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. 😄
#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?
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
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.
"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."
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.
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'."
@anarchiv It would surprise me. Have you seen Norwegian men?
Reminds me of that pick-up artist dude who wrote books about coercing women into sex in various countries, and then he went to Denmark and everybody just ignored him. 😄
Studied the plan of a fictional ranch house near a Texas frontier town in 1875, printed in a Wild West #ttrpg scenario. It has a dedicated indoor bathroom. With a toilet. But no indoor entrance. You have to exit the building and go around the corner to enter the bathroom.
Thank you Zuckerberg. Through my personal bespoke #advertising feed you have offered me plus-size ladies fashion, Gay Sauna the Boardgame, and a membership in Sverigedemokraternas Kvinnoförbund Västsverige. And today, you go all in and offer me a bargain on an ADHD diagnostic programme. While also relentlessly feeding me pictures of 80s Goth bands that I didn't listen to.
@jannem Vid svenska högskolor är forskning ett tillval som man får försöka finansiera själv. Om en institution inte sköter undervisningen blir man däremot nedlagd.