[film] Iron Man 2

I almost certainly remember liking Iron Man quite a bit.

This, not so much. Solid performance from Robert Downey Jr, but dull overall. Take away the dying and needing to find an alternate power source sub-plot, and it would have made for a fun superhero film.

The corporate villain was just too Austin Powers for words, which didn't fit with the rest of the film.

[books 2012] The Hammer and the Cross

54. The Hammer and the Cross: A New History of the Vikings by Robert Ferguson

I recently put a specialist academic textbook about the conversion of Scandinavia on my wish list, and someone bought it for me. At that point I realised I've probably forgotten most of what I knew about the basics, so I grabbed this from the library.

It's a pretty good general history, though it concentrated more on the Scandinavian contact with the outside world, where what I want to know is what was actually going on in the Nordic countries.

It answered some questions, though. Even at the level I was studying history, back in the early 90s, the reasons for the ferocity with which the Viking raiders treated the monastic communities of Europe were presented as unknown (aside from having figured out that that's where the Christians kept the good stuff), down to innate brutality. Ferguson posits that it was because Charlemagne and his successors had converted the Saxons and other German tribes with extreme prejudice and bloodshed. The refugees from these forced conversions made their way north. Thus the Viking raiders knew that their way of life was under threat from the church.

It also confirmed that one of the things I picked up as almost certainly wrong in Jared Diamond's Collapse is indeed wrong. Diamond proposes that one of the reasons for the failure of the Greenland colony (as if Black Death in Europe + Little Ice Age aren't enough) is that there is evidence they had a taboo against eating fish. Which makes NO SENSE whatsoever. According to Ferguson, evidence for consumption of fish has been found at archaeological investigations of the Greenland colony.

[books 2012] Moral Origins

55. Moral Origins: The Origins of Virtue, Altruism and Shame by Christopher Boehm

I bought this after reading a review in New Scientist. As the title suggests, it presents a theory for the evolutionary biology behind the origins of morals, largely through studying the cultural anthropology of egalitarian hunter gatherer societies whose way of life is analagous to human society 45,000 years ago. And chimpanzees, gorillas and bonobos.

I had to read it in small chunks, because although it's not too heavy on the science, it's not a subject I've read a lot about, so there was a lot to process. I suppose I should be glad I've read The Selfish Gene and The God Delusion, although Dawkins isn't talking about the exact same stuff.

What he says largely makes a lot of sense (as opposed to a lot of evolutionary biology theories I read about in New Scientist).

It takes some effort, but is definitely recommended.