One of the things I've come across recently is the fact that most Germans have no real concept of proper wilderness. Wilderness as in "no, there's really nothing and nobody around to help you when you get in trouble, and there's also no shop that will sell you food and water". Because, well, there's no such thing in Germany. You are never far from the next village, or the next road, or the next house, or the next shop. (I was tempted to write "or the next telephone booth", but that, actually, is not the case anymore. There's still about 12.000 of them left, but they will be taken out of service this year, according to Telekom plans.)

Germany as a country is rather densely populated, and there's a huge amount of roads to get you about everywhere in your car, if you so choose. Which means that you won't be able to get further than about 13.48 km from any road - and that's only the case if you travel up to the small island called Greifswalder Oie, off the coast of Germany. On the mainland, you're usually less than a kilometre from the nearest road - if it's more than that, you're already sort of far out.

If that's made you curious, go and check out the fantastic map made by Hans Hack, where you can see the distances to roads throughout Germany. And the next time you wonder why Germans have no concept of being in the wild, or feel like they are on a different planet if there's lots and lots of land with no signs of civilisation... you know why!

Happy New Year, dear readers of this blog - I hope you had a good end of the last one and a glorious start into this year! Mine was partly spent with a rather obnoxious cold, so there was a bit more sneezing and a lot more sleeping than I had planned for.

Of couse I'm well again in time to get back to work... timing, right? But it's nice and interesting work that I'm getting back to, so that is definitely on the pro side. (Well, mostly nice and interesting - I just remembered there's tax paperwork to file in the next few weeks, too...)

There's also planning for some conferences and events in the current year. I will be at the Nadelwelt again in May, and then there's the NESAT conference in May as well. The museum in Syke plans a Bronze Age weekend event in August, where I will show things... but the next thing coming up is the Knitting History Forum conference on February 3. 

I will talk about spinning, twist, and its influence on knitting at that event, and some bits for that paper are still in the works. So here's a sneak peek for you:

These are knit from the same wool, spun once in z and once in s, with two threads held together (not plied). I've done this before, the not-plied-thing, with rather... interesting results once it got washed. This time, I'm also going to see about the differences in spin direction, including the visual ones. Next up will be the same knitting, but with plied yarns instead of yarns held parallel.

(I was hoping for the two bits to turn out the same size, but alas, the threads of one were a bit thinner than the others, or else I messed up the tension. Ah well.)

If you're interested in the outcome, consider joining the conference! It's online only, so you can attend from wherever you are. More about it, including the programme and the link to get tickets, can be found on the conference website. 

It's almost holiday time - we've tried to get all the seasonal things done that we always do, and that make us happy. There's been baking of Plätzchen, and some meetings with friends, there's been Lebkuchen and Stollen and tea and coffee to go with them, and our traditional trip to the "Historical Christmas Market"... to eat Currywurst mit Pommes (sausage with curry-tomato-sauce and french fries). 

This tradition started several years back, when the "Historical Christmas Market" in Erlangen was still named "Medieval Christmas Market". Because then it's obviously much, much funnier to eat stuff with tomato and potato there. But, well, we have coped, and live with the little bit of loss of amusement. It's still Currywurst, after all!

I will now be off into my winter break - I hope you will all have a few nice days that you can spend in a way that pleases you, with friends, family, both, or alone if you prefer. May your last bit of the year be nice, and may your start into 2024 be a good one - and I'll be back on the blog on January 11.

See you next year! 

Sometimes you need to read in more than one book at the (more or less) same time - because, for instance, you want to compare stuff. I know that I've had space issues when trying to check things in several books at once.

Well, turns out that there's a solution for this, and it can be found in a library in Mexico. It's a book wheel - something looking a bit like a rolodex (for those of you old enough to know these), with several shelves for one book each, and you can turn the wheel to look at the books in turn. 

Go see the thing in the original article about it. Unfortunately, I don't parallel read more than two books often enough to justify trying to build one of those...

This morning I found a link to an article in my news digest - about how free-ranging cats are a danger to species diversity, and may be to blame for species going extinct.

Well. WHAT?

I'm aware that there's been a discussion about cats hunting, killing, and (not always) eating all kinds of prey animals, and that this should be curtailed to give the birds and whatever other species more of a chance to survive. Yes, cats are fierce predators with a very strong hunting instinct, and yes, I can see that this may pose a problem. I'm also not thrilled about cats killing birds.

However, I'm also not convinced that keeping cats indoors all the time is the perfect solution. It's definitely safer for the cat in regards to traffic dangers (rarely do cars go inside of living spaces, after all) - but having seen how our old lady lived a second spring when she discovered the Great Outdoors, keeping cats penned up inside, even if it's a rather large place, is also not the best thing that can happen to them. (There is a lot of pros and cons for indoor vs. outdoor cats, but all the cats that I have had in my own life were outdoor cats, and were very fond of their freedom. And I am talking about Germany here, which had the wild cat before the house cat came, so it's not really an invasive species here. Things are different for areas where cats are not more-or-less native predators. Also - feral cats are a problem everywhere, and they should be caught and at least neutered so they cannot breed without restriction. There's enough cats around already.)

To get back to the main topic though - in my firm opinion, free-ranging cats may today pose a problem for animal species that are in their prey spectrum, and are already struggling. The reason for that, however, is not the fact that humans keep cats as pets and companions, or else we'd have lost a lot more species since the Middle Ages or even earlier. Species diversity is endangered because humans have been very good at making bad decisions, at impacting the habitats of a lot of species, and reducing biodiversity overall through the use of monoculture, pesticides, herbicides, and general other Stuff That Is Very Bad For The Environment (TM). And it really ruffles my feathers to have that blamed on cats now. Because it's much easier, obviously, to say that cats are to blame for this or that going extinct than our ruining the planet.

Interestingly, the article itself, from what I've read of it, is not blaming it all on cats as much as the news digest snippet that I got sent does. If you're interested, it is open access in Nature and you can find it here. Linked within is another, equally interesting article about "Invasive predators and global biodiversity loss" where, interestingly, not only cats are listed - but also foxes, rodents, and other imported invasive species. And also interestingly, rodents have played at least as large, if not a larger, role than cats. In any case, the main culprit for importing these species is... the human.

I've looked a bit more for museum collection management software... and I am amazed at how many different options and solutions there are. Most of them, however, will upload or import or otherwise duplicate an existing file. Most of them are also designed to run on a server (though that is something that I could work with), which makes perfect sense for an accessible database, and are accessed through the browser. (Also workable.)

However, it takes a bit of time to skim the documentation for each of the options to see if it might be suitable for my purposes... and that's where I'm still stuck, skimming stuff and figuring out which one may be worth a try. 

That's all happening in little bits of time inbetween "proper" work stuff, though. With extra help from the little cat today (who has been putting her paw down on the touchpad more than usual...). But I won't complain too much about having a fluffy companion while working!

Having the cat relax and hang out on the desk also means that I get to sneakily shorten her claws as necessary. She's not active enough anymore to keep all the claws short enough through wear and tear, and the tendons in older cats sort of wear out as well and don't retract everything as completely as it should be... and that has actually caused her issues with walking. Plus claw snags, which may look funny, but must be rather annoying and sometimes probably also painful. So we got a claw trimmer (human nail clippers have the wrong shape) and now we're keeping her claws short enough that they don't bother her. 

Fortunately she's fine with having her paws handled; the only really difficult claw is the thumb claw, but even that is unsupervised and standing out sometimes, in some sleepy positions. And then, snip!, it is suddenly a little shorter. And Madame is a good bit happier - not strictly in that moment, but overall, since being able to walk without pain is definitely a great factor in personal happiness!

I'm still on the hunt for a replacement for my photo database software (sigh...), which means that occasionally I'm procrastinating by looking for something. The newest direction that I've been going is museum software. Most of that is tailored to run on an Internet server, but that's something that can be done by localhost.  

It does look like there's quite a few open source and free cataloguing software solutions for museums - so maybe, with a good bit of luck, one of them will be suitable for my purposes. (For most of the things I've looked at until now, one of the dealbreakers is that everything is uploaded into a new folder structure. I have a system for my files that helps me to find them outside of the database, and I'd very much like to keep that...)

While looking for stuff, I've stumbled across a "tagging game" (in German only, sorry folks) where you can look for, and tag, items in medieval artwork. So in case you need something to do and like to look at (and for) old things, you might want to check out the Austrian ThingTag!