zappo

Gah, home with pink-eye. Boy it hurt last night! At least it has cooled down a lot by now but here I am, staring with my left eye at the screen from a distance of about 20 cm (my left eye is very, very nearsighted). And that's why I didn't go to work.

At least this time I know why my eye hurts: it was the continuous draught on the bridge last Monday, right into the corner of my eye. Urgh.

And as usual when I am home from work (this is the third time in a year, I think), my neighbout has a disco. This time she didn't wait till 1230, like she so considerately did the first time, no, 1015 is a good time for hiphoprnb.

NOT!

I think I'll turn on the 1812 ouverture again...

But at least yesterday was very nice. I went out to map rocks in the bit of forest left where my paternal Grandmother used to play as a small child. I know she did, because she wrote about it in her memoirs. It's a hill opposite Liseberg here in Göteborg, and they're planning to build a garage in it. Literally in it. Next to an extant sewage tunnel. Yay complicated!

What a pretty day it was! Warm weather (but not too warm), vitsippor, birdsong, and interesting rocks. Gneiss to the east, then all gabbro! Well, here and there it was amphibolitised, and there were interesting veins of magma mingling too -- just like in the intrusion I studied for my thesis ten years ago. Well, no surprise, since that's just over the hill from here.

Also, I saw the foundations for the furnicular they built here in 1923, for the World Fair. Slabs of concrete, the housing for the cable, and some viewing platforms. Contemporary archeology, that. Perhaps we should have a little outing to that hill, with one or the other of the clubs I'm a member of. We'd just have to wade through all the half-naked students lying around in the sunshine...

Well, now for something else. I'm quite bored; I had meant to go out to another bit of forest for gamma radiation measurements, but that will have to wait. Bored bored bored! And nearsighted...

Oh and...

All these science shows, on SVT Kunskapskanalen (The Knowledge Channel), put me in total awe of pre-colombian South American engineering. I don't suppose the Incas suddenly developed the fully-fledged amazing engineering skillz that these science shows purport, but that it's a long, well-established tradition that with the Incas is put into systematic use. (I really must read more about this, it's fascinating.)

It's a stone-to-bronze age culture, in a landscape with extreme terrain, sometimes frightful weather, humongous erosion, plus earthquakes, mudslides and volcanoes. And they made structures that _last_! Wow. Not just the stupendous rock walls with slabs of stone so perfectly molded and assembled you can't push a knife-blade between them, no, I'm thinking about the roads. Built along almost sheer cliffs 500 years ago, and they still exist. And I'm thinking about the cultivation terraces, painstakingly crafted onto and out of the living rock (as Tolkien would say). The irrigation canals. The... well all of it!

And the science shows make it out like it just suddenly appeared, and no big deal. Sheesh. I'm in total awe of all the ancient engineers, all over the world. Unsung heroes of humanity indeed. Rock works rule!