stuff 'n other stuff

Came across this Bradford University undergraduate thesis that looked at the archaeological evidence for cats being present on Viking settlement sites in the North Atlantic settlement area centred around Orkney and Shetland.

Unfortunately, the thesis doesn’t add much to my earlier handwaving, except to conclude that cats were present at some of the sites.

As the settlers were farming, and consequently growing barley and oats, this isn’t surprising as I’m sure that the crops would have attracted rodents. Unfortunately there’s no evidence as to the cats being deliberate imports, local ferals who were already there, or wildcats that knew a good thing when they saw it.

The trouble with Orkney is that it already quite clearly had a reasonable Pictish population who may well have acquired domestic cats from further south. Examinations of sites in the Faeroes and Iceland might provide better evidence, as while there is some evidence that Irish monks got to both places before the Vikings they did not establish any substantial settlements.

Mind you, the monks did like their cats, so it wouldn’t be totally unambiguous.

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Way back in April I wrote about calorie restriction, and the Michael Mosely feast and fast diet.

Well I didn’t do it, well not the way suggested. But I got a result – losing 6kg in six months. At 77kg I’m still a little higher than my target weight which is probably around 75kg for a man of my age and build.

This isn’t a problem, I’m still losing weight albeit at a slower rate than before.

How did I do it – simple really

• we’re social beings. It’s no use doing this unless your life partner is going to support you as the changes will affect both of you, even if you know they secretly buy orange mousse desserts and hide them in the overflow fridge in the garage
• exercise moderately three times a week. We have one of these crosstrainer exericsers we orignally bought for building strength for cross country skiiing and I do twenty minutes on that plus 20 pushups and 20 trunk curls, to the vast amusement of the cat
• drink less alcohol. I’m not being puritancal but we now have between three and four alcohol free days a week and some nights just have a single glass of wine. However if we want to have a weekend evening watching tv, having a barbecue, or whatever with the accompaniment of a decent bottle of red we have no inhibitions
• Eat a sensible breakfast. Meusli, with additional nuts, yoghurt, dried fruit and a half banana, along with orange juice and coffee. No toast, jam, vegemite. At the weekends it can be toast jam and fruit.
• Eat a sensible lunch. A single fairly parsimonious sandwich, some miso soup to give you the feeling you’ve perhaps had more that you’ve really had, an apple and some other fruit. Again weekends can be a bit more generous.
• Eat vegetarian for dinner a couple of nights a week. Unless you really cram it in, the energy density of a vegetarian meal is going to be less
• Have an asian soup like a pho for dinner one night a week
• No dessert or in between meal nibbling, and definitely no soft drinks
• Don’t be fanatical – accept the fact that sometimes life works against you, but make sure you go back to your regime after that occasional blowout
• record your progress on a spreadsheet. You’ll be amazed how much reinforcement that downward curve gives you.

And it works. It might not work for everyone but it worked for me, and it doesn’t need an expensive diet book or a regime that really buggers up normal life …

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I’ve been quiet recently. Not quite true, there’s posts and updates elsewhere, but it’s true to say that I’ve not been writing a lot. In part it’s because we’re just recovering from two long weekends in a row and a sustained spate of spring gardening.

First of all we had Family and Community day, unofficially known as Fish and Chip day, and then Labour day last Monday. By chance they fell on subsequent weekends this year so I took the opportunity to take some days off in between to get on with the garden, which was rapidly turning into a verdant jungle

Unlike last year, when the start of spring was unseasonably cold, in fact it snowed on what was officially the last day of winter, this year it has been warmer and wetter than usual with the result that the weeds have taken off without the decency to wait until I was ready to deal with them

However, I got a load of bark delivered and we’ve managed to get control of around half the weeds and put down bark as a weed suppression mulch and the front is looking half decent, even though bits of the back are still a jungle.

I totally failed to get any seed potatoes – the unexpectedly warm  early start caught me out, and I’m only now putting in our spring an summer veg and starting off seeds, but hopefully if it stays warm and wet things will catch up. (I’ve also managed to find some seed potatoes for sale online from Tasmania so hopefully they’ll be fine).

The apricot and fig trees are already setting fruit which probably means we’ll have our annual invasion by possums – a native animal the size of a cat that while vegetarian is aggressive and has a reputation for decimate fruit trees.

They also go for parsley – last year J had some parsley in pots and we came out one morning to find it all neatly clipped off at about 5mm by possums.

The cat is scared of possums – you always know when they’re about as he comes in and cuddles up to you for protection – I think he’s had a couple of confrontations and come off worst but no obvious injuries …

Following on from my post on Vikings and cats I remembered a post of mine from 2008 about a genetic analysis of mice in the UK which showed that mice from Scotland Ireland and Wales have a more Scandanavian genome than those in the UK.

The hypothesis is that that in these areas it not until Viking times that grain farming was large scale enough to support a large mouse population that crowded out any earlier populations of mice.

The hypothesis is of course that the mice came with Viking settlers, who were perhaps more expert at farming grain in wet marginal climates than the more pastorally focused Pictish, Irish and Welsh populations.

If that was the case we would expect to see cats not far behind, and if the Viking settlers were expert grain farmers there’s a reasonable expectation that they would have brought cats with them – not as pets but as animal that were just around to do useful things.

Getting cats to travel in a knorr or a longboat might have been interesting though.

It would be possible to test this by doing a genetic analysis of the cat populations of Iceland and the Faeroes, where the Vikings were the first settlers to farm on any large scale …

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About three weeks ago, my watch strap broke. It was a fairly expensive watch, and I caught it in time so there was no need for any wailing.

The only problem is that being a moderately upmarket watch I probably should take it to a proper watch shop to get the pins put back in the strap. And of course, I havn’t had the time

That was problem one. Problem two was that my other decent watch had run out of battery. I could have worn the cheap fluoro yellow plastic watch I bought for biking, but that was distinctly lacking in style.

So I bought myself a cheap reasonable looking watch on ebay for seven bucks – after all watches all much the same today – a little bit of digital circuitry and a case, and you can find the same chips in a 100 dollar watch that you do in a $10 watch.

All you are paying for is style and brand name, not, as old mechanical watch days increased accuracy or added features.

The only problem about buying a watch from ebay is it took three weeks to arrive from Hong Kong. During that time I was without a watch.

Now everyone will say, you have your phone, your computer(s) and your car – all tell you the time more accurately than a thing on your wrist. Why, realistically do you need a watch?

And that’s true. It’s also true that wearing a wristwatch is habit. The first week I found myself feeling lopsided and looking at my wrist. After then I kind of broke the habit.

What broke me was the convenience. I thought my ebay watch would end up just sitting there, but no – it’s simply more convenient to have a watch on your wrist – saves diving in a pocket or a bag to find your phone, especially in a crowded bus.

So I guess I now understand why Samsung and Apple are racing to bring wristwatch style devices to market – looking at a thing on your wrist is simply simpler …

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After last week’s arty excursion to Goulburn, we thought we’d go to the Turner exhibition at the NGA.

It’s billed as the ‘making of a master’ and it’s exactly that – a collection of paintings that trace the development of his style from a fairly boring conventional painter of landscapes into a dramatic proto impressionist creating sea and skyscapes from wild twists and swirls of colour.

Don’t expect any big ticket pictures – the budget obviously didn’t run to that, but the collection of lesser known paintings and excerpts from his sketch books do build the story nicely and it’s definitely interesting to see his sketchbooks and cartoons (and the experiments that reappeared in other better known paintings).

NGA winter and summer exhibitions are always a bit of a scrum. We went at 3pm on a Saturday afternoon and it wasn’t too bad – although there was the usual mix of people with frightening haircuts and the inevitable coterie of ignorant men dragged along by their fat wives to ‘something cultural’.

That said, we did see everything we wanted to without too much backtracking and wiggling, and as it was towards the end of the exhibition’s run it was not ridiculously overcrowded.

My major annoyance was having to sign up with TicketTek to book tickets and pay their excessive booking fee, knowing full well we’ll probably get spammed into the bargain. Other than that the mechanics of the visit passed off without incident.

We’re NGA members, so after the exhibition we retreated to the members lounge for a cup of tea and a cake, and I was pleased to discover that tey now provide wifi for members – something to remember if I’m ever in search of a bolthole to write up some notes …

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I’ve been reading a biography of Henry Rawlinson, one of these larger than life nineteenth century characters who was one of the first to translate Cuneiform script, as well as incidentally being one of the people responsible for fomenting the mid nineteenth century British paranoia about the Russian expansion into Central Asia.

Like most people of his time Rawlinson’s world was based around scripture and an assumption that it constituted a historical narrative – it basically formed the underpinnings of his universe of discourse, and consequently Rawlinson was very interested in Mount Ararat and evidence of the ark – just as he found cuneiform inscriptions about the capture of Valerian and the accession of various Persian kings mentioned in the story of Alexander he expected to find similar information about Ararat and the Ark.

So, why Friedrich Parrot?

Parrot was the first westerner to ascend Ararat, but also turns out to have been one of these larger than life characters. The English Wikipedia entry doesn’t really suggest this but the French Wikipedia has considerably more detail.

I’d first come across Parrot when I went cross country skiing in the Pyrenees twelve or so years ago, where he was credited with being the first (recorded) person to travel the mountain chain from end to end – and being blessed with a memorable name helped made sure I remembered him.

What is of course interesting is the extent to which Parrot’s career as a scientific explorer flourished as a result of Russian patronage and their interest in their newly acquired territories in the Caucasus, and that scientific expeditions were not just a British or French nineteenth century phenomenon …

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As I tweeted earlier today, I suddenly realised that it’s around 40 years since I wrote my first code – as part of a maths option in high school.

The programming language was Algol68 and the code was a hello world program – something like

BEGIN
print ("Hello World!");
END.

The code was written on punched cards. I can’t remember what machine it was run on, other than it was at the local technical college, so I’m guessing it was probably something like an ICL minicomputer given the choice of language.

Stood me in good stead too – in my first year of university we did some formal bnf stuff in mathematical methods and wrote some AlgolW to validate it …

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