November Pieces Of My Mind #2

Soon people will be living on the site of Lännbo school that some kids torched in 2006.
Soon people will be living on the site of Lännbo school that some kids torched in 2006.
  • Oh, will you look at that? Ten weeks into the term I find the staff lunch room with microwave ovens and free tea. Typical academic precariat long-distance commuter.
  • Last year I started to let the students suggest questions for the exam. The more I think about this idea the more I like its ramifications.
  • Free editorial advice: before you as much as touch the copy editing, check over and edit the images. Because those are the bits that will delay your whole product if you need the authors to get stuff fixed.
  • Mars scientist Steve Squyres needs to start a male chorus and a female chorus. And they should be known as Steve’s Quyres.
  • I’ve forgotten how to do pen-and-paper division.
  • Do bears have a funny hat? Does the Pope shit in the woods?
  • When are they going to run out of murderous suicidal maniacs? )-:
  • I just wrote myself a reminder in Google Calendar that Jrette will need a tick virus booster shot. At age 17, in November 2020.
  • Students have the right to look at past years’ exam questions. I set a considerably modified exam this year. This student responds blindly with the answers that would have aced him last year’s exam. *facepalm*

Author: Martin R

Dr. Martin Rundkvist is a Swedish archaeologist, journal editor, skeptic, atheist, lefty liberal, bookworm, boardgamer, geocacher and father of two.

27 thoughts on “November Pieces Of My Mind #2”

  1. “When are they going to run out of murderous suicidal maniacs?” – When we get replaced by AIs and robots?

    “Terror suspect ‘planned attack in Stockholm’ http://www.thelocal.se/20151119/sweden-terror-suspect-held-after-police-raid
    Boliden -where he and others were arrested- is a small town not far from the village where my mom grew up. Not smart to hide in a place with only 1600 inhabitants where you inevitably will be spotted by someone watching TV.
    The media coverage here has been a bit overwhelming, to put it politely.
    Anyway, people in Pakistan, Iraq and Afghanistan have to endure recurring attacks that claim more lives than the Paris attack, and western media hardly mention it. Brown-skinned and distant, those victims do not quite count…
    But I assume we are all a bit parochial in how we react to news.
    “Islamo-Nazis detonate atom bomb, flatten Gothenburg”. Meh, it is south of the Dala River so no skin off my nose. Besides those odd southerners just dance around palm trees and eat missionaries all day long, good riddance.
    “Global warming makes sea flood Stockholm!” –Schadenfreude time! The post-glacial recoil will raise the land here in the north faster than the seas can rise, besides, the Stockholm-based lumber companies scammed all the people in the north of their timber in the 19th century, so f*ck them!
    “Asteroid injures reindeer”. Now it is time for headlines!

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  8. I am pretty sure most bears are Catholic. But this may be a bias on my part, for instance, I have never gotten close enough to see if the were circumsized.
    — —
    Much ado about nothing: The dark-skinned bloke/suspect terrorist arrested by cops in North Sweden under a lot of media coverage has been released. It tuns out even the dumber terrorists do not file their real addresses on their Facebook accounts, or have their real name on the door, like this guy did.
    — —
    Mars -and most planets- are pretty boring. Before the Apollo missions an artist named Chesley Bonestell made dramatic drawings of what the Surfaces of the moon and the planets might look like. The reality was mucho disappointing, which may have contributed to the collapse of public interest from ca. 1970 onwards.
    They need to land a probe near one of the “skylights” on the moon or Mars, to get bona fide dramatic pictures from those partially collapsed caves.

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  9. China: …And this is how the current God got started!

    -Dammit, I am so going to 3D-print a thousand pottery warriors for my grave. And they will all have modern weapons.

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  15. Four inches of snow….bleh.

    Something for John: “Australian surfers stay out of the sea as great whites torment town” http://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2015/nov/22/great-white-sharks-ballina-new-south-wales-surf-resort -They are feeding the stereotypes!
    — — — — — — — — — —
    American fascist Theodore Shoebat says the people who were at the concert at the Bataclan (in Paris), they really had it coming because they were listening to evil heavy metal and were thus devil worshipers. “Don’t Pray For France, France Is A Godless Nation That Deserved To Be Attacked”.
    If you are so £@$€ Christian, why don’t you go to Syria yourself and fight ISIS, motherfucker!!!!

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  16. That was me in my body surfing days – the furthest one out, beyond the breakers.

    But no one ever saw great whites around there in those days; only grey nurses and bronze whalers. No one knows if it is because the great white population has expanded, and because they just weren’t looking for them. Great whites like to linger around the bottom, so they are hard to spot from the air.

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  17. Boliden -where he and others were arrested- is a small town not far from the village where my mom grew up. Not smart to hide in a place with only 1600 inhabitants where you inevitably will be spotted by someone watching TV.

    I live in a town with an order of magnitude more population than that–plus it’s home to Flagship State University, so the transient population (many of whom are foreigners, some of them from countries in the Middle East) is particularly high. It still would be difficult for a terrorist sleeper cell to hide here. If you’re new in town, people will notice you, especially if you are not a student. And if you are a student, chances are your fellow students will notice you.

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  20. This is at the tail end of the paleolithic:
    Presented by Stockholm University: ” Swedish researchers find Ice Age ‘missing link’”
    http://www.thelocal.se/20151123/swedish-researchers-find-ice-age-missing-link-stockholmuniversity-tlccu
    Excerpt:” The Scandinavian ice sheet was the force that tipped the dominoes, leading to an expansion of summer sea ice, changing ice distribution in the eastern region of the North Atlantic – and eventually causing abrupt climate change.”

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  22. Recalling the nudist camp reference in the other thread…ths spacecraft looks rather freudian
    “Bezos space firm claims reusable rocket breakthrough” (Update) http://phys.org/news/2015-11-bezos-space-firm-reusable-rocket.html
    — — — —
    Worse than Bindi Irwin.
    “Study looks at the role of corporate funding in climate” change discussion http://phys.org/news/2015-11-role-corporate-funding-climate-discussion.html
    — — — —
    World’s largest animal cloning factory can save species, says Chinese founder http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/nov/24/worlds-largest-animal-cloning-factory-can-save-species-says-chinese-founder

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  25. #22 – I have been taking an interest and paying close attention to alternative energy issues now for more than 47 years, since I wrote my first year undergraduate thesis on the subject (in which I covered all forms of alternate energy except for hydrothermal, about which I knew nothing then).

    It is not just blowing hot air or an exaggeration to say that, if not for corporations and governments, we could be operating 100% on alternative energy now. The world would look somewhat different (not worse), but we could have done it, at a time when anthropogenically derived climate change could have been reversible.

    The argument “We just gave the customers what they wanted” covers a lot of failings, a lot of corruption and a lot of dishonest dealing (thank you Marjorie Kaplan #23 – praise the heavens you have gone.) I don’t see a lot of evidence that anything much has changed, despite vastly more customers saying they want alternative energy as a matter of great urgency.

    As for the self-announced heroes like the guy who ‘powers down’ his equipment overnight, well, wow, man – what do you want, a medal?

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  26. Meh. Hurrican Gorm lost strength and became an ordinary storm before entering Southern Sweden.
    — — —
    which brings me to…”UK storms to get more terrifying names”
    http://www.newsbiscuit.com/2015/11/22/uk-storms-to-get-more-terrifying-names/
    “Desmond, Tegan and Wendy are among the future storm names affecting the UK and Ireland chosen by members of the public to be replaced as Abigail and Barney were largely ignored.”

    (snip) …” Effective immediately, the next storm will be called “Chopper’s Breath” and the next after this will be called, “Deathblower”. Other names include “Windbastard”, “Screaming Tempest of Vengeance”, “Gusty Killer”, “Heaven’s Murderer”, “Roof-fucker” and “Saville’s Gust”.

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