It really, really is amazing what one can learn (and has to learn) just because of some spinning. I have learned on Thursday last week that Excel will find the median of a list of numbers by... choosing the value in the middle of the list. Which means that instead of finding the statistical median (half of the values are larger than this number and half of the values are smaller than it), it finds the number in the middle of a list. Thank you, Excel, I could have done that myself. By placing a simple link to the cell in the middle of the list. Because yes, I can count! So I worked on a little more, using the average instead, and grinding my teeth (figuratively speaking only, though).


In case you do not have your own version of a spinning experiment that you need to evaluate and analyse, and have no clue what I'm talking about: the average is made by summing up all numbers in a dataset and then dividing it by the amount of numbers. The median is the value in the middle of the dataset. Why do I want the median instead of the average? Median is way less vulnerable to outliers in the data. Case in point - let's assume we have a list of values that goes 1, 2, 3, 4, 100. Average is (1+2+3+4+100) divided by 5, which is 22. In contrast to this, the median of the same dataset is 3.

And Friday morning, I had a little private time with Mr. Google again, and I found out that yes, you can force Excel to get the statistical median. You can tell it to find the x-largest number in a bunch of cells. Which means that if you know how big your list of data is (I do) and see if it's an odd or even number of data (I do) and, if it's even, can divide said number giving the length by 2 (I do) and can make Excel calculate an average (I do) you can tell it to calculate the average between the two numbers in the middle of the list. Gotcha.

Oh, and I need the median... because after some fiddling and trying out and looking at data and getting brain-dead and trying something else, the most patient husband of them all and me came up with a possibility to give relative variations of thread thickness. Which uses a simple formula built around either the median (good) or the average (not quite as good). And now please excuse me while I try to get my now nicely-sized histogram bins into a good graph form.

Which will include giving my computer a split personality - because the programme I plot to do my plotting with is only running on Linux machines.

As promised yesterday, here are a few things that might be of interest.

First of all, there's a blog out there with (among other things) a collection of 60 pdf files with papers or articles on experimental archaeology. Go visit http://experimentalarchaeology.wordpress.com/papers/ if you are curious now - and enjoy!

And there's more nice stuff on the net. Quite recently, the Historisch Centrum Overijssel has made all the back issues of the Textielhistorische Bijdragen available online.  This is lovely! Even more lovely is that Isis of Medieval Silkwork has made a selection of all the articles of interest for the late medieval and early modern period, with links. And if you don't know her blog yet, this is a good opportunity to check it out as well.


And another article has gone online: Fragmenter av kvinnedrakter fra vikingtiden –Metode for identifikassjon av gamle tekstilfunn. This is a Norwegian article with a short English summary, available via Bergen University as pdf file. The paper is about textiles from three Viking Age graves owned by Bergen Museum. They were analysed and evaluated using reconstructed micro-stratigraphy (reconstructed because the textiles had been separated from the metal objects in the past).

In more personal news, the collection of addresses of people interested in getting my book in English has started out extremely well, and I am very happy about all the feedback I have gotten both in emails and comments here on the blog. Thank you all very much for your support, and please keep spreading the word by email, facebook, twitter, your blog, forums you frequent - I would love to have a truly impressive list when I check back with the publishing house in two weeks.

There's quite a backlog of things-of-interest that has accumulated, both in my browser tabs and in my email inbox. And I am going to start blogging them... tomorrow.

Because today I have to post this:



If you enjoy a) organic food, b) good and funny movies, c) Star Wars parodies, d) parodies of all kind, or - the best - a jumble of that all... make sure you watch it.

And tomorrow... interesting and really usefull stuff.

After SOPA and PIPA have been shot down due to protests, I have now found that there is something very like it in the making. Here, in Europe, lots of countries already have signed an agreement called ACTA - an agreement that had been discussed behind closed doors.

And what is even worse? There is not much time left to protest against this - it's supposed to be signed in the EU parliament "early in 2012". Which is... about now.



You can read more about ACTA and learn what can be done to do it here. In Poland and Austria, people have protested against it during the last days. I hope we can still stop it. Please do your part - spread the word, join protests, or call an EU parliament member. The Internet must stay free.

Year before last around Christmas, I posted a link to a christmassy song video called "White Wine in the Sun".

Recently, I have really discovered the artist who did that song: it's Tim Minchin, and he is seriously weird and a really good musician. And since I do know the feeling that you're the smallest doll in a Babushka doll... here's Tim Minchin's song It's Not Perfect. I hope you enjoy it like I did!

First of all, to all of you who have signed on to the infoletter, or passed on the information and the link: Thank you! I am really, really happy to get this much response and support on my quest for numbers. A lot of time and effort went into writing the thesis, and it feels enormously good to see that other people are interested in this work, and willing to pay for a book about it.

Also my thanks to you who left comments with suggestions about the publishing procedure and alternatives.

Should you be interested in the German version, this is available through all the usual ways to get hold of a German book - either from a distributor in your country, or from a German shop. You can also order it from my webshop, which is probably attractive if you think about getting some textile tools or supplies at the same time.

Personally, I must admit that the e-book has never gotten me onto its side - I just prefer a bunch of printed and bound paper. I do, however, know how helpful an e-book can be, and I will think about this both for the German and the English version. It is, however, not the first option for the English version.


And regarding the voices who recommend self-publishing or print on demand... thank you for helping me think out of the box. Unfortunately, several reasons speak against using a pod service for this book - and not the least of those are your finances.
A publishing house puts out money for a book to finance an appropriately-sized print run. But they also handle law questions, distribution channels, advertisement, review copies, layouting, proofreading and editing, and thousands of other pesky details. Yes, it would technically be possible to do a pod run and "cut out the publishing house" - but we are talking about a 400-500 page book here, with colour pictures at least for parts of the book. This means it either needs to be all black and white, or it's unaffordable. And while the publishing house also needs to make some money (back) from the book, using its distribution channels and structures also means that a lot of things will be cheaper than if I tried to get it via POD.

There are books perfectly suited to using Lulu or some similar service, but my thesis is not one of them: I did the calculations and all the maths for the German version, and trust me... you do not really want me to go pod with this. It would cost you much more than if I'm going with a publishing house.