Notices by Martin Rundkvist (mrundkvist@archaeo.social)

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

For this reason I was kind of shocked when an acquaintance of mine offhandedly wiped a cutting board with the dish rag. This, in my view, made the cutting board and any food that touched it Unclean until the board would be washed with soap and warm water.

What's everybody's opinion?

2/2

@skinnylatte I suggest you give the classic Beijing breakfast soup a pass. It consists largely of pork liver.

@skinnylatte @iBlame

"Salah ad-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub (c. 1137 – 4 March 1193), commonly known as Saladin, was the founder of the Ayyubid dynasty. Hailing from a Kurdish family, he was the first sultan of both Egypt and Syria."

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

@SuperDicq In Swedish too, but it only refers to 1 January etc.

Datum is Latin for "given". In Medieval letters you wrote "Datum/Given in Paris 1st Sunday after Ascension" before affixing your wax seal. This led to the English words date and dating.

The plural of datum is data. Givens, given facts. This is why the French word for database is base des données. A base of givens.

#language #database

This is amazing from a Swedish perspective. After grad students formed a #labour #union at Boston #University (privately owned, est. 1839) and striked for seven months, BU has now discontinued admissions to PhD programmes in a dozen humanities and social sciences. Including my subject, #archaeology. The two Deans in charge "referenced the new collective bargaining agreement multiple times as the source of what they called 'budgetary implications'."

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/admissions/graduate/2024/11/19/bu-suspends-admissions-humanities-other-phd-programs

#academia #boston