January Pieces Of My Mind #1 [Aardvarchaeology]

We built a snow entity. I shall miss Cousin E.

Waiting to blow

• The introductions to academic paper anthologies often consist of descriptions of the contents. I never read them. That information is in the title to each contribution. Pointless.
• H.G. Wells became public domain on 1 January!
• My new project is writing a Latin grammar in Pidgin English.
• Have you ever been to a Yule Spruce Looting event?
• The blotter pad at the bottom of a supermarket meat tray would probably work well as a wound dressing or a panty liner.
• Be it known that I cooked 1/4 of a goose with wine, garlic, onions, celery and carrots for dinner, and that the Rundkvist ladies ate several helpings each.
• Movie: Stranger Than Fiction. Meta-literary story about a man who finds his life being narrated by an unwitting novelist. Grade: OK.
• Free academic style tip. Do not write “Ben’s car was quite a large car”. It’s redundant. Write “Ben had a large car”.
• Most of Kungsträdgården in Stockholm doesn’t deserve to be called a park. It’s a tarmacked surface with many small holes in which trees grow.
• Told Junior I’d had toast & marmalade for a night snack. “Isn’t that kind of a 50-y-o thing?” “I’m just five years and a few months from 50.” “Really?! You seem more kind of 30ish to me.”
• Birds need to eat more in the winter to stay warm. Realised recently that they also have way less daylight to find each day’s meals by.
• “Nervous breakdown” is not a clinically used term in psychiatry or psychology. There is an academic literature about what laypeople might mean by it.
• Reading a paper about the insertion of large mosques into 1960s council housing projects on Stockholm’s fringes. The author hints that all people want to shop and/or practice religion. And I realise that I am a strange man, whose lifestyle would create strange town planning if more people were like me. I am hostile to shopping and religion. I don’t need public urban spaces. I want to spend my time at home or at my friends’ homes, with occasional trips into the woods or to museums. I want to order minimal quantities of needful stuff on-line.
• My study debt is down to $3,100 = SEK 28,000. It bought me a PhD of highly questionable market value.
• I put all the nasty chocolates in the compost bin.
• Why doesn’t government bailout of failing banks make them public property?
• Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t “coin spill” a type of archaeological context that has been discovered and named by amateur detectorists? It means small coin hoard.
• I wish I could avoid all news about the US for four years with a possibility for extension.
• Always surprises me when fellow Lefties romanticise extralegal action. If we take that direction, then what argument can we advance against neo-Nazis doing likewise?
• Love the shave and shower at the end of illness.
• A huge proportion of Sweden’s able-bodied males were culled young in the 17th century because they were conscripted and sent south to die from dysentery or more rarely musket wounds. It’s a typical population bottleneck with an unusual selection mechanism. I wonder what it did to our genetics.
• I’m becoming increasingly convinced that the only art anyone really needs is @70sscifiart.
• Received a couple of paper manuscripts to review. Encouraging to feel useful.

from ScienceBlogs http://ift.tt/2jaKQXI

We built a snow entity. I shall miss Cousin E.

Waiting to blow

• The introductions to academic paper anthologies often consist of descriptions of the contents. I never read them. That information is in the title to each contribution. Pointless.
• H.G. Wells became public domain on 1 January!
• My new project is writing a Latin grammar in Pidgin English.
• Have you ever been to a Yule Spruce Looting event?
• The blotter pad at the bottom of a supermarket meat tray would probably work well as a wound dressing or a panty liner.
• Be it known that I cooked 1/4 of a goose with wine, garlic, onions, celery and carrots for dinner, and that the Rundkvist ladies ate several helpings each.
• Movie: Stranger Than Fiction. Meta-literary story about a man who finds his life being narrated by an unwitting novelist. Grade: OK.
• Free academic style tip. Do not write “Ben’s car was quite a large car”. It’s redundant. Write “Ben had a large car”.
• Most of Kungsträdgården in Stockholm doesn’t deserve to be called a park. It’s a tarmacked surface with many small holes in which trees grow.
• Told Junior I’d had toast & marmalade for a night snack. “Isn’t that kind of a 50-y-o thing?” “I’m just five years and a few months from 50.” “Really?! You seem more kind of 30ish to me.”
• Birds need to eat more in the winter to stay warm. Realised recently that they also have way less daylight to find each day’s meals by.
• “Nervous breakdown” is not a clinically used term in psychiatry or psychology. There is an academic literature about what laypeople might mean by it.
• Reading a paper about the insertion of large mosques into 1960s council housing projects on Stockholm’s fringes. The author hints that all people want to shop and/or practice religion. And I realise that I am a strange man, whose lifestyle would create strange town planning if more people were like me. I am hostile to shopping and religion. I don’t need public urban spaces. I want to spend my time at home or at my friends’ homes, with occasional trips into the woods or to museums. I want to order minimal quantities of needful stuff on-line.
• My study debt is down to $3,100 = SEK 28,000. It bought me a PhD of highly questionable market value.
• I put all the nasty chocolates in the compost bin.
• Why doesn’t government bailout of failing banks make them public property?
• Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t “coin spill” a type of archaeological context that has been discovered and named by amateur detectorists? It means small coin hoard.
• I wish I could avoid all news about the US for four years with a possibility for extension.
• Always surprises me when fellow Lefties romanticise extralegal action. If we take that direction, then what argument can we advance against neo-Nazis doing likewise?
• Love the shave and shower at the end of illness.
• A huge proportion of Sweden’s able-bodied males were culled young in the 17th century because they were conscripted and sent south to die from dysentery or more rarely musket wounds. It’s a typical population bottleneck with an unusual selection mechanism. I wonder what it did to our genetics.
• I’m becoming increasingly convinced that the only art anyone really needs is @70sscifiart.
• Received a couple of paper manuscripts to review. Encouraging to feel useful.

from ScienceBlogs http://ift.tt/2jaKQXI