The Viking women!

This post exaggerates the role of women in warfare in the Middle Ages — it’s more about how graves are misidentified, that women were sometimes buried with weapons — but most interesting is that two historians weigh in in the comments, one whose specialty is studying weapons in grave goods, and another who is an expert in medieval Scandinavia. Some women may have fought, and they were definitely honored with weaponry at their funerals, but sad to say, Viking society was strongly patriarchal and discouraged women from fighting.

[Read more…]

Every time I’m sure they’ve sunk as low as they can get, they start drilling deeper

So some celebrities had their phones hacked and very personal and private photos stolen, which certain less savory and much more piggish individuals have been happily disseminating on the internet. There is the issue of the hypocrisy of people concerned about privacy celebrating this.

[Read more…]

Spontaneous emergence of an ancient sleep pattern!

I am reassured. My usual sleep pattern is to go to bed around 11 or 12, and then I wake up around 5 and rather sluggishly amble towards alertness. But lately, after having that pattern disrupted by travel, I’ve been going to bed earlier, then waking up around 3am and either struggling to get back to sleep or getting up and reading, and then getting a few more hours of sleep, waking up around 7.

I was getting a little worried that this was a sign of incipient insomnia, but I seem to be getting enough sleep…and then I read about human sleep patterns in the absence of artificial light. Well, cool. It turns out that if you don’t keep yourself awake late into the dark hours you naturally fall into a pattern of waking for a while in the early hours of the morning.

That’s actually encouraging. I’ve been lying abed, annoyed at waking and trying to sleep harder, as silly as that sounds, but now I’m going to take advantage of those 2:30am conscious periods to get up and get something done.

I don’t agree with everything this guy says, either

Way too many clips of Thunderf00t mugging for the camera, and the conclusion staggers home with a feeble “I’m not that kind of feminist” disclaimer, but otherwise, it’s nice to see the Phil Mason School of Logical Fallacies exposed so well.

It seems strange to see people defending a game called “Hit Man”, though. You aren’t required to murder those strippers doesn’t exactly sound like an accolade — it’s still a game where you pretend to be a professional murderer.