Yuccacentric

"If God were a french fry, He'd read this blog..."

with Guest Host Stentor Danielson

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7.7.2001

*** I hadn't realised what a hassle buying shampoo was going to be. I figured it would be easy. I don't have any special haircare needs, considering my Official United States Senate Haircut is pretty robust. All I needed was the cheapest shampoo they had.

The cheapest shampoo ($1.99) at Tops was Suave brand. So far, so good. Except that there was a 6-foot section of shelf devoted to $1.99 bottles of Suave, and they were all different. Tropical Fruits, Extra Body, Aloe Vera, Peach, Salon Formula, and so on. I looked hard for a bottle of "normal" shampoo, but I was out of luck. They didn't give me any options -- I had to make a statement with my choice of hair care product. I couldn't just choose a shampoo, I had to choose a beauty lifestyle. It was a frightening prospect.

I eventually went with "Balsam and Protein" because it had a translucent bottle, thus making it easy to see how much is left, but it didn't have a weird fruity smell.
posted by Stentor Danielson 7:04 PM | link |

*** Zeke has finally posted the Old Man Rockin' flash movie. Finally.
posted by Stentor Danielson 2:02 AM | link |

*** Timmy finally put up the picture of me grabbing Kevin's ass (UPDATE: later, Kevin took it down). Now it is documented.
posted by Stentor Danielson 1:43 AM | link |

*** Yesterday at Prof. Kerber's party I was talking with Carol Ann Lorenz, the former curator of the Longyear Museum. She was talking about the problems they've had with storing items in the collection. It all started when referred to the putty that the DeAngelos are using to prop up some objects while they photograph them as "Play-Doh." Prof. Lorenz was shocked. Apparently Play-Doh has oil in it that can leave a damaging residue on artefacts, so you need to use special Museum Putty.

The storage room seems nice and cool -- a low-stress environment for keeping things safe. But it isn't climate controlled, so humidity was making some paintings stick to the tissue that separated them. They had to spend hours sraping tissue off the paint. The cabinets that we keep the Oneida materials in are even worse. They're made from wood, which is Bad News in archival terms. Any organic material will give off resin, which in the long term will damage artefacts, even when they're kept in special acid-free boxes in the wooden drawers. What we need is steel cabinets.

It's strange the lengths we have to go through to preserve this stuff. And even with climate control and inert metal shelving and everything else, it still won't last forever. I was thinking of this as I sorted pot sherds yesterday. Whenever I'm going through the collection, my hands get dirty. I know part of it, particularly with stone items, is just dirt from the pit the things were dug out of. But when I look in the boxes of sherds, there is a residue of crumbly dirt in the bottom. I often dump it in the garbage, to keep things clean. I even throw out sherds below a certain size (a centimeter across or so) just so they don't confuse the count of unnumbered sherds. But I stopped to look at the dirt that had accumulated in the box I was using as a temporary home for items as I took them out of the drawer to check them off the inventory. There was a fair amount of it. The pot sherds are, for lack of a better word, eroding. Every time I touch them, every time I move the box that they're in, every time I bang the drawer against the posts of the cabinet because there's no real track for it to slide on, I hasten their breakdown. It's most noticeable with the Oneida pottery because it's a rougher form of pottery, more like grade school art class ware than the European ceramics that are sometimes mixed in in contact-period sites. But it must be happening to some degree to everything -- stone points, rusted gun parts, glass beads, and so on. Using it for anything damages it and makes it less useful to the next person.

It's a recurring dilemma in field archaeology. If you don't excavate a whole site, your conclusions aren't as complete. But the more you excavate, the less there is for the next person who comes along. And the next person might have more sophisticated techniques, or just different research questions, and an eye out for different types of evidence. When we visited Dungey, Prof. Kerber told me he was really hoping that Darryl Wonderley would be able to point us to a new section of the deposit that previous digs so that this summer's workshop didn't "use up" the site.

I suppose the problem is that archaeological data isn't reproduceable. Once an artefact is damaged, it's gone. You can't get it back. There's a similar problem with storing the digital photos -- any data format is susceptible to corruption. Prof. Kerber has had long conversations with guys from ITS about the stability of different brands of CDs. We have a little acid-free box to keep the CD backups in. But the thing is that the images aren't objects, they're just information. If something happens to one backup, you can copy the information from another one. We can make a thousand copies of the digital photograph. If we recopy onto fresh disks at intervals, we can theoretically preserve the information forever. But it doesn't work like that with artefacts. Even the best copy doesn't inculde everything -- which is the heart of the anti-repatriation argument. You have to keep an item around as long as you can, to milk as much information as possible from it. But you can't milk it too hard, or you'll destroy it. They weren't able to date the earliest human remains for a long time because the dating methods they had at first required such a large sample that we would have destroyed too much of the little surviving bone in order to get a reliable date.

The situiation is especially odd when you consider that the vast majority of the items we have -- particularly the contents of digs on local land, since our Mesoamerican and African collections consist mostly of whole statues and representative tools -- are junk. We have Oneida pottery in the Longyear museum, to preserve for future generations, because some Oneida way back when tried to throw it out.
posted by Stentor Danielson 12:38 AM | link |

7.6.2001

*** I haven't died. I'll post my thoughts from yesterday later today. But at the moment I've been sitting in front of the computer for too long catching up on the Brunching UBB for too long. So I'm going to go do some work.

They finally connected the computer in the Longyear Museum to the network today. Just in time for me to not be working there much anymore.
posted by Stentor Danielson 3:33 PM | link |

7.5.2001

*** I hope everyone had a good "Screw You, England! Day"

For once I actually socialised with real people. This morning I went to the Hamilton parade with Kevin and little Moon-Pie. Kevin was extremely critical of the Hamilton Central School band. He was complaining about their marching and the way they held their flutes so much that at one point he turned around and declared "I can't even watch this!" I also got to see one of the motorcycle guys fall off.

After frolicking in a sudden torrential thunderstorm, I headed to a little get-together with a bunch of professors at Prof. Kerber's house. I mostly listened in on conversations, on topics like the fact that nobody ever reports on the actual crackpot nature of Falun Gong's beliefs, and the pros and cons of the Moscow metro.

Then I headed over to the fireworks, where I met up with Dan and Bethanie. We went downtown looking for food, but eventually wound up at their apartment eating cheese and Triscuits.

Also, on IRC I managed to get annenayne hooked on John Mars. The perfect end to the day.
posted by Stentor Danielson 2:47 AM | link |

7.3.2001

*** At long last, we have Dave news! In a postcard I received today, Dave informs us that Utah is "a who's who of patriarchs." He's also had the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to listen to lots of Garth Brooks. He said a lot of other stuff, but it's fairly illegible because he was writing it in a moving vehicle on a bumpy road.
posted by Stentor Danielson 6:49 PM | link |

*** I did another information session for prospectives today. It was fun. I get this weird kick out of telling these high school kids how great Colgate is. Because, as much as I complain, I really do believe it. It disappointed me that this group didn't ask more questions. I didn't even get the standard "what do you like least?" question that every college search advice tells you to ask.

Doug Chiarello was leading the session. As soon as I got home (I walked directly home, mind you) I had an email from him telling me that I was "en fuego" and saying how wonderful the session went. Get a grip, Doug.

Tomorrow I'm meeting with someone from Carreer Services to talk about postgrad fellowships. At the moment there are four I'm looking into -- the Marshall, the Mitchell, the Watson, and the Fulbright. But the more I look at things the less likely it seems that I'll get any of them. I took a look at some of the credentials the folks currently on Marshall or Mitchell have. Wow. These people are so far beyond me in terms of credentials. I suppose I could bs my way into being in the same order of magnitude as the less accomplished people -- talk up my involvement with getting the Prism started and so on. But that would feel really dishonest. I think the only way I have a shot is if I can really put together an outstanding concept for what studies I want to pursue and why. Of course, the problem with that is that with all of these fellowships, I want to do something in environmental studies. But that will be a tough sell for the exact reason that I want to do it -- I have almost no background in environmental studies. The Marshall and Mitchell want you to study something you're already immersed in.

I have the opposite problem with the Watson and Fulbright. They're "year of independent travel and research" type fellowships. So they want you to go out and experience new things. But the thing that I'd really find worthwhile and rewarding would be to go back to Australia. They don't like you going back to places you've been already, especially if that place is America with a funny accent. So my hope there is that I could sell it on the fact that I'd be studying Aboriginal ecology. I took a look at Fulbright's requirements for New Zealand, too. They say that if you want to do anything relating to the Maori (which I of course would), you're required to take Maori classes at a university there. And while I don't know anything about the Maori other than that they came to New Zealand around AD 1000 and killed off the moa, the prospect of learning their language has got me all excited.

No Dave news at this time.
posted by Stentor Danielson 2:58 AM | link |

7.2.2001

*** It seems that InterLibrary loan is more powerful than a library's regular borrowing rules. As far as I know, libraries do not let people check out reference books or bound journals. But I currently have in my possession Australians to 1788, from the reference shelves of SUNY Buffalo, and Memoirs of the Queensland Museum 37, a journal from the University of Rochester. It gives me a feeling of superhuman power.
posted by Stentor Danielson 4:08 PM | link |

*** Whew. Turns out ubiquity really is a word.
posted by Stentor Danielson 12:12 PM | link |

*** Today was rather uneventful. It figures that the one day of the week when I really ought to get up early (for church) is the one day I manage to be able to stay asleep long enough to get a decent night's rest. So I skipped church. Ah well.

But I made up for it by having Deep Religious Thoughts while I was catalouging stuff in the Longyear Museum. I explained it in a thread on the Brunching UBB. Or I tried. It's still in pretty rough form.

Basically, it runs like this: People who say you have to accept Jesus as your Lord and savior are missing the point in the same way as people who say "I'm a good person, so why would a loving God send me to hell?" Both people are implicitly asking "what do I have to do to get into heaven?" with the assumption that there's some kind of checklist of prerequisites for eternal life. But I think that the central message of Jesus' ministry is that we shouldn't be asking that question. He didn't come to say "If you do what God wants, you'll go to heaven," he came to say "God loves you. How does that make you feel?" Being a moral person in order to earn a spot in heaven is like hanging out with your friends so that you'll have reliable character witnesses if you get taken to court.
posted by Stentor Danielson 1:07 AM | link |

7.1.2001

*** It's really sad that a Yahoo! search for "sticknest rat urine" only brings up two hits.

Why, you might ask, was I doing a search for sticknest rat urine? Well, I was reading Man the Hunter, and I came across a discussion of the usefulness of studying coprolites. This led me to think of some of the research currently being done in the School of Geosciences at the University of Wollongong. The theory is that over time, the rats' urine builds up in their nests and hardens into a shiny black rock. By testing the solidified urine, we can date sites where no carbon (for c14 dating) has survived. During my Australian Archaeology class, we got to inspect one of the chunks -- a piece about the size of a large man's fist. Everyone thought it was pretty gross that I had no issues about picking it up.

Upon further consultation I found that Yahoo!'s knowledge of stick-nest rats is a little better if you spell it "stick-nest" instead of "sticknest."
posted by Stentor Danielson 11:36 AM | link |