From the BBC: The Dutch city experimenting with the future of urban life.
If Atlantis was the ancient city myth says disappeared beneath the waves, Almere is the modern riposte, risen from the sea. And it has done so as perhaps the world’s most experimental city, realising differing expressions of the concept of “design for living”. [continue]
This makes city planners here look like utter luddites.
From phys.org: Rescued Victorian rainfall data smashes former records.
Record-breaking Victorian weather has been revealed after millions of archived rainfall records dating back nearly 200 years were rescued by thousands of volunteers during the first COVID-19 lockdown.
The Rainfall Rescue project was launched by the University of Reading in March 2020 and offered members of the public a way of distracting themselves from the pandemic by digitally transcribing 130 years’ worth of handwritten rainfall observations from across the UK and Ireland.
Some 16,000 volunteers responded to the challenge, digitising 5.2 million observations in just 16 days. Ahead of the two-year anniversary of the project launch, on Saturday 26 March, these records have now been made publicly available in the official Met Office national record, extending it back 26 years to 1836. [continue]
Somebody mentioned the use of spider webs as bandages, so I went off to see if that is seriously a thing. It is! From Interesting Engineering: This Antibiotic Spider Silk Makes a Better Bandage.
Even though it sounds ripped from the pages of a Spider-Man comic, this innovation came from a lab in the UK.
Five years of work between a spider expert and a chemist resulted in antibiotic spider silk. The synthetic material, produced by a team at the University of Nottingham, can be used to heal wounds and deliver medicine. It uses the silk synthesized from E. Coli and infuses it with other substances. These additional molecules are “clicked” into place, thus showing how ‘click chemistry’ can be used to affect a substance. [continue]
Still haven’t seen any sign of spider web bandages in the local shops.
From phys.org: Chemists cook up way to remove microplastics using okra.
Extracts of okra and other slimy plants commonly used in cooking can help remove dangerous microplastics from wastewater, scientists said Tuesday.
So double good news, right? A way to deal with microplastics, and a use for slimy plants. [continue]
A while ago we adopted a dog from the local animal shelter. Hector is a large boy, a mix of many breeds, and he is delightful. But he was given up for adoption when he was just under a year old – the humans who had him first said he was too difficult to handle.
He is not difficult to handle. He is eager to please and full of bounce and joy.
Hector didn’t have much in the way of manners or training when he came to us, but we’ve been working on that. We use clicker training, which is so fun and efficient. Fortunately I have a pretty good background in dog training, so that helps. And I’ve learned some good tricks for working with this boy, whose needs are different from those of other dogs I’ve trained.
So sometimes now, there may be posts about dog training intermingled with whatever else I blog about.
If you happen to have a dog and need help with training techniques, I can suggest lots of good books to read and videos to watch.
From phys.org: Rare Pictish symbol stone found near potential site of famous battle.
… the new discovery appears to be intricately carved with evidence of classic abstract Pictish symbols including triple ovals, a comb and mirror, a crescent and V rod and double disks. Unusually the stone appears to show different periods of carving with symbols overlying one another.
From phys.org: Rewriting the history books: why the Vikings left Greenland.
One of the great mysteries of late medieval history is why did the Norse, who had established successful settlements in southern Greenland in 985, abandon them in the early 15th century? The consensus view has long been that colder temperatures, associated with the Little Ice Age, helped make the colonies unsustainable. However, new research, led by the University of Massachusetts Amherst and published recently in Science Advances, upends that old theory. It wasn’t dropping temperatures that helped drive the Norse from Greenland, but drought. [continue]
From phys.org: Painstaking race against time to uncover Viking ship’s secrets.
Inch by inch, they gently pick through the soil in search of thousand-year-old relics. Racing against onsetting mould yet painstakingly meticulous, archaeologists in Norway are exhuming a rare Viking ship grave in hopes of uncovering the secrets within.
Who is buried here? Under which ritual? What is left of the burial offerings? And what can they tell us about the society that lived here?
Now reduced to tiny fragments almost indistinguishable from the turf that covers it, the 20-metre (65-foot) wooden longship raises a slew of questions. [continue, see photos]
From an article by N. Scott Momaday: When dogs could talk: among words in a state of grace.
My friend, the late Vine Deloria Jr., once chided me for remarking too often a time when dogs could talk. I had to admit that he was probably right. I had discovered that Kiowa elders used this formula to indicate something that had happened far back in time. This or that happened a long time ago when dogs could talk. It seems to me a charming and appropriate expression. It is the kind of thing that reveals more and more of itself in the fullness of time. That, by the way, is a mystery which distinguishes the oral tradition, and it is a foundation of language itself. Language seems always to exceed itself, and certainly it exceeds our grasp of it. We know that a certain province of experience is ineffable, that there are limits to what language can express. But the fact is, we have no inkling of what those limits might be. Lewis Thomas has told us that we are at the beginning of language. I suspect that to be true. [continue]
N. Scott Momaday – Wikipedia
This article from Heritage Daily rings all my chimes: Place names describe Scandinavia in the Iron and Viking Ages.
Every now and then, researchers are lucky enough to experience a Eureka moment — when a series of facts suddenly crystallize into a an entirely new pattern.
That’s exactly what happened to Birgit Maixner from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology’s (NTNU) University Museum when she began looking at artefacts and place names. [continue]
If you might ever need to listen to medical advice, you’ll want to read this 2017 Probublica article: When Evidence Says No, But Doctors Say Yes. The site summarizes it:
Years after research contradicts common practices, patients continue to demand them and doctors continue to deliver. The result is an epidemic of unnecessary and unhelpful treatment.
Go read the whole article. If you ever needed a reason to question before accepting some treatement, surely you will find it here.
What to do if monkeys are threatening your crops? Some farmers in India have a great solution! From the Deccan Herald: Farmers’ monkey-scaring plan a roaring hit
Deception is the name of a new game in the Malnad region, but it is aimed at harming nobody. Farmers in the region have resorted to painting the fur of dogs to fool monkeys into believing that they are tigers. This, to save their crops from the simians, which were destroying them with utter impunity. [continue]
The article includes a photo of a transformed dog.
From the Guardian: Experience: I learned to play the piano without a piano.
I was 11 years old when I asked my mum for piano lessons, in 2010. We were in the fallout of the recession and she’d recently been made redundant. She said a polite “no”.
That didn’t deter me. I Googled the dimensions of a keyboard, drew the keys on to a piece of paper and stuck it on my desk. I would click notes on an online keyboard and “play” them back on my paper one – keeping the sound they made on the computer in my head. After a while I could hear the notes in my head while pressing the keys on the paper. I spent six months playing scales and chord sequences without touching a real piano. Once my mum saw it wasn’t a fad, she borrowed some money from family and friends, and bought me 10 lessons.
I still remember the first one. I was struck by how organic the sound of the piano was, as I had become familiar with the artificial electronic sound. The teacher tried to explain where middle C was but I could already play all the major and minor scales, as well as tonic and dominant functions, and the circle of fifths. [continue]
From Heritage Daily: Finn-Kirsten Iversdatter: Norway’s Forgotten Witch.
The case has been almost completely absent from Norwegian history, despite the fact that it caused an uproar at the time. It was the talk of the town in Trondheim, between the remote villages from the south to the north of Trøndelag, and even all the way to Nordland. The story itself, and the characters that emerge from the court records, could easily be from the pages of a fantastic and macabre novel, she says. The trial against Finn-Kirsten started in the isolated mountain village Støren in 1674, and rumbled on until 1677. After that, it disappeared into the darkness of history. Finn-Kirsten Iversdatter was the last person to be executed for witchcraft in Central Norway, with over thirty people from all levels of society at risk of the same fate throughout the trial. [see full article]
Related links
From the Guardian: Chilling discovery: ice house found under London street.
For the well to-do residents of Georgian London, serving chilled drinks at a festive party was a more complicated process than today. In the absence of electricity to make ice cubes and keep them frozen, they had to source their ice from elsewhere.
For the most discerning hosts, that meant using blocks of purest frozen Norwegian fjord, which was shipped to London’s docks and then carefully stored until required to be chipped into glasses and clinked.
Archaeologists have now uncovered a link to the capital’s lost ice trade with the rediscovery, under one of London’s most prestigious addresses, of an enormous 18th-century ice store, the existence of which had been almost entirely forgotten. [continue]
From ScienceNordic.com: Life was good for Stone Age Norwegians along Oslo Fjord.
Eleven thousand years ago at the end of the last ice age, Norway was buried under a thick layer of ice. But it didn’t take long for folks to wander their way north as the ice sheet melted away. The first traces of human habitation in Norway date from roughly 9500 BC.
Steinar Solheim is an archaeologist at the University of Oslo’s Museum of Cultural History who has worked on numerous excavations of different Stone Age settlements around Oslo Fjord. Now he and colleague Per Perrson have investigated longer-term population trends in the Oslo Fjord region, based on 157 different Stone Age settlements. All were inhabited between 8000 and 2000 BC.
The two researchers tried to determine whether the population during this time was stable, or if living conditions were better or worse for people who lived here during different periods. [continue]
You’ve probably come across the website called Medium. All kinds of people and organizations have used Medium to publish their articles. It feels a bit like a huge blog, with a variety of interesting, and sometimes famous, people posting articles. It all seemed just so wonderful.
Until it wasn’t wonderful anymore. Suddenly Medium put up a paywall thing, and it won’t let readers view more than five articles until they sign up. And now Medium has removed a feature, without a whole lot of notice. Niemanlab.org explains: Medium abruptly cancels the membership programs of its 21 remaining subscription publisher partners.
The thing about using somebody else’s “free” service to publish your stuff is that you are not in control of your own content, or how it is handled. It seems that this lesson is one that people on the internet keep forgetting, and having to re-learn. Now many are realizing that Medium is not a benevolent charity, and that their business model involves making money from the content you provide for free.
There is a lot to be said for publishing your own content on your own website.
So now there is a thing called Hooktube, which explains itself this way:
Share YouTube videos without giving them views. Bypass country blocks and age restrictions. Download YouTube videos and music. Keep your data private from the G.
HOW: Just replace the domain in any YT link with hooktube.com and you get a light-weight page that loads YouTube’s media files (mp4, webm, etc) directly into your browser’s native media player.
That’s a good privacy enhancement to know about! And here’s a video I happened to find on Hooktube:
Eben Moglen on Facebook, Google and Government Surveillance.
From EurekAlert: Brain training for old dogs: Could touchscreen games be the Sudoku of man’s best friend?
Spoiling old dogs in their twilight years by retiring them to the sofa and forgiving them their stubbornness or disobedience, doesn’t do our four-legged friends any good. Regular brain training and lifelong learning create positive emotions and can slow down mental deterioration in old age. Physical limitations, however, often do not allow the same sort of training as used in young dogs. In a new study, a team of researchers led by cognitive biologists from Vetmeduni Vienna propose computer interaction as a practical alternative. In the training lab, old dogs responded positively to cognitive training using educational touchscreen games. The aim now is to get the interactive “dog sudoku” ready for home use. [continue]
That’s a happy development. I have some low-tech puzzle games for my dog, and she is very happy when I take them out of the closet. I wonder how she would react to the touch-screen games.
Happy news for language lovers! From EurekAlert: Unknown language discovered in Southeast Asia.
A previously unknown language has been found in the Malay Peninsula by linguists from Lund University in Sweden. The language has been given the name Jedek. (…)
The language is an Aslian variety within the Austroasiatic language family and is spoken by 280 people who are settled hunter-gatherers in northern Peninsular Malaysia. (…)
The community in which Jedek is spoken is more gender-equal than Western societies, there is almost no interpersonal violence, they consciously encourage their children not to compete, and there are no laws or courts. There are no professions either, rather everyone has the skills that are required in a hunter-gatherer community. This way of life is reflected in the language. There are no indigenous words for occupations or for courts of law, and no indigenous verbs to denote ownership such as borrow, steal, buy or sell, but there is a rich vocabulary of words to describe exchanging and sharing. [continue]
Update: skip to the end to read about the RSS app I selected. It’s free, open-source, and works well for me.
I rely on RSS feeds to keep up with my favourite websites. For years I’ve been using a marvellous RSS aggregator to read news feeds on my Android device. But it went terribly wrong, alas. So I’ve been testing other Android RSS apps, looking for something that will work well for me.
An assortment of things to read as you sip your coffee, my dears.
This tidbit turned up in a blog post at Jason Fung’s site:
A physician’s job has always been to heal the sick and give advice on how to stay healthy. There were medical treatments, to be sure – leeching, purging, and my personal favorite – eating ground up powdered mummies. Yes. You read that correctly. For thousands of years, eating the ground up mummified remains of long-dead embalmed human beings was considered good medicine. That’s what they taught at them ancient medical schools. The demand for powdered mummies was so great that sometimes hucksters would simply grind up dead beggars and plague victims and sell them as mummies.
The history of medicine is the history of the placebo effect. This mummy-eating practice died out in the 16th century was was replaced by other equally useless procedures – such as the lobotomy to cure mental illness. Hey, let me shove this ice pick through your eyeball and mash up parts of your brain like I’m mashing a potato. The inventor of this procedure received the 1949 Nobel Prize for Medicine. This was the cutting edge of medicine circa 1949. Any criticism of this mashed-brain strategy could be legitimately met by “Did YOU win a Nobel Prize, buddy?”
Wow. A search for more information led me to The Gruesome History of Eating Corpses as Medicine at The Smithsonian. An excerpt:
“The question was not, ‘Should you eat human flesh?’ but, ‘What sort of flesh should you eat?’ ” says Sugg. The answer, at first, was Egyptian mummy, which was crumbled into tinctures to stanch internal bleeding. But other parts of the body soon followed. Skull was one common ingredient, taken in powdered form to cure head ailments. Thomas Willis, a 17th-century pioneer of brain science, brewed a drink for apoplexy, or bleeding, that mingled powdered human skull and chocolate. And King Charles II of England sipped “The King’s Drops,” his personal tincture, containing human skull in alcohol. Even the toupee of moss that grew over a buried skull, called Usnea, became a prized additive, its powder believed to cure nosebleeds and possibly epilepsy. Human fat was used to treat the outside of the body. German doctors, for instance, prescribed bandages soaked in it for wounds, and rubbing fat into the skin was considered a remedy for gout. [continue]
Oh my.
From The Guardian: How Neolithic farming sowed the seeds of modern inequality 10,000 years ago.
Most people regard hierarchy in human societies as inevitable, a natural part of who we are. Yet this belief contradicts much of the 200,000-year history of Homo sapiens.
In fact, our ancestors have for the most part been “fiercely egalitarian”, intolerant of any form of inequality. While hunter-gatherers accepted that people had different skills, abilities and attributes, they aggressively rejected efforts to institutionalise them into any form of hierarchy.
So what happened to cause such a profound shift in the human psyche away from egalitarianism? The balance of archaeological, anthropological and genomic data suggests the answer lies in the agricultural revolution, which began roughly 10,000 years ago. [continue]
From the New York Times: North of Nordic: A Young Chef Invents ‘Neo-Fjordic’ Cuisine.
Instead of foraging in the past for inspiration, Mr. Haatuft asked himself a hypothetical question: “If western Norway were a region of France, what would the chefs here brag about?”
His theory is that the prestigious classic cuisine of France is “farm food that was beautified and refined” to suit the tastes and whims of rich people. In Norway, he said, there was never enough wealth to transform food into cuisine. (That changed after oil production began in the North Sea in the 1970s, making modern Norway one of the world’s wealthiest nations.)
Traditional Norwegian food is famously bland, with infinite recombinations of fish, potatoes, flour and milk. But those porridges and dumplings were often spiked with intense tastes like smoked lamb and reindeer, salt-fermented salmon, goat salami and pickled root vegetables. The country has top-quality dairy products, berries that grow sweet in the 18-hour days of summer and complex aged cheeses. Extraordinary fresh seafood is harvested from the cold waters of the North Atlantic and the North Sea, and preserved using time-honored traditions that are just as complex as French charcuterie.
“A French chef here would brag about the smoked mackerel,” he said. “He would clean out the dark parts to make it beautiful. He would add butter to make it rich and smooth, and make the flavor of the ingredient shine.”
That is precisely what Mr. Haatuft does at Lysverket. [continue]
Related link: