... giving us riddles.

Like the female community buried, and now being excavated, here: 

It's only a short video, but I found the graves quite fascinating! 

Amazingly, the book covers analysed in a Northern French abbey were bound in... seal skins. That was quite unexpected, and some more research and analyses discovered more seal skin use in books in Belgium and England. 

You can read the original article here.

Ebay sent me an email a while ago about changes in their Terms and Conditions, ending with the sentence "You do not need to do anything". They are valid from yesterday - and apparently if you don't do anything (like I did), it grants ebay permission to use your data for training of KI.

Aaargh. And have I mentioned aargh? Thankfully I have the Most Patient Husband of Them All, who sent me info about this today, including on how to deny this. (Obviously if they already used your data, that's done, but at least you can disallow anything new to be used.)

If you want to read a bit more in German about this, here's a Spiegel article. And if you only care for the "f* off and leave my data alone"-link, here you go. You will have to log in, then move the slider from the "yes" to "no" side.

And just in case you have not guessed yet: I am very much not amused.

It's getting warmer and sunnier here, and all kinds of flowers are blooming. Some are a little early, and it's been too dry hereabouts,  but I am still enjoying the warmth... and the flower carpet that the Gundermann is making: 

(The dictionary tells me the English name is "ground ivy", which seems a little weird to me - there's not so much similarity to ivy...)

And also coming up, very fitting to the warm weather and everything green and hopeful again: Easter. Which means I will have a few days off, so the blog will go on a break until next Tuesday. I hope you can enjoy a few nice days and maybe a long weekend, whether you celebrate or not!

In case you can access BBC online, there's a one-hour broadcast about "The Mysteries of the Bayeux Tapestry", featuring Dr. Alexandra Makin. It's currently available online here.

If you have been on facebook recently, you will have seen the "trendy images" generated of people - using photos as a base, they are rendered in Studio Ghibli-style or, the most recent fad, you can turn your photo into an action figure, in its plastic packaging, with some objects as accoutrements.

Yeah. There was a big blow-up about the "Ghibli filter" in AI, because the material taken to train the AI was taken without permission, and without reimbursement to the artists. So basically their work was stolen - much like the books that were used to train AIs, taken without permission (and one I co-authored was among them, by the way).

And now the trend is action figures. Well, at least that does not take someone's work and hands it out for free, right? However, there is still a stack of issues connected, one of them being the use of water (to cool) and energy (to run the servers).

You can read a little more about this here on Instagram...

or in this BBC article here. (Though I don't get why this, or other critical articles, are saying "don't do it" only to decorate their posts with multiple images of the figures, including those of the authors. Hm.)

Would I find it fun to see myself as an action figure, or drawn Ghibli-style? Yes. Will I have the AI make it? Definitely not. Apart from the intellectual property issues with the Ghibli filter, I don't really want to feed the AI enough data about myself to render a nice image. (Also you'd probably need a pretty oversized box if you wanted to include all the stuff to describe my work and life...) And it would feel a little off to waste energy and water on making a "fun" image when I'm trying hard in the other areas of my life to be as sustainable and low-impact as possible. 

Or they will tell you you're good to go.

Across the street, that is.

If you are confused now, here is the explanation: Traffic lights for pedestrians have been installed in Haddeby, the modern settlement close to Haithabu. Yes, that Haithabu of the viking-age settlement that was excavated years ago.

So now there's a little Viking standing with a round shield for the stop signal, and a green one running, axe at the ready. Hopefully not to kill and plunder the Hedeby museum!

Read the full article (in German) and see the pictures here!