Aardvarchaeology

A Blurred Pornographic Vision, Sir

Category: Music

Here's a brand new and particularly fine piece of world-weary goth rock from prolific Uppsala decadents Kurtz. Ladies and gentlemen, I bring you "Sex Cult 10". And don't miss the band's RSS feed!

Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 0 Comments

Email Ghosts

Category: Tech

I correspond with a lot of people and my email program remembers them all. Every time I type in the first few letters of an address, Thunderbird suggests a list of people it thinks I might want to write to. The software of course knows nothing about what goes on in the world around it, and so blithely continues to suggest the addresses even of people who have died.

I have heard of ghost email that has been sitting in some screwed-up mail server for months and only reached its adressee after the death of the person who wrote it. But this is something else. My computer wants me to write letters to dead people.

Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 3 Comments

Only Population Size Really Matters for the Environment

Category: Biology • NOIBN

Here's a grim thought about the environment.

There is no way of life for humans on Earth that is ecologically sustainable for a global population of more than a billion. Our per capita environmental footprint doesn't really matter at this stage.

If we retain our current population and return to a Palaeolithic lifestyle, we're still fucked in the not-too-long run. If we quit having so many children and get back down to a global population in the hundreds of millions, it won't matter any more how each of us splurges and consumes.

You don't need to recycle milk cartons. What you really need to do is convince people to have no children. Two good ways to do this is to give all women at least a high school education, and to convince the Catholic Church that contraceptives are a gift from God.

The population will of course come down eventually. We choose whether this will happen by us not having so many children, or by billions of people dying catastrophically.

Posted by Martin R at 5:17 AM • 63 Comments

One Laptop Per Child and One For You

Category: Children • Tech

I accompanied my son's new class to the Stockholm Museum of Technology today. An investment -- it's good for me to get to know everybody, and it's good for Junior that everybody knows me as a present and available dad.

At the museum, just about the first thing I saw was the XO laptop, about which I've heard so much on Digital Planet. This is the machine developed by the One Laptop Per Child project, known as the "$100 laptop" (though it hasn't quite come down to that yet). Having lugged all 3.6 kilos of my four-year-old Dell Inspiron 6000 through the streets of Lund and Linköping for two days, I instantly desired the tiny XO. That's the kind of size my next computer will have.

The XO went into production a year ago, with a run of a million machines projected for 2008. 300,000 have been delivered only to Uruguay. 11,000 are in Afghanistan. It's a ruggedised wifi-centric Linux machine with highly innovative screen technology and gigabyte of flash memory for storage. No fan and no hard drive -- no moving internal parts that can fail.

A second round of the Give One, Get One (G1G1) program will open on Monday 17 November, organised through Amazon. For about $399, £254, €312 plus shipping, you can give an XO laptop to a child in the Third World and get one for yourself as well -- or pass it on to a kid you know. Perhaps worth considering for your Christmas shopping?

[More blog entries about olpc, xolaptop, onelaptopperchild; onelaptopperchild.]

Posted by Martin R at 5:08 PM • 3 Comments

Non-Chicken Laid First Chicken Egg

Category: Biology

What came first, the chicken or the egg? Easy, you say, eggs were laid by other animals aeons before the first chicken saw the light of day.

But what came first, the first chicken egg or the first chicken? This boils down to whether a chicken egg is one laid by a chicken or one out of which a chicken can hatch. Only the latter definition allows the question to remain open to discussion.

Biologically, a member of the chicken species could be defined by a list of alleles that must be present in its DNA if we're to call it a chicken. And somewhere, sometime, the first bird that fulfilled that definition hatched. It hatched out of an egg laid by a non-chicken. As an adult, the first chicken (being lonely) probably mated with a bird that did not quite fulfil our definition of chickenhood, and so the first chicken probably laid non-chicken eggs. Out of these eggs hatched birds that almost, but not quite, fulfilled our definition of chickenhood. In subsequent generations, chicken eggs became more and more common. Later, after the geologically instantaneous speciation period, birds fulfilling the chicken species-definition became common and so chicken eggs were reliably produced generation after generation.

As they are still today: I boiled one Wednesday morning and served it to my daughter with soy sauce and a bowl of pao fan rice re-run gruel.

Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 21 Comments

Wikipedia Academy, Lund

Category: NOIBN

I'm at the first Swedish Wikipedia Academy conference in Lund. Yesterday I did a talk on inclusionism vs. deletionism (vs. mergism) on the online encyclopedia (text available on-line in Swedish). Above is my audience who asked a lot of questions and were nice & friendly. Most participants are not themselves Wikipedians, they're largely librarians and teachers. I've chatted with a lot of people, notably Mathias Klang and Lennart Guldbrandsson and Lars Aronsson, and I look forward to future collaborations.

[More blog entries about wikipedia, Sweden; wikipedia, Lund.]

Posted by Martin R at 5:37 AM • 7 Comments

Respectful Vandals

Category: Archaeology • History • Sweden

Here's some characteristically excellent photography by my friend Lars of Arkland. He's recently moved to Visby on Gotland, a big old limestone slab in the Baltic Sea, where he's the Hauptnetzmeister of the National Heritage Board. The funny thing about the above picture is that it shows young vandals/graffiti artists to have a conscious and highly traditional perspective on the cultural heritage. Much more traditional than today's heritage administrators, who worry endlessly about whether their perspective is democratically informed, in touch with the times etc. While these administrators consider whether they should preserve and protect abandoned post-war factory environments, kids in Visby are defacing the town's jail from 1857 but respecting the Medieval town wall along which the jail was built.

Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 5 Comments

Tåby Figurine

Category: Archaeology • Art • Sweden

Last Thursday I went to Norrköping and checked out the Town Museum's collection of prehistoric metalwork. Most of it is decontextualised, but I did manage to collect some useful data on the movements of my 1st Millennium aristocrats across Östergötland.

Among the things I handled was, unexpectedly, the Tåby statuette. It's a stray find from a field near Tåby parish church. Arthur Nordén published it in Fornvännen 1924 and suggested a Late Medieval date about AD 1400. I don't know if the piece has been discussed in print since. It looks neither quite like Bronze Age figurines nor Early Iron Age ones. After 84 years it still poses, as Nordén put it, "an archaeological stumper". When was it made? Where? For what purpose?

[More blog entries about archaeology, art, Sweden, Medieval, middleages; arkeologi, östergötland, norrköping, medeltiden, konst.]

Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 7 Comments

Lad Lit: Ninjas and Pirates

Category: Books • History

I've taken out a couple of extremely laddish books from the library to read for fun. Seeing constant mentions of ninjas and pirates on the web, I became curious about the historical reality of these matters. So I've started on Stephen Turnbull's Warriors of Medieval Japan (2005) and I've got David Cordingly's Under the Black Flag (1995) lined up next. Here's a fine passage from Turnbull:

"... even though the Age of Warring States was a time when samurai warfare went through its biggest revolution in history under the influence of strategy and technology from both Europe and China, it was also a time of amazing nostalgia. In spite of the hail of bullets whizzing past his ears, and the ranks of lowly spearmen under his command, even the most modern samurai leader kept looking over his shoulders to a glorious and often hypothetical past. This golden age, in his view, had been a time when a battle consisted of a number of individual combats fought between honourable enemies who had singled each other out by the issuing and receving of challenges. The victor would have taken the victim's head as proof of duty done, and for his reward would have been as pleased with the name he had made for himself as with any grant of rice fields he may have been awarded by his lord." (p. 20)

My wife and I have very different reading habits. Ideally, I like to read only one book for fun at a time, and I don't stock up very far into the future. She, however, has tens of books and magazines going at any one time, and constantly amasses more. As I collect them from around the apartment I deposit them in our vertical book case. The floor and ten shelves are hers. The top two tiers are mine. Currently I have three copies there of a friend's kids' book to give away, plus three DVDs I've received as review copies for the blog, and the Swedish Tourist Association's annual that arrived yesterday.

[More blog entries about Technorati Tags: books, reading, history, japan, pirates, samurai, ninja; böcker, läsning, Japan, pirater, ninja, samurai, historia.]

Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 9 Comments