2 military power. It's air force and navy are nowhere close. It has defensive capability, but not offensive capability.

China has one refitted outdated Russian aircraft carrier, which it uses for training.

America has armed Taiwan with 150 fighter aircraft that are far superior to anything that China has.

This is in no way comparable to the Ukraine.

China has a lot of merchant shipping passing through the southern part of the South China Sea, which is very vulnerable to bad weather, and they have a lot of problems every year. They are establishing forward capability for weather forecasting and search and rescue, and they have offered to extend the availability of these services to other countries in the region.

No one was stopping Vietnam or the Philippines from establishing similar facilities, but they didn't do it.

What right has America got to dictate to China that it can't take steps to improve the safety of its own merchant shipping?

"What right has America got to dictate to China that it can’t take steps to improve the safety of its own merchant shipping?"

None. Or rather, the right of might. Which will of course become the sacred ststus quo after a few decades. As for "human rights" it is a matter of trade and $$$ as we have seen in the conflict between Sweden and Saudi Arabia about wether flogging bloggers is bad or not. The Saudis bought the votes of all members of the Arab League to condemn Sweden for condemning flogging.

Sorry that I have not managed to find more local Swedish causes of interest for skeptics. There ar plenty of Swedes who claim outrageous things but they are rarely in a position of power and influence.
The "VIP" mistakes are usually mundane and boring. (I would love it if some Swedish cleric followed the Iranian example of blaming earthquakes on immodestly clad women)
So my reliance on USA-ian examples simply reflect what is easily found in media, not an anti-American bias. Or anti-British, or whoever.

Birger - It's no good being sorry. It's thanks to you that I am having to watch Alien the Director's Cut *again* because I don't remember feeling empathy for the navigator, and want to know whether I did and forgot, or whether you are more empathic to not overly bright navigators than I am.

Mind you, I'm enjoying watching it for the umpteenth time, so no harm done. But after this I will have to watch Aliens *again*.

John, the navigator is annoying and yellow, just like me!
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Addendum: The reason why USA has become such a "target-rich" environment depends to a great deal on a certain media mogul.
When he started Fox News he followed the cynical advice of Doktor Göbbels: "for propaganda to be effective, it must be aimed at the least intelligent segment of the people".
This gave Death Panels, terrorist camps* on the Mexican border, Obama apparently going back in time to cause the Iraq War and other Monthy Python stuff being discussed on prime time.
(I do not hold you ordinary Americans responsible for this)
*Mexican-Syrian terrorists with Ebola*

Finished it. I wondered why I didn't remember feeling any empathy for the navigator - it was because I didn't feel any :)

I didn't feel any empathy for the cat either, but then I have a genuine dislike of domestic cats, fuelled by a powerful allergy to them and a pretty fair grasp of Toxoplasma gondii and what it can do to people. But then, I'm not too fond of pit bull terriers either, for other equally rational reasons.

In Aliens I felt empathy for the tough little female Hispanic marine. I'm going to have to watch the director's cut of that again next.

I would argue the xenomorph is a more ambitious predator than the cat, and thus more interesting. I look forward to an Attenborough documentary on the subject.

other Monthy Python stuff

Please, Birger, don't insult Monty Python by comparing them to the ridiculous stuff being discussed on American TV "news" channels. Monty Python tried to be funny, and usually succeeded. At least some of the newsreaders in the US actually believe the stuff they are spouting. And more importantly, so does a large fraction of their audience. You can draw a straight line from there to what happened in Charleston last week.

Yes, Eric, it is no coincidence that the "mainstreaming" of extremism coincides with hate crimes.
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Baby in coffin of Swedish bishop was 'deliberately concealed' – video http://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2015/jun/22/baby-coffin-swedish-…

You're saying cats are not dangerous?

http://shanghaiist.com/2015/06/22/land-rover-veers-into-river-driver-do…

Pets are useful. "Scarlet macaw skeletons point to early emergence of Pueblo hierarchy (Update)" http://phys.org/news/2015-06-scarlet-macaw-skeletons-early-emergence.ht…

The problem of accurately re-enacting ancient times http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=3773

You’re saying cats are not dangerous?

No more so than other animals. The biggest hazard of cats around here is the rate at which they kill birds: a cat with a functional hunting instinct can easily average one bird kill a day. But dogs, rodents, and even small children sometimes run into the road, with similar results to that driver in Jiangsu.

Then there are the deer and moose. Deer have become quite well adapted to American suburban environments, where they cannot be hunted because there are so many dwellings around, and car-deer collisions are a regular hazard throughout the eastern US. Moose tend to live in areas with lower human population, but if you should hit one with a car, expect the car to be destroyed, and your own chances of surviving won't be that great. If I were forced to make the choice, I would rather hit a concrete wall than a moose, because I might be able to walk away after hitting the wall.

It was a joke, Eric.

"der Quantenschaum der Raumzeit" -the foamy state of spacetime itself at the smallest meaningful scales.
--- --- --- ---
More dangerous parasites: If we are talking films, the telepathic kids in "The Midwich Cuckoos" are scary in a more insidous manner.
The last film version was also one of the last film roles for wossname, paraphlegic actor who quit the Scientology crew.
Underrated films: Dark City.
The Sticky Fingers of Time.
And (title forgotten) where Max von Sydow et al are literally trading with luck as a commodity.
I am told that the graphic novel series "Lucifer" (inspired by Neil Gaiman) will be a TV series but I do not know when it will be available4.
(Ironically, the name comes from a third century mistranslation of an aramaic text relating to a Babylonian king. I have mentioned this before, but it deserves repeating)

Swedish discrimination exposed in bus video http://www.thelocal.se/20150624/swedish-class-divides-exposed-in-fare-d…
We are all probably prone to treat "the other" differently, especially when facing cues of "low status"...

National trauma partially resolved!
"Swedish police recover stolen strawberry haul" http://www.thelocal.se/20150622/swedish-police-recover-stolen-strawberr…

I watched the film Chappie last night.

I had missed that Sigourney Weaver and Hugh Jackman are in it, mostly because they don't have lead parts.

In any case, I can't honestly recommend it. It's sort of violent, very unattractive and childish all at the same time.

As AI films go, Ex Machina is an infinitely better film in my view.

For anyone who missed this, the full paper is available on open access:

http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2014/03/21/003517

A piece related to the above:

http://www.unz.com/gnxp/the-false-dawn-of-modern-humans-in-eurasia/

And another one:

http://dienekes.blogspot.hk/2015/06/oase1-had-neandertal-ancestor-no.ht…

Conspiray theories make me sad http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=3778

Beijing quadrupled in size in a decade, NASA finds http://phys.org/news/2015-06-beijing-quadrupled-size-decade-nasa.html
This has increased winter temperatures and made the air more stagnant

I read recently that urbanisation increases rainfall intensity.

http://video.pbs.org/program/first-peoples/

http://www.unz.com/gnxp/first-peoples-its-complicated/

Razib himself will be in one of the episodes - I think he said the 5th.

That's not fanciful - it's a Physics-based conclusion, and has to do with increased 'surface roughness' of urban areas, increase of aerosols released in urban areas, greater convection due to 'heat island' effects, etc., but apparently is extremely difficult to predict quantitatively.

The temperature effects of urban 'heat islands' can obviously be directly measured with reference to historical records, and are well documented - all large cities act as 'heat islands'. Likewise, the effects on air flow can be directly measured, and can also be modelled. Modelling of air flow modification is one of the requirements of modern town planning.

NASA can no doubt produce similar findings for Shanghai, Mexico City, and any large American city e.g. LA.

The growth of 'first tier' Chinese cities like Beijing and Shanghai has been very fast because China lagged the developed world in terms of the demographic transition (people moving from rural to urban areas) until relatively recently. The migration from rural to urban was previously controlled when the CCP had more of a grip on the population - now it is uncontrollable. The start of the demographic transition can pretty well be dated to the end of the Cultural Revolution and Deng Xiaoping's opening up of the Chinese economy.

One of the interesting things about the demographic transition is that, everywhere it has happened (including USA, Australia, Japan, South Korea, and anywhere else where the economy has transitioned to a modern developed economy), it has been accompanied by a drop in birth rates.

The same has happened in China. The irony is that it looks pretty much like the One Child Policy was unnecessary - population growth dropped with the development of the economy anyway, to the point now where the ageing population is one of the major concerns in China, as it is anywhere where the demographic transition has occurred.

This is now happening in India, most noticeably in those states which are more economically developed and prosperous. The only continent still experiencing population explosion is Africa.

In Australia, the rural population has been steadily dropping. One mildly upsetting effect of this is that the first place that I lived in now no longer exists, and is no longer marked on the map. I know how to get there, and have been back there, but that is just because I remember where it was. There is nothing there now to show that it existed except the old school house where my father was the solitary teacher of a combined class of all primary years, including the local Aboriginal children - that has been turned into a minor museum, to show what typical small 'bush' schools were like.

So I'm the Man from Nowhere, now.

It's not just in Australia, John. Rural population has been dropping in many parts of the US as well. My mother is from South Dakota, born in a once-thriving township that no longer has a post office. The farm where she was born is still in the family, but my cousin who runs it now has kept his day job in Sioux Falls, because the income from the farm (a spread covering about 25 km^2) isn't enough to support him. There is no longer a permanent dwelling there; he lives in a trailer when he is on site. My mother worries that they may repeat the Dust Bowl experience because my cousin, like most people farming in South Dakota these days, has plowed some hillsides for extra crops. They don't need as many farm hands as they used to, so there is nothing to keep people in the area.

The town where my mother went to high school happens to be the state capital, so they still have an economy of sorts. Many small towns throughout the US, including the place where my father grew up, have no visible means of support. So anybody who can leave does.

This isn't a problem where I live, as it is close enough to Boston to be considered a feasible commute. It is a problem in the North Country. Up there, they still haven't recovered from the 1990 recession.

Depopulation of the countryside has been going on in Scandyland for 150 years and no reversal of the trend is in sight. Having lived all my life in suburbs of major cities I don't really mind.

Before the advent of modern sanitation, cities were population sinks, and people living in rural areas were healthier and lived longer. That was even the case in ancient Rome, which had the nearest thing to modern plumbing until the early 20th Century - people moved to the city and died. Retired legionnaires who had served their time and were rewarded with plots of farmland happily hightailed it out of the filth and disease ridden city and went to live in the country and farmed.

That trend has now reversed - people living in rural areas have less access to modern health care and don't live as long as people who live in urban areas. In Australia, this trend is accelerating - it is very difficult to persuade doctors to go and work in rural areas which are depopulating. As in Eric's case, the traditional family farm is no longer sustainable financially, and farming is increasingly run as agribusiness. Countries like Germany and China who are keen to secure food supplies are buying up the agribusinesses and employing local farm managers to run the farms on an industrial scale.

This has had a noticeable effect over the past 20 years - Perth, which once had excellent fruit and vegetables at relatively very cheap prices as recently as the 1990s, now has lousy stuff which is ridiculously expensive. All of the good stuff gets sent overseas. The bizarre outcome is that I can buy Australian fruit, vegetables, meat and seafood in Hong Kong which is cheaper and better than I can find in Perth. And I pay much lower taxes for the privilege.

With the end of the mining boom in Western Australia as commodity prices have dropped like a rock with the slowing of the Chinese economy, I can even see the prospect of Perth depopulating due to lack of employment opportunities, at which point real estate prices, which have been ridiculously high, will also drop like a rock. Property speculators are already holding housing inventory which is sitting empty, and can't earn enough rental income to cover their mortgage loans.

The tipping point may come when interest rates stop getting cut. Currently, the Reserve Bank of Australia is fearful of any increase in interest rates because they know it will trigger the bursting of a massive real estate bubble in Australia, so they keep cutting. But it has to happen some time - they are just delaying the inevitable in the hope that they can somehow manage a 'soft landing'. They are caught in a cleft stick - the more they cut interest rates, the lower the Australian dollar drops. Australia now manufactures virtually nothing, and imported goods are becoming progressively more expensive in Australian dollars.

I can't help the feeling that it's all going to end in tears for a lot of low and middle income Australians, in an ageing population, with a lot of elderly people who can't get work and don't have the financial means to support themselves, and a bankrupt government that can't support them.

Colour me pessimistic.

Sweden is very different. Sweden has a strong manufacturing base, producing stuff that is in demand in other countries. Both Sweden and Australia weathered the global financial crisis relatively well, but Australia did it on the back of the Chinese economy which fuelled the prolonged mining boom. Now that's over, there is nothing in the Australian economy to replace it.

I live in a satellite town of 500,000 people on the south coast of China, and smack in the heart of town is a big IKEA store that is always thronging with people, stuffing their faces with Swedish meatballs. The roads are full of Swedish trucks. I can't escape the feeling that Sweden is sustainable and Australia is not.

Australians I have spoken to do not welcome being reminded of this, but per capita, Australians have the biggest carbon footprints on earth. The Australian Prime Minister felt able to tour the globe lecturing to other countries about climate change, because Australia has a small population, but individually, Australians are a model of unsustainability. They build the biggest houses, now bigger than American houses, with huge poorly used open plan spaces which are very difficult and costly to heat and cool, in climates that require extensive cooling during summer and heating during winter (the houses are not well designed for either hot or cold weather). They drive the furthest distances, and in vehicles which are trending larger and with greater fossil fuel consumption. They are strongly resistant to high-rise living, so the urban sprawl around Australian cities just keeps getting larger and larger, with people having to spend more and more time sitting in their over-sized motor vehicles commuting to work. The urban sprawls are such that they are impossible to service with efficient public transport, which in any case has been very seriously neglected over the past 3 decades, with suburban rail lines actually closing down in some cases.

Viewed from the outside, Australian cities are very unsustainable. But when I try to discuss this with my countrymen, their reaction is resentful and denialist. They are still 'living the Australian dream', which is to live in a 4 bedroom 2 bathroom fully detached single storey house, with the biggest air gap that they can get between them and their neighbours, and for which they are willing to take on a mortgage that will take the whole of their working lives to pay off, with the idea that sale of the house will ultimately fund their retirement - a model that is looking increasingly dangerously optimistic.

If the Australian real estate bubble does burst, a high proportion of the population will be left holding large negative equity, in an economy that will increasingly be unable to supply well paid jobs. Australians already have some of the highest individual debt levels in the world.

Martin et all, is the peat bog bodies preserved by something besides the low oxygen content? The anaerobic bacteria in the digestive tract do not need oxygen so one would expect the whole body to get "liquefied" from inside. What is it that arrests decomposition?.
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"resentful and denialist" ...yes. before the mess in USA 2007 critics of the system were regarded as kooks. Sadly it was the same in Sweden before our big 1990s collapse.

" If the Australian real estate bubble does burst"
It looks if the human mind works in a way tha makes disasters necessary to remind people of the dangers. In the 1990s Sweden had essentially skipped a recession cycle, and highly paid people who should have seen trouble brewing ignored the lessons of the past.
In the 1990s, the Great Depression had disappeared from living memory amd Americans began de-regulating the finance sector.

No oak log burial has been sampled for modern lab analyses. But I believe humic acid from the peat, tannic acid from the oakwood and the formation of airtight iron pan inside the barrows are important.

Archaeologists need vacations too.... I have tried to find exciting news (apart from the DNA stuff) but right now it seems pretty slow...
For skeptics who want to read about non-functional weltanschaungs and general delusional thinking, here is a link to Dispatches from the Culture Wars http://freethoughtblogs.com/dispatches/

#61 - Don't know. But people who design sewage treatment plants use anaerobic digestion of sewage sludge (basically the concentrated solids mixed with some fluids), and at the end of that they end up with 'de-activated sludge' or 'treated sludge' (sludge in which all of the pathogens have been killed) - so then they have to de-water the sludge and dispose of it somewhere, like in a landfill. Some people advocate using it as fertiliser, but that's really a bad idea because the de-activated sludge still contains elevated levels of heavy metals, etc. which are bio-available for uptake by plants, and which get returned to the environment at levels elevated above natural background levels.

One day some genius is going to figure out how to mine the heavy metals out of human shit, thereby doing everyone a favour by rendering the de-activated sludge safer to use as fertiliser and recovering the heavy metals for use as something useful.

What they don't end up with after anaerobic digestion is all of the sludge (organic solids) being digested and turned into liquids and gases - a lot of it is turned into gases, and they use anaerobic sludge digestion to generate bio-gas (basically methane) which can be used to generate energy. But what I'm getting at is that at the end of the process they are still left with solids to dispose of, albeit dewatered solids.

So something stops the process at some point. Maybe when the anaerobic bacteria run out of whatever it is that they eat.

I presume that in landfills, the sludge undergoes further aerobic decomposition until not much is left.

I presume that is what happens to peat bodies if they are cut open and left out in the atmosphere - that they would then undergo the aerobic decomposition that the slightly acidic peat environment has been preventing, and they then decompose like any other human remains.

If there was an anaerobic decomposition process that turned all of the organic solids in sewage into liquids and gases, then sewage treatment plant operators would all be very happily using it, so we can assume there isn't.

What's the origin of the heavy metals in the shit?

John, check this out!
" Aboriginal history rewritten again by ignorant political class" http://phys.org/news/2015-06-aboriginal-history-rewritten-political-cla…
You know, government ministers should try this thing called "internet" to check their facts. Or ask their secretaries, if they are too busy to do it themselves.

OK, a senator not a minister, but my argument still holds.

#65 - They occur naturally at 'background' levels as minerals in rocks and soils, sometimes in very high concentrations. They can be sorted selectively by flow of groundwater and streams, or formed into veins by thermal activity such as metamorphism.

They get taken up by food crops and ingested by humans. (A classic case is that rice is very good at taking up arsenic - in America, a lot of rice is grown on fields that were previously used to grow cotton. The cotton was prey to all manner of insect pests, and so the cotton crops were sprayed with toxins like arsenic to kill the pests, and now the soil is above-background level in arsenic, which is readily taken up by the rice crops - hence warnings in America not to consume too much rice. Most of the arsenic is retained in the husks, so the worst thing to do is to eat the rice as brown rice rather than refined white rice. Arsenic is a carcinogen at sub-lethal concentrations.)

Many heavy metals are cumulative, so humans accumulate higher concentrations of them in their bodies before they eventually pass out.

They get taken up by marine organisms that ingest soil particles and accumulated in progressively higher concentrations up the food chain until they are ingested by humans eating seafood. Classic cases are the oysters which are farmed in Hong Kong, which are very high in cadmium, and sharks and large pelagic fish, which carry very high mercury levels - hence the advice not to eat large fish like swordfish, tuna and mackerel too often.

Likewise they are accumulated in the bodies of domesticated animals which are in turn consumed by humans.

They can even be breathed in as wind blown dust if you are located in a 'hot spot' where there are naturally high levels of some heavy metals, or otherwise accidentally ingested.

The outcome is that heavy metals are present in human shit at higher concentrations than background levels. Putting the shit as fertiliser on food crops is just going to recycle the heavy metals back into the humans again to become accumulated into even higher concentrations.

Not all food plants take up all heavy metals, but enough do. Leafy green vegetables take up arsenic.

#67 - I saw that. That was a classic. He clearly had no idea what he was talking about. He couldn't even quote the crackpot theory correctly.

Methinks this is questionable. "Inside the Chinese Boot Camps Designed to Break Video Game Addiction" http://www.motherjones.com/media/2015/06/chinese-internet-addiction-cen…
There may be other more subtle problems behind excessive internet use. Blaming new technology for corrupting young minds sounds a lot like the 1980s panic about gaming turning kids into Satanists.

Which is exactly where much of the US was ten years ago. Parts of the country, including my town, have recovered to some extent, but it took a long time. Other places, such as California's Inland Empire (San Bernardino/Riverside) and Central Valley (Bakersfield to Redding, including Sacramento), may never fully recover. People tend to underestimate what a pain it is to commute long distances in heavy traffic. And much of the western US (especially California) have serious water issues. Green lawns were already ridiculous in England--hey, let's devote perfectly good agricultural land to the cultivation of an entirely useless high-maintenance crop! But at least England has a suitable climate for that kind of thing. Most of the western US doesn't, and neither does Australia.

#70 - I think the problems are easy enough to figure out. Gender imbalance, so no hope of getting a girlfriend. Pressure on not very bright kids to excel at school. Unemployment.

That addiction centre looks a lot like a prison to me.

#71 - Spot on again, Eric. And southern Australia is on a prolonged drying and heating trend. Sometimes I think Australians gave up going to church because they need to mow their lawns on Sunday mornings - big expanses of front lawn that take a lot of water they don't have, and fertiliser, and then need to be cut all the time and the grass clippings disposed of. And they are not used for anything. The English style Australian front garden may as well be a featureless desert, because no one uses his front garden for anything at all.

I admire my late father. When he finally bought a house, he built the smallest one he could on a small piece of land; he filled the front garden with drought resistant native flora, and at the back he farmed vegetables and grew fruit trees.

Is there a reason people don't plant trees in Australia? Granted, trees use a lot of water, too, but much of that goes into wood. You also have to rake the leaves after they fall, but that's only a few times a year at most. Best of all, mature trees are good for shade, especially if planted on the equatorward side of the house--less strain on your air conditioning system, or (in my case) less need to install an air conditioning system.

Most of my neighbors are pretty good about avoiding the unused featureless expanse of lawn. But some houses in the neighborhood are landscaped thus, and in many parts of the US, it's considered normal--even enforced, in some areas, by homeowners' associations.

The last few years I have been reducing the size of my lawn, replacing parts of it (especially where it's hard to mow, or grass isn't growing anyway) with landscaping. The flowers look much prettier than grass ever can. I haven't put in a vegetable garden yet, but that's on my list, along with planting another tree or two.

Some people do plant trees, but the trees that grow best and require least water are hardwood eucalypts, which are very slow growing. The exception is the Tasmanian Blue Gum, which grows fast, but the downside is that it grows very tall and it drops large branches, which you don't want crashing through your roof.

My father planted native trees (carefully avoiding Tassie Blue Gums) and the outcome of that was that my mother used to insist on going out and raking up the leaves every single morning. Also, the leaves clog the roof gutters and you have to get out on a ladder several times a year to clean them out.

Me, I like a few dead leaves around. It looks more natural and provides good hiding places for the spiders, centipedes and scorpions.

The other catch, aside from people like my mother who take it as a personal insult to have a slightly untidy looking garden, is that the eucalypts are deep rooting and very good at seeking out any source of water, so at some point your drainage pipes are going to get disrupted and blocked by roots. They're not as bad for that as willows, but they're pretty bad, and calling out a plumber in Australia can bankrupt a person. And it's a job that plumbers seem to hate, so you have some big hairy guy swearing at you while he drains your wallet.

With my father's enthusiasm for planting trees, a visitation from a swearing plumber has had to happen several times over.

I've had my patches of enthusiasm about growing vegetables, but I don't like using insecticides of any kind, and to see your carefully nurtured crops gone through by pests is just too heartbreaking. However, I am a champion fennel grower - in my last vege garden I planted one fennel plant, and the damn stuff nearly took over the whole garden - new fennel plants kept cropping up everywhere, so matter what I did to try to keep it down. We had two things in great abundance in that garden - fennel and rosemary. Just about everything else I planted got eaten by snails, slugs and various other pests, and the Chinese vegetables were always the first to get ravaged.

Yeah, there are suburbs of Perth where it is not permitted to fell a tree, or even to lop off dangerous over-hanging heavy branches that could kill someone. People go overboard about it, even when common sense should tell them that a tree has become dangerous and needs some judicious cutting back.

I love trees, but I'm not suicidal about them. But I prefer productive trees, so my inclination is to grow fruit and nut trees, although what the pests don't ruin the damned black cockatoos come and rip to shreds. I planted an almond tree, and the year it produced its first really good crop of almonds, I was just savouring the almonds ripening, because there's nothing like almonds picked straight off the tree, when a flock of black cockatoos descended on the tree and stripped in bare.

I understand the desire for productive trees. My landscaping includes several blueberry bushes--that species grows wild in this part of the US. Alas, they barely produce enough fruit to top one bowl of oatmeal, even if the fruits all ripened at once (they don't).

I am fortunate to be in a climate that generally sees adequate rainfall year round, so most houses here don't have irrigation systems, as is common in places with an identifiable dry season, inadequate overall rainfall, or both. The primary limitation I have is winter frost: I am in USDA hardiness zone 5.

That Wikipedia article demonstrates what a nice thing the Gulf Stream is for northwestern Europe. At 43 degrees north latitude, I am in the same hardiness zone as Umeå (64N), Kiruna (68N, but in a regional warm spot), and Longyearbyen (78N), the latter being the principal city of Svalbard. Martin can grow things in his garden that won't survive in mine: Stockholm is zone 7, as is Tromsø.

Our Everyday Path

aardvarchaeology — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 07:20:56 +0000

Our Everyday Path

Three years ago when we moved into our house, the stones of our patio were newly laid and all level. Since then we have been walking across that surface, usually along the diagonal between the patio entrance + shed door and the front door of the house, sometimes around the corner to the compost container. Every step we've taken has caused a stone to settle infinitesimally into the substratum. Every step the kids have taken has on average made a slightly greater impact as they've grown. And when it rains, you can see that it all adds up. If I had a more volatile psychological constitution, this sight would probably be enough to trigger a full-blown mid-life crisis.

aardvarchaeology Thu, 12/08/2011 - 02:20

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homeownership

I absolutely love observations like this. For a while I was thinking on working on an art project that would involve recording the traces of our everyday actions and how they created patterns in an archaeological record of the recent past.

After all, archaeology is about recognizing how human agency has shaped things in the world. My favourite things are steps that have been worn down in the centre of many years of people using them.

In one of the lovelier buildings on campus, the wide marble steps reflect 80 years of people maneuvering around the turns as they go up and down between floors. Each step is like an inverted distribution curve. When you stand back you can actually see the typical path of generations. You've given me an idea for a post that will involve some photography and some measurements.

When I have designed the nanotech for shifting around the ground underneath the tower of Pisa I will let you have the nanotech template. Don't do any programming errors or your town will get a Rift Valley.
--- --- --- --- --- ---
Same effect in reverse: -Are you in the habit of throwing away stuff on the ground? Keep it up across the generations and your descendants will live on top of a hill, like they do in the Middle East.

AAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!! AAAAAAHHHHHHH!!!!!! Have you built upon an old graveyard? An ancient cairn? What is that large ghostly face hovering around and behind the trees?!?!?!?!? I can see a chin! Lips! A nose?!?!?! You have offended the gods! The spirits walk amongst us! the whole lower face is seen?!?!!? The eyes! The eyes! Where are it's eyes!

*high-fives Mike*

Colours Turning on Boat Hill

aardvarchaeology — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 06:20:46 +0000

Colours Turning on Boat Hill

Here's what's currently outside my kitchen window. Rosehip in the foreground, rowan berries in the middle, and cloned white brick houses like my own in the background.

aardvarchaeology Mon, 10/24/2011 - 02:20

Tags

homeownership

Photography

So they clone houses over there too! The wonders of mechano-genetic engineering continue to amaze me.

Rosehips are common here, but no rowans. We do have sugar maples, though!

Nice... plant some of these and it will be perfect http://www.hecklerspray.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/hydnora-africana…

The seasonal changes are great, provided you live in a well-insulated house.
(Landscape eye candy: http://budsartbooks.com/prod.cfm/pc/EE12/cid/12 )

Fixing the Shed's Door

aardvarchaeology — Sun, 14 Aug 2011 06:44:54 +0000

Fixing the Shed's Door

Earlier this summer I did some upkeep on the board fence, pergola and yard gate of my house. Swapped some rotten boards and beams, put on some paint, whacked a few nails back in that had crept out. Easy work since I didn't have to design anything: I just measured the original parts and copied them with fresh material. And today I cycled to the builder's store and brought a few short boards home to fix the door of the garden shed. The lower four boards were rotten. Pleasing work, not least because I noted the need myself and did the job in my own good time.

What about you, Dear Reader? Done any carpentry lately?

aardvarchaeology Sun, 08/14/2011 - 02:44

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homeownership

"Easy work since I didn't have to design anything: I just measured the original parts and copied them with fresh material"

For copying more complex stuff I recommend a 3-D printer for rapid prototyping -see "Rule 34" by Charles Stross.

If the fence was originally designed to keep away Things from The Far Side I recommend you follow the original design to within a tolerance of one ÃngstrÃ¶m (there is a story by H. P. Lovecraft about what happens if you get sloppy about maintaining old stuff to the letter of the instructions).

Being a house owner myself I know that there are always carpentry and different projects to be done at all times pretty much. As soon as you think you have it all done, you notice something else.
I recently built a safety gate for our deck that is high up with tall stairs, I was going to simply buy a pre fabricated gate for it but decided to build one from scratch instead, went better than I thought it would actually and turned out nicely.
Now I'm pondering building some kind of fire wood storage structure but I haven't decided on a design yet.
Carpentry can indeed by very pleasing and rewarding work if you have the time to relax and do it in your own time at your own pace, however with 3 kids (and another on the way now appearently) and a million things to do I find it increasingly difficult to find enough time to do these type of projects. You have enough to do to just make things go around with the basic chores that any extra project like this unfortunately is a luxury.

I'm rebuilding my roof. It wasn't well put together to start with. Poor quality materials slapped together by people who were clearly unknowing and uncaring. On such construction problems the hardest part is deciding where to stop. Everything is, to some degree, wrong. Some of it is very clearly so wrong it needs to be ripped out and replaced. Other parts are functional but something short of right.

There is always the urge to start with a clean sheet of paper and build it right from jump street. In some cases tearing it all down and starting over is the way to go. Deciding on, and sticking to, a arbitrary transition point from old to new is always stressful. Easy to do 'just a little bit more' and 'a touch more' and ...

You probably know this but whacking nails back in is seldom a long-term solution. They will tend to back out at ever faster rates every time they get hammered back in. Substituting a larger diameter nail, ie: a 10d for an 8d, cut off to limit length if need be, works fairly well if the hole isn't too over-sized. Slathering the old nail with a suitable glue, Gorilla glue or epoxy, works and an over-sized nail and glue is belt and suspenders.

My favorite solution, my final solution, is to pull the nail out and substitute a deck screw. I've never seen a screw back out on its own.

I'm always slow to start a repair. Small jobs are fun but any job can snowball quickly. Go to replace a loose board and it is likely you find out the entire structure is questionable. A friend started a fence repair and ended up essentially replacing it. After he was done the neighbor told him the fence needed to be moved as it was across the property line. The noise and digging prompted the neighbor to look closely at where the old fence was installed. The whole thing had to be dismantled and reinstalled a few feet away. Figures the neighbor would inform him after the new fence was installed.

A good example of a one hour project growing into an expensive and stressful two week ordeal. I love the Zen feel of calm and competence working with hand tools and the warm glow of doing a job well. Years afterward I see an old project and smile.

I've gathered that unless we're talking leaky plumbing, your number one priority in house maintenance should always be the roof. If it leaks, anything you fix indoors will soon be ruined anyway.

During the time I was in high school, We roofed a barn, tore down a barn and a goat shed, took out some pens, made new pens, etc. Right before I went off to college in 1953, we were almost through with the barn. I took a small board, drove three nails into it, and installed it as a temporary latch on the barn door. It is still in use today.

Haha, that's terrific!

Last year I had to give living on a farm with a workshop and move a small terraced house with no external storage [unemployment - the scourge of the archaeologist]. This entailed disposing of my stock of wood and other materials, but I now have a sitting room fully equipped for power carpentry.

Sounds like one hell of a pick-up line. Though to keep the ladies happy you really need to have wood as well.

(OT) Yes! Fermented herring season begins on Thursday!

BTW, I am told that wood from larch trees have some natural protection against rot, unfortunately larch wood is not considered to be high quality carpentry material.

John Cleese (operating a slide projector): The larch!

Great to hear you've got some work to do, since you're so devoted to DIY-work. Having a house sure finds work for idle hands to do. We've enforced a truss and ceiling on the porch. So hopefully that will stand until we have to rebuild the roof in a couple of years. The running project now is to replace an old staircase.

... with a space elevator.

... or why not skip that intermediate technology go for the teleporting devices at once?

I may have said it before here or you may have heard it elsewhere: "A homeowner's life has two happy days: the one when he moves in and the one when he moves out."

(Actually, the fulfillment one feels when completing projects like this shed door can at least provide an illlusion of happiness for a while...)

I see, and are you thinking of purchasing a second shed?

No, woman, no cry. 'Ere little darling, don't shed no tears.

Two weeks ago I built a small box to house my British beer engine a friend of mine brought over from the UK. It fits two kegs of beer and has a small compartment for an ice pack to help lower the internal temperature a few degrees lower than room temperature.
I have zero woodshop skills, and it looks like hell, but it's functional. Anything that lets me serve beer makes me happy!

Weight vs Density of Snow On Your Roof

aardvarchaeology — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 09:30:33 +0000

Weight vs Density of Snow On Your Roof

Boat Hill, where I live since two years back, is a 70s tract-housing estate where roofs are almost flat. Snow thus tends to build up on them. Of course, pile enough snow onto any structure and it will collapse. But I've come across a curious notion here. Several neighbours have told me to beware wet snow "because it's so heavy".

They're not talking about snow that becomes secondarily soaked by rain that adds to its weight. They believe that if I have a tonne of powdery snow at -10 Celsius on my roof, I'm OK, but if that tonne approaches 0 Celsius and compacts down into a thinner, less fluffy layer, it will break my roof.

As far as I understand, they're confusing weight and density. A shovel of powdery snow is lighter than a shovel of slush. But when you shovel slush, you need to shift fewer shovels of the stuff to get your yard (or roof) free of snow.

aardvarchaeology Fri, 01/07/2011 - 04:30

Tags

homeownership

In my experience, people who have never been trained in quantitative things have a shockingly poor grasp of basic physical concepts like weight and density.

I worked with a woman not long ago, an elementary school teacher, who thought ice was heavier than water - not more dense, but that a beaker full of water would gain weight if placed in a freezer. I do not think her attitude is rare.

I can't say I'm too surprised by your conversations with your neighbours.

Water is so strange, being densest at 4 degrees C. Lucky for us -- and for the fish!

Jag trodde det hÃ¤ngde ihop med luftfuktigheten...

"Blir snÃ¶n tyngre nÃ¤r det tÃ¶ar?"
"Ja, om det samtidigt Ã¤r fuktig vÃ¤derlek, vilket Ã¤r det vanligaste. Den frÃ¥n bÃ¶rjan torra snÃ¶n drar dÃ¥ Ã¥t sig luftens fuktighet och blir tyngre."

http://www.nyteknik.se/popular_teknik/teknikfragan/article18328.ece

Alternatively, and presuming that your neighbors decide whether they need to shovel snow off their roofs primarily based on a visual assessment, what they're saying is sensible. One should be wary of wet snow because, due to its greater density, an amount that looks innocuous may in fact be a danger to structural integrity. Without hearing how it was specifically phrased by your neighbors, it's difficult to say that this is what was meant.

Johan offers a link suggesting that dry snow sponges up air humidity about 0 centigrade, whoch would add to its weight. But does that effect continue to operate once the snow has become wet through its own melting?

I think johan’s point is important enough to be translated: at warmer temperatures snow absorbs moisture from the air and becomes heavier with no apparent change in volume.

"Heavy snow" is a term often used to describe snow's water/volume ratio;

"The water content of snow may range from 3% for
very dry snow to 33% for a wet, heavy snow, to
nearly 100% for ice"
http://www.aragriculture.org/disaster/ice_snow/ice_snow_accumulation.pdf

I have covered this in my blog as it applies to archaeological buildings, with a pitched roof, snow is an important factor in the design of a built environment.
[flat rooves are archaeologically untested, and are probably best avoided for a few centuries].

One potential issue is that depending on whether you get direct sunlight and how well insulated your ceiling is, you may have portions of the roof with temperatures above the melting point, from which some of the snow will melt and run off toward other parts of the roof. The risk with shallow roof pitches is that an ice dam will develop which prevents such melt water from running off the roof, instead allowing it to re-freeze right behind or on top of the ice dam, or even worse, to find a path through the roof and into the house. That, rather than snow load, may be the issue for you. I presume Sweden has standards for the amount of pressure (force, in the form of the snow's weight, divided by the area of the roof) due to snow loading the roof has to withstand, as places in the northern US generally do. In the part of the US (New Hampshire) where I live, preventing ice dams from growing is usually a more urgent issue than preventing roof collapse, the exceptions coming when there has been a particularly heavy snowfall (even then, my roof has withstood a series of snowstorms that dumped over a meter of snow in the space of a week, with 80 cm of that coming in a single storm).

The site that Johan links to describes an experiment where a bucket of snow held at 1 Celsius gained 2% in weight in one day, and then lost 1% the second. On the third day all of it had melted, and the resulting water weighed 103% of the original. Hardly significant changes.

I'm concerned about what my body weight, boot heels and snow shovel might do to the roof paper if I went up there.

I come from Colorado and heard variants on "beware wet snow because it is heavy" expression often. I don't think the expression is necessarily incorrect: for a given volume, wetter, denser, snow weighs more than dry snow. That was always the meaning I ascribed to it.

Though your roof won't mind either way, weight is properly measured in newtons.

When it rains on snow the rainwater cannot run off but is collected in the snow. And whatever the measure its heavy.

The 'holier than thine neighbor'approach taken by Dr. Martin,the skeptic and apparently 'knower of all things'omits the common sense approach taken by his 'cretin' neighbors. Should you have 6 inches of light powdery snow on the roof of your hovel, and 6 inches of heavy slush on that same roof, the SLUSHY SNOW will weigh more, and be more likey to cave in that yurt of yours!! Smugly, Dr. Martin ignore these local Neanderthals, and watch your roof cave in on you and your arrogant profile.

The Brummel... Ask yourself why ice floats on water. Tell me then which is heavier...the same VOLUME of ice or of water? Then tell me then what the Earth would be like if water did not expand as it freezes. Perhaps contracted like every other substance when it freezes or cools! Why do you think that happens...expansion rather than contraction? Would it perhaps sink? What would happen then to any and all bodies of water as they froze. Would all bodies of water freeze if those were the conditions..water contracting as it freezes.
Have you ever given that any thought?
Have you been trained in 'quantitative things'?

Let's measure and calculate the snow load (kg/m2).

http://www.ymparisto.fi/default.asp?node=15820&lan=fi

dmab; I thought you were going to make a sincere effort to stop dropping acid this new year..oh well...try again!

Actually Martin, in snowy areas there are roof 'shovels' designed to remove roof snow from the ground. They have extensions and will easily do the building you picture.Your local hardware store will have them. Be sure not to stand under that part of the roof when the snow slides off...especially if it is that elusive 'heavy snow'. Perhaps one of your 'notsobrite' neighbors could show you how to use one.

I live a few houses down the road from Martin in an identical house. Apparently, according to the insurance people, the greater risk of the snow and the melting of the snow is not a cave in of the roof due to the weight of the snow regardless of water content. The greatest risk, from a general insurance claim statistic point of view, is leaks in the roof allowing the water to enter the roof and damaging the property. Please don't take that as a guarantee that your roof won't cave in, but I personally think it is less likely. Having said that I know for a fact that roofs have already caved in over the side entrance passages in some houses. But they are as you know not constructed in the same way as the roof om the rest of your house.

Martin: "I'm concerned about what my body weight, boot heels and snow shovel might do to the roof paper if I went up there."
Then don't wear your stilettos up on the roof.

More seriously, the roof SHOULD have been designed to withstand both the dead and live loads it would normally be subjected to, such as wind, snow, people doing maintenance, etc. Australian building codes have quite a large safety margin factored in, but I have no idea what Swedish codes of the 70's had.

Magnus, my side passage has no roof. I've been shoveling a lot of snow there lately to be able to reach the compost Dalek. (-;

Eleanora, Swedish building codes in the 70s were pretty strict.

Has anyone here ever heard of the roof of a private residential house -- as opposed to, say, a giant mall or sports arena -- caving in under too much snow?

Phinneus, check your reading comprehension. I didn't say what you seem to think I said. Neither did Dr. Rundkvist. At what point did either of us discuss solid ice floating on liquid water? How is that property of H2O relevant to the current discussion?

The water-absorbing properties of snow are something new to me. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, but I'm curious about the temperature effect - does snow absorb atmospheric water more at higher temperatures because of some structural difference in the snow (shape / size of flakes and pores, for example), or because warmer air carries more water, all else being equal?

Tor, I seem to remember cases of residential buildings (houses and apartment buildings) having damaged roofs (not necessarily caving in or totally collapsing) in Victoria, B.C., Canada, during a very severe storm near New Year's day 1996/1997. Very large amounts (more than 30 cm) of very-high-water-content snow were deposited in something like 24 hours in a city that in a normal year receives very little snow (I think the long-term average is something less than 10 cm / year).

Hey, Im a new homeowner in MN and I have a house that was built in the 70's and looks very similar to the one pictured above. I havent gotten a chance to remove snow from the roof and we have had alot of snow here. There is deffinately an ice damn up there and I would say about 3-5 inches of snow on the roof. Im getting pretty concerned about all the ice in the gutter and on the roof and im hearing what sounds like snow crunching comming from the roof. Its especcialy cold tonight (below 10 degrees f) and I dont really want my roof to fall on my head. What do you suppose the chances of that actually happening are? I am trying to work with some folks to help me out but Im afraid time is running short. Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

I think you can relax. An ice dam (if you do have one) is only a concern when the temperature is above the freezing point of water. And 4 inches of snow is not much. The noises you hear are probably from the snow doing things on its own, not bits of your roof cracking.

If you're concerned, get up there tomorrow, tie yourself to the chimney with a rope and shovel the snow off the roof.

A snow load of 2' 6" works out to be the equivalent of 17 lbs. 8 ozs. per square foot on your roof. Even old stick trusses are designed to carry a load on your roof of about 40 lbs. per square foot. Current day engineered trusses are 80 to 90 lbs. per square foot, there is plenty of room left for snow load.

On pitched roofs, the load is actually carried by the walls, not the trusses.

You can calculate the water content of the snow wherever you want on your house or any building. Pick a snowy spot. Use a measuring tape and measure the snow depth. Mark a foot square area. Shovel the full depth of snow/ice into one or more containers. Melt the snow and weigh the water, or measure the volume.

An imperial cup of water weighs 10 ounces or 10/16 ths. of a pound. Make sure you use the full depth of the snow since there are a number of layers, each having different water content.

If you want to shovel, do so equally, if you donât, you can
change the load factor on the roof; potentially big problems.

Also, when you are shovelling your are walking around on frozen shingles. You should leave 4" to 5" of snow on the roof (do not take it down to the wood). Moreover, you're putting pressure on those frozen shingles, they are very brittle and likely causing damage which will likely show-up months or years later.

Here are some basic calculations for those who might be interested:

1" of liquid water weighs 5 lbs. 3 ozs. per square foot. A rough calculation is that 1" of rain precipitation is 1/10th of snow precipitation or 10" of snow. That is the same as a water content of 10%. A very dry snow, the kind that falls on very cold days, can have a water content of less than half of that. Wet, heavy snow, the kind that falls at around the freezing point, can have a water content of about 30%.

Add rain to dry snow, two things happen, there is more water content since the rain is typically absorbed by the snow. The snow also starts to collapse and the depth is reduced. An inch of precipitation within a 24 hour period is unusual at any time of year. So that would add 5 lbs. 3 ozs. of load. The other thing that happens is that there is a heat loss from all roofs.

Those that have well ventilated attic spaces, which is rare even when standards are followed, will have less heat loss at the roofing surface. Since snow starts to melt with heat, a deep snow on the roof will eventually reduce in depth due to heat loss as well as sublimation, direct change from snow to water vapour. A similar thing occurs with Sunlight on the exposed layers.

Look at a few properties with houses and free standing sheds. Since the sheds are likely not heated, the snow depth on the sheds is typically quite a bit deeper than that on the house. Everything being equal though, the two buildings should have similar weights of snow on them. The house may
have less since it is higher and thus, on windy days, more snow tends to be blown off than on a lower building.

Let's for good measure, assume that the snow on the roof of an average house at the moment is 12" deep and that there is a layer immediately adjacent to the roof surface which has a high water content of 50% and is for good measure, 1" thick. That gives it as weight of say 3 lbs. Then let's give the rest of the 12 inches at 20% water content an average weight of 12 lbs. per square foot for good measure.

That gives us a snow load of 15 lbs. per square foot. Older trusses were designed for 40 lbs. per square foot.

MY GARAGE TOTALLY COLLAPSED LAST NIGHT DUE TO SNOW ON ITS ROOF. IT HAS NOT SNOWED FOR OVER TWO WEEKS. NO RAIN HAS FALLEN. IT HAS BEEN THAWING MOST DAYS AND FREEZING AT NIGHT FOR THE LAST WEEK OR SO. SO IF I UNDERSTAND IT DID NOT GET HEAVIER FROM THE DAILY MELTING, WHY DID IT COLLAPSE TWO WEEKS AFTER THE LAST SNOW WEIGHT WAS ADDED? i AM GUESSING THE STRESS OVER TIME DID IT.

SHOULD i BE FRIGHTENED TO SLEEP IN THE HOUSE TONIGHT?

i AM GETTING PARANOID BUT IT IS NEARLY MIDNIGHT. HOPE I WILL STILL BE HERE IN THE MORNING.

Maybe you should get up with a rope and a shovel, tie yourself to the chimney and shovel some snow off your roof to ease your mind?

Gardening Clearance Cairn

aardvarchaeology — Sat, 02 Oct 2010 03:03:38 +0000

Gardening Clearance Cairn

I once produced a small shell midden in my kitchen. Just now I made a small clearance cairn in the garden. My wife has ordered a peony bush from Gansu in China via a plant dealer in Turku, Finland, and I picked it up at a trucking firm the other day. Now it fell upon me to dig the hole and plant the thing. While digging I set aside all the stones I came upon, as lo-tech farmers have done for millennia, only at a smaller scale. And thus my little cairn.

[More about archaeology, gardening; arkeologi, trÃ¤dgÃ¥rd.]

aardvarchaeology Fri, 10/01/2010 - 23:03

Tags

archaeology

homeownership

Can't you buy peonies in Sweden, or was this some special variety?

You know, you owe it to some far-future archeology student flailing around for a PhD project to plant a 17th century erotic figure and an 11th century coin together with something contemporary under the rocks.

El, this is apparently something quite special. There were peonies in the garden where I grew up.

Janne, what I really want to do is bury all the stuff you suggest along with something collected on a trip to the far future.

Failing an ability to travel to the future, you may have to settle for stuff from as far flung places as possible, eg, Janne's erotic statue - maybe from Italy, some Viking silver work, a Chinese lion, perhaps a stainless steel statue of a fairy or emperor penguin, a carved emu egg (how would you preserve it?) and something that typifies South America - maybe a stone llama or something from a dig that's already several centuries old.
This could become a fun game.

Maybe I could get one of my elderly neighbours to kill and dismember another elderly neighbour and then bury the body along with my cache of exotic objects.

Be sure to include a clay tablet (fired) inscribed with mirror-writing Klingon which translates as "Ha ha! Wrong cache."

Who cares about the rocks in the way! It's just soil with some larger than average particles. What kind of peony was it? A tree peony? Come on, give with the good stuff.

A rockii tree peony of a breed named Long yuan zhuang shi, "Dragon hero". There were actually two plants in the box, slightly intertwined but not joined.

Very pretty, but I can't believe the prices quoted on the wbsite I looked them up on!

You should also dig some post holes at random spots in the garden, interspersed with fire pits, and let the posts rot in the holes. Those poor future archaeologists could get bored excavating 21st century suburbs and landfills and yearn for simpler periods.

My toil at Ãshusby in Norrsunda '92 and SÃ¤ttuna in Kaga '08 convinced me that it should be considered a crime against humanity to dig a pit or posthole without putting anything interesting in it.

So, I guess you should have buried some statury or coins or something under the peony.

Dildos seem to be huge hits with future researchers: http://scienceblogs.com/aardvarchaeology/2010/07/stone_age_dildo_found_…

A buddy of mine actually found a modern dildo at a site he dug a few years ago. It was at a highway crossing in SmÃ¥land.

Ant Killer

aardvarchaeology — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 06:20:43 +0000

Ant Killer

Last summer I battled with wasps: this years it's ants. Small black ones have underground nests in our yard, and they usually don't bother us much. But a hot and dry summer recently inspired them to investigate our house, where they found two things they really like: sugar and water. When we returned from a trip to the archipelago, a busy ant highway stretched from the side door through a bedroom, a corridor, the dining room and into the kitchen, where the main destinations were our candy cupboard and the sink. Thousands of tiny insects.

I bought some insecticide. It looks like pale pink ice-cream sprinkles, and in fact consists mainly of sugar. But mixed into the sugar are two chemicals: one that makes the stuff taste awful to children and other large animals, and another that kills insects. It's imidakloprid, a synthetic nicotine analog. I put a pinch of the stuff in each nest opening I could find out in the yard, and placed a small dish of it by the ants' entry-point into our house.

It was frighteningly effective. After a couple of hours, that busy ant highway across our floor was gone. Our yard was also deserted. All that remained were a few dead ants. Apparently, most of them ran home when they started to feel sick. And none of them were of course smart enough to avoid the bait: they'd climb over the dead and dying to reach the stuff and gobble it up.

I love the smell of imidakloprid in the morning. It smells like... victory.

[More about ants, insecticide; myror, bekÃ¤mpningsmedel.]

aardvarchaeology Thu, 07/15/2010 - 02:20

Tags

biology

homeownership

Don't declare victory yet - I keep winning the battles and losing the war.

I attack nests about once a week in summer, and about once a month in winter. The stuff works, everything is dead and laid waste. Then I turn around and the little bastards have made new nests and are again marching resolutely through our games room (not board games, don't get excited - it contains my weight training gear) towards the kitchen.

I'm kind of torn about this, because they clean up the corpses of the earthworms who commit seppuku on our outdoor brick paving every time it rains. But when they invade the house, they have to go.

I have similar issues. What brand of insecticide is it you used?

Last year we had excellent results with Terro liquid ant bait. It's borax in sugary solution, so relatively safe. Put some drops on pieces of cardboard and the ants swarm to it. Then they stop showing up...

You bastard! I'm organizing the reinforcements and will be sending them your way shortly.

I'll have to check this stuff out. My house is currently under attack; we've tried the ant baits that worked so well last year, and the mega-nuke stuff that one of the local exterminators uses, but it appears that the Ant-Borg have adapted.

Hmmm, I'm wondering if your ant remedy hasn't killed the combined RSS feed for Science Blogs. It stopped working last night. :(

Now you'll have Myrmecos mad at you.

Read "Empire of the Ants" by Bernard Werber. Excellent science fiction!

Regis, this is a Swedish brand, "Myrr". Check the Wikipedia article about imidakloprid for other brands.

Alex, haha, I forgot that Sb has an ant infestation of its own! (-;

Bob, ouch, I'll check with the Overlords.

I've had luck with Amdro. Mostly for tackling fire ants, welcome to Florida, but it also seems to work on other varieties. I've been told it is fairly safe.
Then again you have northern ants and Amdro is based on grits. Yankees don't eat grits. LOL.

I had grits in Chapel Hill, NC two years ago. Pretty bland, but not bad. The biscuits and gravy were more challenging simply through their great density. I must learn to order from the children's menu when in the US.

I was wondering if anyone would get the grits reference.

To those who don't know, grits are kind of like rice. Bland with a mild flavor all their own they mainly pick up whatever is added.

Various proportions of the holy trinity of southern cooking; salt, sugar and lard; get you different flavors. Top with gravy - flour added to drippings from cooking fatback (bacon in modern kitchens)and a pinch of sugar and salt - and your doing genuine southern style grits.

Most modern grits served in the south have far too little lard and salt to meet traditional tastes. Old timers were as likely to stir in the drippings from frying up the pork to give them flavor. Cheese grits are the same idea but a modern invention and, as such things go, not bad. Next time ask for cheese grits (add Tabasco for a zing) or grits with sausage gravy. I can't say your sure to like it but you won't starve and, as you noted, southern cooking will stay with you and keep you going. Around here they call it 'stick to your ribs' food.

Grits allowed to sit out a bit can be refried like you re-fry rice. Refried and smothered with sausage gravy makes a decent dish. Of course southern cooking is heavy with lots of calories, as befits brown-dirt farmers and stoop labor, using cheap ingredients. Corn, rice, sugar cane and pork being mainstays.

As it is, traditional high calorie food with modern low expenditure lifestyle has caused a general widening of the population. It doesn't help much that poor farmers used to only get one full meal a day (supper) and outwork their mules, while modern folks eat three a day and sit on their rears.

Then again perhaps it is the new 'space age' look. I read a report, from NASA as I remember it, that suggested that sending up astronauts overweight and feeding them fewer calories along the way, so they are in shape on arrival, was more efficient than sending them thin and feeding them more during transit. Evidently fat stored in the body is about as efficient as it gets in terms of calories per kilo delivered. I bust out laughing when I picture the classic "Right Stuff" scene, astronauts walking line abreast, with them weighing twenty stone each. Like sumo wrestlers in Mylar suits strutting their stuff.

Wouldn't that be special?

Haha, that astronoaut calorie transport calculation is priceless!

Now I've got a plague of crickets near my herb and vegetable garden.

They don't attack the crops, but I don't like them - they crunch when you tread on them.

Anyone know of any good cricket poison that is sufficiently non-toxic to put near my herbs and veges?

Smother them in chocolate? (-;

Mmm, crunchy centres.

I might have to get a flame-thrower.

The Remains of My Neighbour's House

aardvarchaeology — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 07:50:14 +0000

The Remains of My Neighbour's House

My house. It's L-shaped; of its six walls, only these two lack windows.

In January, a house near ours caught fire in the middle of the night and was pretty much burned out. A malfunctioning electrical blanket on a couch in the living room was the cause. Nobody got hurt. But it was scary, because Boat Hill is all kedjehus, "chain houses", separate nearly identical brick buildings with narrow roofed spaces between them, forming contiguous blocks. The house that burned was in the block next to ours, a stone's throw away.

An identical house seen from the same perspective.

This morning they started to tear the ruin down, using a back-hoe with a huge clawed pincer. A lot of the furnishings were still inside. No attempt was made to separate materials. Me & Jrette saw a blackened dressing gown still hanging on its hook on the bathroom's remaining wall. We saw the claw grab two wardrobes and crunch them up like an empty milk carton. Char-edged pages from a spy novel were strewn across the street. And I felt a little queasy, because as I said, the houses here are identical. That ruin is what my own house would look like if it caught fire and had to be demolished.

Here's what the site of the burned house looked like on 8 July after the demolition and clean-up was done.

[More blog entries about housefires; eldsvÃ¥da.]

aardvarchaeology Tue, 07/06/2010 - 03:50

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homeownership

I agree to the medium nice feeling of seing this house demolished. From my kitchen window we had a clear view of the fire. It took about 10 min from a tiny fire in the absolute back of the living room to have engulfed all of the livingroom and kitchen. A scary sight to witness.

Still, it will be nice to not have to smell burned out wood every day when I come home to my house (oposite of the demilished building in the picture). I am also looking forward to see what a brand new boat hights chain house will look like :) Will they build it identical as the rest of the houses or will they improve some of the points that has been identified over the years as being medium good?

Cheers,
/Magnus

You guys really had a nasty night there. I didn't find out about the whole thing until next day's afternoon!

When my daughter and I visited the site this morning she said, "It smells just like in China". Coal smoke...

That would be an excavator.

So would I.

Out of idle curiosity, how often do you find evidence of housefires, demolition, and re-building in your archaeological digs? I was under the impression that building-destroying fires were not at all uncommon prior to the advent of electricity, and that the frequency is less now than in the past (though, obviously, still not zero).

Evidence for houses or entire town neighbourhoods burning down is common. So common in some rural areas, in fact, that it has been suggested that there was a custom where a house would be torched when its owner died. Reconstruction is also common, but people rarely build exact replicas of the previous house. Architectural fashions change.

I think I finally figured out why you call it Boat Hill. I'll say that's better than Boot Hill!
There is a similar flatroofed "chain" settlement not far from where I am, dating to the early seventies, with the streets named after people who opposed Nazi rule during WWII.

It's BÃ¥thÃ¶jden in Swedish. You've got the date right: 1972.

In East Berlin many streets are named for radical left activists who fought the Nazis in the streets during the 30s. I have a feeling that many of them were actually just red versions of Horst Wessel...

Here in the West, these guys didn't get many streets named after them for some reason. Of course, street fighting or even left-wing publishing was out of the question after '33 anyway.

That's a thought - how do flat rooves go with snow loading? Evidently OK, but it doesn't seem like an obvious way to design them.

I knew something was bothering me about that photo, apart from the lack of windows on those two walls, which I presume is for privacy. It's the flat roof. I realize Sweden is actually pretty dry, comparatively, and high latitude, so I guess you don't have high rainfall intensities to design for.

"It took about 10 min from a tiny fire in the absolute back of the living room to have engulfed all of the livingroom and kitchen." This event is a cautionary tale against highly flammable furnishings.

They're not flat, just not very steep. It works well. But a neighbour just told me about one winter when a northerly blizzard blew fine snow into the attics of several houses here whose vents had lost their original mesh covers. When that snow melted, the 70s fire-hazardous plastic ceilings suddenly became pregnant with melt water...