Opportunity Mars Rover, Please Phone Home

Oppy at Solander Point in August 2013

The Opportunity rover landed on Mars fifteen Earth calendar years ago today. It drove more than 45 km across the Red Planet’s cold desert landscape and worked fine until 10 June last year. A planetwide dust storm then covered the rover’s solar panels with dirt, cutting off its power supply, and it hasn’t been heard from since. Strong winds may one day remove that dust and allow Oppy to phone home again.

Either way, 14½ years of operation and the longest trek any off-planet vehicle has ever made are epochal achievements. Huge kudos to the Mars Exploration Rover team! And let’s not forget the Spirit rover that operated on Mars for a very respectable 6 Earth years, or the Curiosity rover that has so far been active for 6½ and is going strong, or the Mars 2020 rover whose launch is planned for July or August next year.

January Pieces Of My Mind #2

Monuments in conversation at Millesgården

• How to identify a female Medieval scribe’s burial: lapis lazuli powder in her dental calculus. Excellent work!
• Sudden realisation: Cardigan is an Anglicised version of Welsh Ceredigion.
• After twelve days on the dole I’ve signed on to temp-teach high school Swedish for six weeks, full time, respectable salary, short commute. And after that I’ve got something else looking promising. Happy to be employable!
• Sudden realisation: tomato ketchup is a type of English brown sauce, akin to HP sauce. It has nothing to do with Italian cooking.
• If I ever come into the political media spotlight, it will be interesting to see how my opponents deal with 25 years of relentless, copious, dirty and absurd joking online.
• I knew that Ursula LeGuin’s parents were renowned anthropologists and that she went to high school with P.K. Dick. I did not know that her best school buddy was John Steinbeck’s niece.
• *sings* Don’t mess with my Desmond Tutu / Don’t mess with my Desmond Tutu
• I program my home computer / Beam myself into the 90s
• My new job at this high school is just across the highway from my first job during high school. I did IT support.
• I spent the morning reading and writing horror fiction and poetry with a charming group of nursing students.
• Jrette tries to do her homework on women’s suffrage, but the school’s porn filter keeps her from googling “number of female bosses”.
• The Book of Dead Names: H.P.Lovecraft’s heart-warming and dramatic memoir of the early trans movement in 1920s Providence, RI.
• Keep coming back to this. I have a really hard time understanding that the skills I spent a quarter century honing are worth so little on the market, while stuff I just sort of picked up along the way or did for fun or was born with is in high demand and really well paid.
• There’s loads of accordion on the Beach Boys’ “Wouldn’t It Be Nice”.
• I’ve got to visit my old primary school this autumn on a windy day to check if leaves still dance in that corner next to the main entrance.
• Why teenagers don’t wear caps, wear gloves or button up their jackets in winter: the pain of getting super cold is not as intense as the pain of possibly being considered not cool by other teenagers.
• Found my first ancestor in the nobility, a woman in generation 12. That generation contains 4096 people or a bit less. My blood is not particularly blue.
• Movie: Zoolander (2001). Spoof on the fashion industry with two extremely daft models and innumerable celebrity cameos, including an unfit future US president. Grade: OK.
• The celebrity cameos in Zoolander made me a little queasy. Because they’re from 2001. And I kind of think of all those people from ~18 years ago as current celebrities.

Lidingö: walking from Dalénum to Millesgården

This is my most recent ready-made piece of installation art. It is titled “Academia”.

 

Sentenced To An Hour Of Beheading

Remembered a D&D story I heard in the 80s. One of the player characters had stupidly and overtly committed a serious crime – had he attacked the King during a formal audience? – and been sentenced to beheading. Letting this happen is never a fun way to end a character’s career, but I believe both the players and the Dungeon Master were quite young.

The day of the execution dawns, the prisoner is taken out to the chopping block in the town square, the executioner steps up with his sword… And the only way this DM knows to handle situations involving swords is the combat rules. Which don’t really offer any details on combatants lying trussed up and face down on the block. Also, the execution victim is quite a high-level character, while the executioner is a basic man-at-arms.

The executioner could barely hit the victim, and when he occasionally did, he took only a small proportion of the victim’s hit points. It took an hour in the game world and endless dice rolling in our world to behead him.

January Pieces Of My Mind #1

The National Museum in Stockholm has re-opened after a long period of renovations. Endless treasures! Here’s a detail of the background on a 16th century Madonna & Child.

• Woah. Checking my calendar. I have nothing planned from mid-summer until retirement. Except monthly meetings with the municipal education board.
• Havande is an old Swedish cognate of having. It means “pregnant”.
• If you’re the kind of voter who falls for fascist strong & stupid men, what’s the next step if one disappoints you? Abandon strong & stupid men or transfer faith to a new one?
• Snow dusting in yellow sunshine on the grey gneiss scarp at Stubbsund made it look like limestone. Foreign.
• You should always consider carefully before building an unstable interdimensional transfer portal. Because as the poet reminds us, “See how the void gates that held back the Chaos foe / Shudder and shatter, an entropy overload”
• Wonder if the resin caulking rings found as remains of bark boxes in Early Iron Age graves also contain lots of human DNA from a chewing process, as has recently been shown for Mesolithic pitch lumps with tooth marks.
• Some people think NASA should not call anything Ultima Thule because the Nazis used that name. That’s like refusing to listen to the Beatles’ White Album because the Manson cult did. Ultima Thule was first mentioned by Pytheas in the 4th century BC.
• Movie: Annihilation. Lovecraft’s “Colour Out Of Space” + Tarkovsky’s Stalker + Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. Grade: OK.
• Wife horrified & scandalised to learn of my perverted hedonistic pleasure: I put some peanut butter and salt in my hot chocolate.
• Yay! The County Archaeologist in Linköping has agreed to publish my forthcoming book on the Medieval castles of Östergötland!
• 2019 will be my last year of paying back my study loan. I currently owe SEK 9,600 = USD 1,070 = € 940.
• Free Swedish lesson! Unlike German, Scandy languages hardly ever pronounce an S as SH. Neither skål nor smörgåsbord has a SH. Repeat after me please: SSSSSCORL. SSSSSMER-GORSE-BOOED. SSSSSS.
• I once tried sailing my space ship in 80s Elite straight away from the star. After a long while the star simply flipped from being behind me on the scanner to being in front of me. The same star.
• How to identify a female Medieval scribe’s burial: lapis lazuli powder in her dental calculus.

Bronze Age Cemeteries As Comic Books

Vertical photos of untidy cairn-like structures at the cemeteries of Påljungshage in Helgona and Rogsta in Tystberga.

Cemeteries of the period 1000-300 cal BC around Lake Mälaren display a bewildering variety of ugly, damaged, diffuse stone structures. They usually contain multiple small depositions of potsherds and burnt bones that often do not represent a whole person, and sometimes there’s even just part of an animal. Closed finds are frustratingly rare here, when archaeologists often look to cemeteries to find out about chronology and social roles.

I’ve been reading Anna Röst’s 2016 PhD thesis where she’s drilled down for hundreds of pages into the minutiae of two of these sites. She has a really interesting perspective on them.

Röst suggests that her sites were not governed by the idea of permanent burial that we see so often in eras before and after her study period — including our own. Instead, they were intended for long convoluted multistage ritual processes where people would mess around with the bones, metalwork, stone structures, pottery, fire and animals. The great variation among the structures that we excavate and document now is partly due to varying ideas about the correct script for such a chain of ritual events: two structures may look different today because they were never intended to look the same. But in other cases the variation may be due to a single ritual script being interrupted on different pages: two structures may look different today because they were abandoned at different points along the timeline of a single process.

This recalls Fleming Kaul’s interpretation of the imagery engraved on period bronze razors: he considers each razor to be a panel in the same comic book about sun-ship mythology. You can’t understand a whole comic from one panel. Nor can you understand what people where doing and intending at a Late Bronze Age cemetery in Södermanland by looking at a single structure.

But there’s a big difference between the burials and the razor iconography. We never find a razor with a half-drawn scene on it. If Röst is right, then almost every one of the structures we document today at her kind of cemetery is a half-drawn scene, intended for an audience who were interested in the act of drawing, not in reading the finished comic book.

Röst, Anna. 2016. Fragmenterade platser, ting och människor. Stenkonstruktioner och depositioner på två gravfältslokaler i Södermanland ca 1000-300 f Kr. Stockholm University. [Full text available online]

Most-Played Boardgames of 2018

Here are the eleven boardgames that I played more than thrice during 2018. The year’s total was 74 different games.

• Hive (2001)
• No Thanks! (2004)
• Gaia Project (2017)
• Sechs nimmt / Category 5 (1994)
• Azul (2017)
• Plato 3000 (2012)
• Tichu / Zheng fen (1991)
• Innovation (2010)
• Keltis (2008, travel version)
• Patchwork (2014)
• Heimlich & Co (1984)

As always, the games on the list are mostly short ones that you can play repeatedly in one evening. But my new acquisitions Gaia Project and Tichu are way longer, full-evening games. All eleven highly recommended!

Dear Reader, what was your biggest boardgaming hit of 2018?

Stats courtesy of Boardgame Geek. And here’s my list for 2017.

Best Reads of 2018

Here are my best reads in English during 2018. The total was only 39 books (when 40-45 is my normal number), mainly because I slogged through a lot of borderline-bad Swedish paperback novels. They became my lot in life for months after the local historical society gave me a book token for a shop that hardly stocks any English titles. Even giving them each a 50-page chance was quite the chore.

Seven of the books I read were e-books. Find me at Goodreads! Dear Reader, what were your best reads of the year?

• Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al Madinah and Meccah, Vol 2. Richard Francis Burton 1857.
• The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. H.P. Lovecraft 1927.
• Maskerade. Terry Pratchett 1995.
• Guys and Dolls and Other Writings. Damon Runyon.
• The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger. Mark Levinson 2006.
• Maps and Legends: Reading and Writing Along the Borderlands. Michael Chabon 2008.
• The Brothers Cabal (Johannes Cabal #4). Jonathan L. Howard 2014.
• The Men Who Stare at Goats. Jon Ronson 2004.
• Salt. Adam Roberts 2000.
• A Rage to Live: A Biography of Richard and Isabel Burton. Mary S. Lovell 1998.
• Air. Geoff Ryman 2004.
• A Meeting with Medusa (The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke, #4). 1960s.
• Diamonds Are Forever (James Bond #4). Ian Fleming 1956.
• The Door into Summer. Robert A. Heinlein 1956.
• The Innocents Abroad. Mark Twain 1869.
• Pistols at Dawn: a History of Duelling. Richard Hopton 2007.
• Spinning Silver. Naomi Novik 2018.

Here’s my list for 2017.

2018 Enlightener & Deceiver Awards

Fråga Lund

The Swedish Skeptics have announced their annual awards for 2018.

The Enlightener of the Year award is given to the pop-sci TV show Fråga Lund. The show answers viewers’ questions about science and research in an accessible way by recruiting scientists and other experts in various fields. Through its format that mixes facts and playfulness the programme attracts a different – and far larger – viewership than the purely fact-based science programming that Swedish public service TV also offers.

The Deceiver of the Year anti-award goes to the writer and speaker Thomas Erikson for his best-selling amateur psychology books and lecture events where he touts simplistic personality tests without basis in real psychological research. Erikson was soundly taken down at feature length in the long-read magazine Filter already last summer.

Open Thread For January

What are your biggest plans and hopes for 2019? I have no big plans and only one big hope: to find a steady job where my archaeological knowledge and skills matter.