After a very full summer and autumn season, I am taking a few days off to take a breather. My list of things to ponder, write about, finish and take care of during the winter is rather longish, and I'm looking forward to all of this - but before that, a few days to take my mind off everything and gain some distance are in order.... sometimes, it's good to take a step back, and one can see clearer.

Regular blogging will thus resume on Monday next week :)

Yesterday was a day that I took things easy, to accommodate for the weekend spent working (in a thoroughly enjoyable and wonderful way - it was a lovely workshop!).

Some of that taking-it-easy-time was spent rootling around the internet, and I came up with several really cool links.

First of them: Gamers have probably solved a puzzle that scientists had not been able to solve before (using computers). The reason? Humans are (still) much better at spatial reasoning than computers. Not only did they solve it, they also were pretty quick about it! The game is called "fold.it", it's an online game that you can download for free, and there's links to a protein database where you can learn, for example, about Amyloid beta precursor protein - in a way that will not bore your proteins out of your brain.

I've mentioned gender quite a few times on this blog - and I'm not alone. Magistra et Mater blogs about the now available new Handbook from Oxford Uni Press: Oxford Handbook of Women and Gender in Medieval Europe.

And the last "wow" thing for today: A 2000-year-old seed has been successfully sprouted into a sapling date tree. Isn't that amazing? There's a nice article about it at National Geographics.

On Friday's Ask me anything, Cathy wanted to know

Why did you decide to go into archaeology as a career?

That is actually a long(ish) story... when I was close to finishing school, my plan was to go into medicine. A while before the actual final exams, though,  I discovered that a job as a medical doctor (or similar) has several different sides that did sound very un-appealing to me. So I decided that it would be not my line of career, after all.

That decision sent me into a sort of limbo, because all the years before, I had always had a plan on what to do with my life after school. Finally I made a list with all the things on it that I wanted in my future professional life. Things like working outside at least part of the time, working with people, having both manual work and brain-/desk-work. At that time, I was already into living history and had been for a while, so I added "something to do with the Middle Ages" to the list. (To be precise, it was "something to do with the Middle Ages but not History because I am so bad at remembering numbers".) I also wanted to go to university.

Then I leafed through the book you got, back then, listing all the possible course lines that you could study, and the places where they were offered. I found "Archaeology of the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age" in that book, and it sounded appealing. It also sounded like it would fit in with all the bulletpoints on my list, combining outside excavation and fieldwork with academical work using books and computers at a nice, comfy desk.
My parents supported the decision, though it was very clear from the beginning that it is not a line where you are guaranteed a steady, well-paid job - and that's how I ended up studying in Bamberg and doing Medieval Archaeology: because I had made that list, and the career seemed to fit in with what I wanted.

It did fit in with what I want still, and I have not regretted it, and am deeply, deeply thankful to my parents for making it possible.

Did that answer your question, Cathy?

Tomorrow will be the start of my sewing workshop, and I'm really looking forward to this - I'll do the last preparation bits necessary for it this afternoon.

Otherwise, I have been busy registering my photos with VG Bildkunst, after getting the prod in the behind that I needed to finally get myself a password and do the paperwork. I'm really curious to see how much that will bring me! This is what made me find out, by the way, that I have posted a bit more than 200 photos on this blog. That's not so much, actually - it roughly means one photo every fifth blog post. (I should post more pictures. Pictures are nice.)

Also, I have decided to do an Ask me anything - go ahead and post your question in the comments. I will do my best to answer anything, within reason. (Non-reasonable things being those too personal, or those too complex to answer in a blog post. Or those I deem unreasonable for some other reason. You know how those things work, right? And probably better than me, too.)

In today's random list of things that I found interesting:

Are computer searches making us dumber or smarter?

A very personal, and very impressive, answer to someone depressed and thinking of suicide.

A piece on gender behaviour and its possible biological roots.

The journal Archäologische Informationen is now online and open access. h/t to tribur.

Norway is trying to break the Australian record for sheep to sweater, and it will be televised.

And finally, should you be looking for inspiration on how to quit your job in style - look at the art of quitting.

A while ago, I hinted at something developing connected both to the Eternal Spinning Experiment and Ravelry.

Though I have been mostly away, and busy, and mostly without internet access during the last two weeks, that thing has gone on developing (huzzah for collaboration with others not absent during that time!) and it has, also during my absence, gone live.

Ladies and Gentlemen, may I present to you a new Ravelry group: SpinStats. The aim of that group is to use the immense number of (handspindle-)spinners on Ravelry to collect some data about things that are of interest for research into hand-spinning... such as: how much yarn do people pack onto a spindle?

Spinning styles and methods can differ wildly, as can fibres and thread thicknesses and whatnot. But we do need some more data than is currently available on hand-spinning processes, and Ravelry with its mass of spinners from all over the world is a wonderful place to collect said data. This is why we came up with the idea for SpinStats. We will post challenges to that group that anybody who likes can join - beginners, advanced spinners, we want you all.  The first challenge is already up and running, and it will hopefully tell us something about the normal cop weight that modern spinners put onto a spindle. Is there a difference between spinning styles? Or depending on the spindle? Fibre, maybe? If we are lucky and get enough data, we might gain some insight into this.

So if you are a hand-spindle spinner and would like to help in generating some data, please go join our group. (In case you are not on Ravelry yet - it's free to join. Should you not want to join for whatever reason, but still like to participate, just email me and I will give you the challenge data.) If you know hand-spindle spinners that might be interested, please pass on the word - the more spinners, the better. We have the first few cops submitted already, and I am absolutely thrilled to see the group up and running. (I'm still working on my cop, though, being a slow-ish spinner with thin threads, and so on...)

... for this especially late blog post. Because I got distracted. By not one, not two, but three repositories:

Fornvännen, a Swedish journal, has searchable archives online. The articles are (of course) in Swedish; if you search for Inga Hägg, you will get several articles by her about Viking garments.

Also online, also for free: the London and Middlesex Archaeological Society's Transactions. Plus their newsletters and special papers. The archives go from 1860 to 2005, and the Transactions themselves are quite substantial.

And thirdly, the Durham e-theses - you can browse by department, see the newest additions, or search for a term.

I will get back to digging some more in these three places now. Yay for research to be found online!