Notices by Martin Rundkvist (mrundkvist@archaeo.social)

"They're becoming increasingly common, especially in cities: cargo bikes used as environmentally friendly means of transporting goods or children. But how safe are these eco-bikes? A test by the North Rhine-Westphalia State Traffic Safety Association has now revealed something alarming: 9 out of 10 cargo bike riders would not survive their bikes being hit by a cruise missile."

https://www.der-postillon.com/2023/05/risiko-lastenrad.html

Hey palaeontologists! If I'm a colleague of yours 1MY from now: will I see the Late Pleistocene Megafaunal Extinction and the currently ongoing #Anthropocene Extinction as separate events?

#palaeontology

#Goodmorning from overcast Fisksätra. Today's work on my fieldwork report, maybe lunch with old dad, then cycle into town for dinner and a few games of Netrunner. What are you up to?

@aral We've been making random geoengineering interventions for 300 years. There's an argument that we should learn to do intentional ones.

If you hear about a job where it helps to have over 200 publications in academic and popular #archaeology, plus 20 years' experience as a journal editor, plus a solid record as a popular teacher, then please give me a nudge!

#jobs #academia #getfedihired #fedihire

@skinnylatte Have you seen the groups of mostly elderly amateur Beijing / Shanghai Opera performers who gather in parks and play their favourite scenes? Awesome.

Playing Mexican Train, the big main game in my daughter's boyfriend's family. #boardgames

Has everyone in the US realised that because of Republican voters, their country has just lost all the international stature and credibility it has amassed since their ancestors entered World War I? It doesn't matter who wins the next presidential election. The one after that may still deliver another insane Republican populist who is fun to watch on TV. We simply can't trust that country's citizens any more.

#eupol

20th century historians -- who are being defunded in droves in the US because of their perceived politics -- can tell the Bonehead Administration that institutional discrimination against an ethnic minority was a major reason for why the US, not Nazi Germany, developed the A Bomb.

#nuclear #fascism #history

My dad showed me a picture of his buddy the alternative health practitioner. When he suffered a stroke some years back, his wife the intuitive distance healer didn't call an ambulance. She called an osteopath. So the poor old man didn't get the swift treatment that saves many stroke patients from severe disablement nowadays. Alternative medicine may not mostly be damaging in itself, but it costs money and it keeps people from getting evidence-based care.

#health

“In everyone’s pocket right now is a computer far more powerful than the one we flew on Voyager. I don’t mean your cell phone — I mean the key fob that unlocks your car.”

— Rich Terrile, JPL scientist and member of the Voyager imaging team

#space

@quokka1

Nurses got tired of the too-short screenlock timeout on a Swedish hospital's computers. They placed an electric blood-bag shaker next to each computer and put the mouse on it.

#security

In what was apparently not a sick joke, the Murmansk branch of the Russian governing party has given condolence gifts to the mothers of soldiers from the region killed in Ukraine. This has met with criticism. A lot of it.

They gave these bereaved women meat grinders.

https://www.lemonde.fr/international/article/2025/03/08/en-russie-des-hachoirs-a-viande-offerts-aux-meres-des-combattants-morts-sur-le-front_6577097_3210.html

#russia #ukraine #murmansk

LinkedIn wants me to add this Swedish academic as a contact. He's inadvertently funny because he's given his title there as "full professor", which means "drunk professor" in Swedish. 😄

I've lived my life under two main nuclear umbrellas, and now both of them are owned by bad guys. Fuck you, nuclear umbrella owners.

@annika Please explain

#Goodmorning from Fisksätra. It's 2 Celsius, dark and drizzling here. I'm giving an interview today to a PhD student from a Turkish university. He's looking at how archaeological knowledge is communicated to the public through digital platforms. I've been doing that for a bit less than 30 years now. What are you up to?

#scicomm #archaeology

Looks like my dear Polish friends can't afford to renew my contract after 28 February, largely because of what the Russian invasion of Ukraine has done to the cost of running a large public institution with a lot of buildings. So my new year's resolution is to find a new job, one where I get to put on pants in the morning and commute to a workplace where there are other people whom I collaborate with. 1/2

#jobs #academia #publishing

Mass resignation of the editorial board of the Journal of Human #Evolution. #Elsevier has gone bad. Very bad, in fact.

#academia #science #publishing #paleoanthropology

The study of how people conceptualise Clean vs Unclean is a classic field in anthropology and comparative religion. If you touch an apple or a spoon with your bare hand, this does not make it Unclean in my local culture. But the dish rag that hangs on the water faucet in most Swedish kitchens is Unclean. I don't want to use a spoon or eat an apple that has been wiped with the dish rag. 1/2