Author Archives: gmcdavid

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About gmcdavid

Retired IT professional with a wide range of interests. Married. Three sons, two with autistic-spectrum disorders and the third being transgender with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome. From Chicago but now living in the Twin Cities metro, Minnesota. Episcopalian. Carleton College (BA 1972, physics) and Stanford University (MS 1974, Applied Physics; MS 1976 Statistics).

Archaeology and the Druids

Possible Druid Grave Enchants Archaeologists. Via Archaeology in Europe

Unlike a lot of sensational reports, this one is properly cautious about the dangers of interpreting a society from physical evidence alone:

There’s a joke among archaeologists: Two of their kind, in the future, find a present-day public toilet. “We’ve discovered a holy site!” cries one. “Look, it has two separate entrances,” says the other. “This here,” he says, pointing to the door with a pictogram of a woman, “was for priests. This is evident by the figure wearing a long garment.”

This reminded me of Digging the Weans (excerpt here), and Motel of the Mysteries.

Tom and work

mia_mcdavid just wrote about what is happening with Tom. I will be taking the day off from work for this. Fortunately, my cred at the office is pretty good right now. The weekend’s server work was way more exciting than I like–there was a really obscure problem with different versions of Microsoft software, but in the end we opened for a normal business day this morning (as a branch of government we were closed yesterday, although I was still working).