things going on in the world

I've recently gotten a heads-up about a funding possibility for citizen science. Well, funding in the sense of you have to win the competition, but still, it's a possibility!

Here's the description, with links:

€100,000 prize fund for new EU citizen science competition

The EU is holding the competition for citizen science researchers annually from this year on. The closing date for submissions is 13 March.

As part of a bid to get the public involved in science research, the EU launched a competition 10 January with a grand prize of €60,000 and an overall prize fund of €100,000. The European Union Prize for Citizen Science competition is being overseen by Ars Electronica, an Austria-based scientific and education institute. There is no entry fee.

This is the first time the EU has held a citizen science-focused contest on such a large scale. The EU's aim is to celebrate and reward ordinary people doing extraordinary things in science. Lay people who dedicate themselves to scientific research outside of their regular professional lives are often referred to as citizen scientists.

Many of the world's most famous discoveries and breakthroughs have been made by citizen scientists. Professional scientists often rely on and collaborate with lay scientists, particularly when it comes to solving problems. Over the past few months in Ireland, citizen scientists have been called on to help with projects ranging from red squirrel revivals to air quality monitoring . In May 2022, the European Space Agency called on the public to help astronomers spot changes on the surface of a comet they had studied for some years.

As well as the grand prize of €60,000, the new EU competition will grant two other awards. The Diversity & Collaboration Award is worth €20,000, as is the Digital Communities Award. There will also be 27 honorary mentions made as part of the competition. The awards will be made by a jury, who will meet in April to review the submissions. Those interested in entering this year's competition can do so until the final closing date of 13 March 2023. The awards ceremony will take place in September, following the winners announcement in June.

From now on, the competition will be held annually by Ars Electronica, with funding provided via Horizon Europe, the EU's research and innovation fund.

More information about entering the European Union Prize for Citizen Science is available on Ars Electronica's website.

JAN.

Linky Stuff!

things going on in the world and now for something completely different

There've been a few things popping up that I find interesting enough to link them here - even though some of it is in German. You'll cope!

First of all, a video about Germany's last wire weaving workshop. It's very short, and it shows a huge loom right at the start, weaving... wire.

The second item actually, sort of, potentially also concerns the shop: The Bundeskartellamt (the state's Antitrust Division) has started investigations against Paypal. (English version of that report here. I'm impressed there is one.) Their prices are fairly high for taking payments, and they might be abusing their dominant position. I'm utterly delighted about this, because I have read all their clauses, and they are very, very restrictive in what you are allowed to do as a company using them as payment venue. However... these days, with people from different countries ordering stuff online, and lots of people really appreciating paypal for its convenience and ease of use, it's a rather hard choice to not offer it as a payment option. I get the delight in using paypal as a customer, by the way - it's quick, it's easy, you get the goods right away, and it costs you nothing as a private customer. Well, at least not in a way that you will notice easily, because of course, costs for the payment will be priced in somewhere.

And then a very interesting German-language blog entry from the Archäologisches Freilichtmuseum Oerlinghausen - about the comic "Legenden aus Hamsterland" - which is a very right-wing comic, using elements from Early Medieval culture for the usual right-wing shitbrainy stuff.

Finally, in English: An open access article about the possibility of some early calendarial notations in cave paintings... An Upper Palaeolithic Proto-writing System and Phenological Calendar. I'm not completely convinced, but it's certainly an interesting hypothesis!

AUG.

Oil Spill Threatening.

things going on in the world green living

Off the coast of Yemen, there's an old oil supertanker that has been used as a storage facility and loading bay for crude oil. It's still hanging out there, slowly decaying. Or quickly decaying, these days, since maintenance has been called off because of the war.

Which means that the tanker, with four times the amount of oil that was spilled during the Exxon Valdez disaster, is a catastrophy scheduled to happen any old day now.

There's a plan by the UNO to pump off the oil from the tanker, bringing it to a safer storage place, but they lack the funds to start work on the rescue mission. They lack a few millions, actually - and they're getting desperate enough to have started a crowdfunding, back in June. Up to today, though, there's not enough money been raised for this.

If you can spare some money, you can donate for this cause, either directly at the UNO website or via SumOfUs (German site here, there's no way I could find to link you to the English version.) You can also help by spreading word about this issue, and the UNO crowdfunding.

MäRZ

F**k War.

things going on in the world

We're living in a crazy world, and it seems like it is getting crazier by the day. There's not just the climate crisis, there's not just a pandemic, still ongoing, on top of that - no, now we also have war in Europe. Friends, Romans, Countrypeople - I cannot believe it. It wasn't so long ago that I thought the one Big Historical Thing in my lifetime would be the fall of the Berlin Wall and the fall of the Iron Curtain, but no, apparently I am to live in interesting times, as are you.

I still cannot believe this is happening, and it makes me a little sad and a little despaired. It also makes me feel that the life I lead is sort of unreal in some way - that I am sitting here in comfort and safety, as much as there can be, and suddenly that safety feels really fragile. There's food on the table every day. There's friends and there's a working phone. There's running water and electricity, and all the comforts of home that we tend to take for granted. Not so far away from here, all those things were normal until a few days ago, and now they are not.

If someone decides to go to war, what can the other party do? Once things get aggressive and escalate, there will be fighting. You do not stop someone intent on hitting you with friendly words. Or words in general, including unfriendly ones, as it seems.

It's not only the war that makes me sad, though. It's also the fact that suddenly, Germany has a lot of money to spend for the army. It's a shitload of money, folks. A metric f**kton of money. Or, to give you the actual number: One hundred billion Euro. Or, in numbers: 1.000.000.000 Euro.

That's a number so large that my brain has a hard time processing it. That is so many zeros that my maths division is zeroing out.

Now... don't get me wrong - I can see that there has to be some investment into military, because humans will be humans, and there will always be some party that gets the bright idea it would be a fine thing to bash somebody else's face in. It would be a much nicer world if that were not so, but that's like wishing that yellow would be pink. I can also understand that Putin's starting a war put the fear into politicians everywhere, including here in Germany, and a sudden spike of fear will make people do things. Fear is a really strong motivator, as we probably all know from our own personal experience. But I'm still really sad that there's been discussions about better pay for service workers and care workers for more than one year, and a paltry bonus was finally agreed upon; there's been nothing done to stop the climate change because there's no money for it... and now we have a metric f**ton to spend on the army.

I sincerely hope that the war will be over soon, with as low a number of deaths as can be. I also hope that our world will get its shit together afterwards and emerge a better place. I won't hold my breath, though.

(I was debating with myself, by the way, on whether to use the nice little asterisks or not... and decided in their favour. Germans use the f-word and though it is considered pretty strong, it's not horrifyingly bad, at least not to my knowledge.)

NOV.

Circular, Black, Madness.

things going on in the world and now for something completely different personal stuff

You're probably also getting them: Loads and loads of advertisements and promises of deep discounts and insane deals, coming up on Friday, or the weekend, or all this week, even.

I think I posted a similar rant last year, and I'm kinda tired of doing it again, but... but. I will still write about this.

Black Friday is the day after Thanksgiving (the US food coma holiday), and it's been made a retail and shopping madness day at some point years back. It has since spread over about all the world, and now people are getting loads and loads of ads and discounts and whatnots to tempt them into buying stuff and more stuff.

Now... I totally get the desire to have nice things, and new things. I'm not adverse to having something pretty, and having stuff is, for most of us humans, a quite basic desire. Stuff like food is a necessity, as is clothing appropriate to the time of year and climate. Then there's the social component, stuff that shows one's taste and preferences and social status. There's stuff that we need for work, stuff that we want for comfort, stuff we buy to make others happy. Stuff we get to repair other stuff. Stuff we get for future use (stash acquisition, anyone?) and stuff we get for future use though we strongly suspect while getting it that we will never actually use it.

I am, overall, fine with that. For myself, I try to stop and think before buying something new whether I will really use it, and do so in time. Do I really need this? Will it be useful? Am I sure about this? Then there's some secondary considerations, like how is it packaged? How much energy does it use? How long will it last? Can it be repaired? Does it have a fair price, and where does the money land that I pay for it - where the work has been done, or somewhere else?

Altogether, these things lead to shopping decisions that I'm usually happy with, not just after buying, but years and sometimes decades later. My thermos cup felt really expensive back when I bought it, back in 2012. I'm still very happy about the decision to get it anyways every time I pull it out of my bag to have a coffee on the road. It looks quite battered by now, but it's still working very well. Deals limited to a short amount of time, intending to put pressure on people to buy right now this instance or the opportunity will be gone make me deeply suspicious, though. As do deep discounts - because, well, if the sticker price can be discounted that far, either the seller loses money with the deep discount (which is not a smart business move), or the sticker price is way higher than it would need to be for the seller to make a decent profit. But if there's still money made with the deeply discounted price... how cheap is the item, actually, when they buy it? I'd really love to know the calculations behind these deals...

For now, though, I'll stick with not buying stuff this Friday. Just like most Fridays. Like most days, actually. And that's something I'm totally fine with.

NOV.

It's Crazy.

things going on in the world

It's been quite a while since I wrote anything about the Covid situation - partly because, during the summer, numbers were low-ish enough to ignore things, and partly because there was other stuff to write about, but mostly because I'm tired of it. Like probably everybody else is as well.

Vaccination rate in Germany is still pretty low, as opposed to new infections and incidence numbers - they are sky-high, and still skyrocketing, thanks to the politicians doing, well, exactly nothing for way, way too long. Now we have 7 day incidences of over 1000 in some areas, overfull hospitals that cannot accommodate any more patients, overfull ICUs which is a danger to anyone suffering a stroke, heart attack, or having been involved in a life-threatening accident.

And why all that? Because, obviously, not a single one of the effing people supposed to steer this country has learned just a penny's worth from the pandemic occurrences in the past two years. I'd love to say now that if anybody would act as stupidly and irresponsibly in a company, they'd be fired at a moments' notice, but unfortunately that is not true either.

The thing that I find most disquieting about all this, though - it's actually that I am so tired of the stupidity of the politicians, and so tired of all the pandemic shithappenings, and so tired of all the misinformation, that the most I can do is go "meh" and move on. Like so many others, I've become so jaded - and it frightens me. We've been living with high incidence numbers, high death numbers, high numbers of people in ICUs for so long, with the politicians always saying "ah, it's not so bad, everything is under control, everything is fine, let's loosen restrictions some more" that slowly but surely they have been losing their importance, and they just seem so normal now that it's hard to remember how scared everyone was back in the first wave, and how outraged by the passivity of the politicians in the second and third wave. And now we've come to expect them, actually, to do nothing until things are far worse than before, and then act half-heartedly and go say "but look it's even worse somewhere else" and "oh who could have known" and "somebody else is to blame".

In July, scientists predicted an incidence number of 350 for mid-November if vaccination rate would stay at 65%. Guess what rate we had? Guess when we hit the incidence of 350? And now politicians say "well, who could have guessed that!" I just feel so taken down the garden path. I also get the impression that no matter what most of the Germans would like to see done, or changed, in the politics of the country, the guys at the rudder just blatantly ignore it. Most of us would like a general speed limit on the Autobahn... right during the pre-talks for the new coalition after the elections, the group declared that there would be no general speed limit. WHAT?

All this makes me so mad, and so tired and hopeless at the same time, that I don't know what to do anymore. So I've been ignoring things for a while, which does not make it better either - and now I'm writing about it here, because, well, not talking about it is also not an option.

So. I'm jaded now, so jaded that it frightens me, while it feels at the same time that being frightened about my own jadedness is also getting less and less each day. That probably is a very useful psychological mechanism to help survive inevitably dire situations without going insane... but unfortunately, this situation would not have been inevitable if some people would just have listened to scientists and actually did what people who know their shit recommend. I also wonder if politicians are at all able to learn from the past, or not, and if the latter, why. Why can they not do sensible things, and make sensible decisions, instead of going "oh look there's a wall straight ahead, let's hit the accelerator!"?

Sigh.

Maybe it's a little better in your bit of the world - how are you feeling?

SEP.

Oopsie.

Sorry for the blog silence yesterday - I completely forgot to post! That happens only rarely, but this year, I had the very interesting idea of scheduling workshops fairly soon after the summer break, and together with the catching up on things that is still going on... well, it totally slipped my attention. Even though "blog" is on the list of daily things to do. But just like calendars, lists are of limited use if you don't look at them...

There's quite a bit going on here at the moment, behind the scenes. There's a newsletter to write for September, I'm preparing the items for the next online sewing workshop (on October 10, and there's still spaces free if you'd like to learn about medieval stitches and seams, in German), and both of these meant taking some photos yesterday. There's also a new thing for the shop, hooray! (Which obviously needs to go in as a listing before the newsletter goes out.) Oh, and I figured out how to solve the broken image problem on the blog - they should all be back now. (For some reason, there was a 1 added to a lot of picture file names, and deleting that meant the pics, which were on the server, could be found again.)

I'm also doing some spinning tests for the next reconstruction project - a museum would like to have Bronze Age fabrics for visitors to touch, and try on garments made from them. This is a lovely project, and a wonderful task, and it means a lot of spinning, which also means a bit of test spinning. Once I have the tests finished, they will go to the weaver to see if they are suitable, and give me some feedback, and then spinning for real will start. I'm very, very excited!

Other news? The vote in Germany is over (that was last Sunday), and now we're waiting to see who is going to run (or ruin) the country for the next 4 years. Mathematically, a lot of party constellations are possible - not, unfortunately, those that I personally would have favoured most. We might still end up with the "traffic lights" - that is SPD, FDP and the Green Party, which is the one I'd prefer out of the options left. It's definitely living in interesting times...

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