Stuff that's happening.

I got a new battery for my trusty laptop today, as the old one is, well, trying to turn itself into a soft hillside. Not good. 

Still working on the Alpirsbach riddle, where lots of the grain directions on the actual photo don't match very well with the grain directions on the pattern drawing, and where the two legs were consequently probably designed/drafted individually and slightly differently in approach. Gnah.

One single white tulip is blooming.

There is a part of the Swedish Historical Museum website that has all the documentation drawings of the Birka excavations, and you can search the list and look at the individual graves all you want. Why do I know this? Because I had to find out today, when working on a translation from German to English, whether the thing with textiles attached in grave 901 was scissors or shears. (German can do a distinction if you write Bügelschere instead of Schere, but the latter can mean both, so unless there's an explicit Bügelschere, you never know. It was shears in the grave, by the way.) This translation issue reminded me of a friend's explanation why so many of the automatic translation programmes have issues with genders: Because it's much easier to have just one dataset for each language that goes to English and back, and to translate from, say, Finnish to Suaheli, you'd go Finnish - English - Suaheli. Which gets you odd effects if you are translating from a language with a certain distinction between things to English where this is lacking and back to another language that would in theory mirror the original distinction, but now it won't because the information got lost in the intermediate step.