This year, I actually managed to look into my calendar in time, and did not forget to do so until after the blogiversary*. This year, however, the blogiversary day is tomorrow - and that's a Saturday.

Well, I do not have many hard and fast rules for this blog, but one of them is "I post Monday to Friday." Which, by inference, means that I do not post Saturday or Sunday. (Technically, since this is my blog and I am allowed to not post on weekdays if I announce it beforehand, it would be perfectly possible to post tomorrow. But... somehow, I don't want to. It's weekend, after all.)

So today is the day for some blog-related navel gazing. I started this blog on December 8, 2008, and it has been running all weekdays ever since. Well, except for when I'm on holidays. Or on a conference. Or need some time off. Or am on a medieval event. Or... well, you know what I mean.

On average, I did about 200 blog posts per year - in a wild mix of links from the Internets, hints to resources like databases, programmes and other websites, conference calls for papers, some unashamed plugging of my own stuff (though speaking as my vaguely entrepreneur-like self, I'm probably not doing enough of that by far), and telling about past and future events that I am taking part in.

The little blog has grown to have more than 160 followers, racked up 150 500 page views in its days, and has the healthy number of a bit more than 320 rss feed subscribers (on average, as Feedburner is quick to tell me).

But there is something much, much more important than these bare numbers. This little blog is, and means, so much more - and has done a lot for me. It gives my work day a bit of structure (which is not bad for a freelancer to have). It means I practise my English and get to roam the Internet a bit each day (I have to find something to blog!). It is immensely gratifying for me to hear that the blog is amusing, entertaining and - best of all - helping others. And it has opened some new avenues for me as well... for instance, I would never have gone to the Leeds blogger meet without it, and thus never met this weird Australian that is now my partner in a project.

So... happy blogiversary, little corner of the Internet! May you go on to prosper...


* I was late to catch on in both 2009 and 2010 and did a belated blogiversary post. In 2011, I completely forgot to do one.

I have managed to enter a few more of my books into my book database yesterday, and now I have the reordering problem - the bookshelf is, technically, full. If I am taking out individual books from here and there, then re-order them into the new order in some other bit of the shelf, said last other bit is not spacious enough because the gaps in the size of the books are somewhere else.

So what I would really love to have now is a magic extra shelf in some magic box or something that is bigger on the inside and can hold all the newly ordered books until my shelf is all cleared out and I can put them back in.

Bonus points for automatic shelving in order if I just toss in the book.

Apart from that, it's getting more and more wintery here, and the festive season is starting properly now - there will be the first pre-Xmas-dinner tonight. And cookie baking has started, with the first two batches already finished and the dough for the next one waiting in the fridge.

I am wrestling with Excel, and it is winning. I have not yet made it to the breakthrough in R (I think I need someone to teach me R for dummies, as I am somehow shattering on the most basic things, like importing an Excel workbook with several sheets and saving that as a dataframe) but I need some quick results. Not much, mind you; not the full analysis... but at least something. Something! And I would know how to get it! But... I have made the mistake of saving the formulas in one workbook, and now I need them in another one. And due to the perverseness of my system, and that of Excel, and that of the worksheets... I get an out-of-memory error every time. No, the workarounds all do not work. Yes, I have tried them all (at least all that I could find). Arrr...


And since two people posed the same question yesterday: From what I remember of Swedish coffee (real Swedish coffee drunk in Sweden, from a cafe or a selling point for caffeinated hot drinks) they are large, they are strong (but not overly so) and they are delicious to my taste - with neither too much acidity nor too much bitterness. Not like the thing we termed "Swedish coffee" at the Forum - though of course there are different strength and quality coffee experiences to be found in any country.
German plain coffee roasts often have a tendency to be quite acidic, and the sourness is something I neither like nor can stomach well, so I am fond of the "milder" kinds of beans here, and I generally prefer the fancy coffees with lots of milk (latte macchiato, anyone?). And the coffee I tasted in the Czech Republic was not really acidic, but always quite, quite strong, plus the beans and/or roast and extraction must have been different, since it was very bitter (at least to my taste).
Your coffee-when-traveling observations are very welcome in the comments - I'd be interested to hear what experiences you have had!

Today is a holiday hereabouts - so no proper blog post.

Instead, have this:


(from www.foxtrot.com)

Nobody can do research without money. Because researchers, like all other people, need to sleep (preferably somewhere dry and not too cold), to wear something (yes, really) and to eat something (not only chocolate, though it should be in there somewhere if you ask me). And all that needs some money.

If you are more or less involved in museums, archaeology research facilities or similar institutions, you will know that money is always scarce there. I remember being a student helper when I was still studying; we'd get paid for doing necessary preparatory work for papers such as taking and sorting slides, or helping when there was a conference. There was scarcely enough money to pay for the work that really needed to be done. Nobody doing a phd would have a chance of getting paid from the Uni - either you got funding somewhere else, or you were self-funded. You had a chance to get a work space (as in "a table") in one of the department's rooms, though they were limited, and you had to bring your own computer.

There's no law that says good research cannot be done with a low budget. But a low budget is severely limiting research in several ways: time, resources, possibilities, presentation.
Someone researching topic X with no money for it has to provide not only for the necessities of life, but also for the research. Books and articles are expensive, as are trips to libraries further away. All this has to be paid for - or our researcher has to do without. Time has to be spent on other, paid work. No funding also means little possibility to use newer analysis methods. And finally, no funding as in "you pay for going to that conference* all by yourself" means fewer possiblilties to exchange knowledge and experience with other researchers, limiting not only that one person's research, but also its impact. (Even worse when the conference has no funding and thus publication takes ages and ages and ages. Ask me how I know.)

Why am I writing all this? The next summit of the EU heads of states on 22-23 November 2012 will be a decisive step in determining the EU research budget for the next seven years. The conditions are not favorable: the financial crisis has put severe constraints on the national budgets and several countries, in particular the "net-payers", are demanding cuts on the total EU budget. Research and innovation will compete with other policy priorities.

Fourty-two Nobel Laureates and five Fields Medallists (something like Nobel, but for Maths folks) have written an open letter urging the EU to keep funding research. This has turned into a petition that you can sign here - and then join me in hoping this will be enough to keep the EU from cutting budget.

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* The conferences are not as pricey as, say, medical conferences usually are - but still: you need to sleep somewhere, you need to eat something, you need to get there and back again, and pay the conference fee. Conferences (and I so love going to them) are one of the big spending points in my budget.

Some problems you can solve with scissors. Or shears. Like getting the wool from sheep.
Some problems you can solve with maths. Like how much to charge for shearing a sheep.

Now, a lot of textile people are not so very fond of maths - maybe this would be a good suggestion to make maths textbooks more textile-people friendly:





Shear transformation, anyone?

(via cheezburger.com)

Debbie of the Mulberry Dyer has blogged about Cream of Tartar that is part of quite a few historical dye recipes, and of some modern ones, too. It seems that some dye retailers want their customers to buy the tartar in their own shops and not in the grocery store, so they say that the cream of tartar used for baking is the wrong chemical.

Well, that's nasty behaviour - since it isn't. Go read Debbie's blog about that. It also includes some more info on what the stuff is, chemically, and where it comes from. (Wikipedia has some more, and different, info as well.) The German name is much clearer about this - it calls the chemical "Weinstein", literally translating as "Wine Stone". And that's exactly how you can find it: As small crystals or stones on the bottom of wine barrels or sometimes wine bottles or sometimes even in grape juice. We get our grape juice as 5 l bag-in-box thingies, either red or white, from the Weingut Hechler - and I have found tartar in there once the bag was empty.

So if you need tartar for something... here is your perfect excuse to get some wine or good grape juice.