I, Mind Traveller

2017 Reading Challenge Anna has read 12 books toward her goal of 60 books. hide 12 of 60 (20%) view books .gr_grid_container { /* customize grid container div here. eg: width: 400px; */ } .gr_grid_book_container { /* customize book cover container div here */ float: right; width: 98px; height: 160px; padding: 0px 0px; overflow: hidden; } Share book reviews and ratings with Anna, and even join a book club on Goodreads.

[astravers]

happy fall equinox!

[delta-breezes]

@janne_paalandet

[colorel11]

[colorel11]

© leonid Len

[maddyandsummer]

[quakerjoe]

[posthooliganism-deactivated2019]

2018 is the year we forcibly collectivize JSTOR

[oligopsoneia-deactivated2018051]

morally correct but historically incorrect, since as a matter of fact scihub was founded in 2011

[posthooliganism-deactivated2019]

until scihub has articles on the intersection of Brecht, feminist theory and chinese operas ill be waiting outside jstor’s offices with a molotov cocktail in one hand and my burning desire to read about obscure theatrical history in the other

[vann-haal]

hi can somebody please translate this into regular street english for me please? i feel like im having a stroke reading this

[oligopsoneia-deactivated2018051]

JSTOR is a commercial archive of scholarly papers, and has many (though not all) scientific journals. Professors (mostly, but in principle it could be anyone) of various disciplines (e.g. Brecht, feminist theory, chinese operas, organic chemistry) write these papers, which is sort of like posting, except it takes much longer because moderation is much stricter, and if you don’t get enough reblogs you die. If you have a university affiliation as student or faculty, you probably have access to a JSTOR subscription. 

If you don’t, you can read most of their articles online. This is a policy that JSTOR adopted after bad press and the apprearance of free alternatives -  young activist Aaron Swartz downloaded their entire archive for it to be freely distributed to the internet (much as you would download a movie), for which they tried to throw the book at him, leading to his suicide. JSTOR was angry about this because it gets money by charging people (mostly universities) to view its content.

Sci-hub is a site that breaks (some countries’) copyright laws to make files freely available, like Pirate Bay but for science and the humanities. A young scholar, Alexandra Elkabyan, set it up on many of the same principles that inspired Swartz - that scientific findings and scholarship should be publicly available. Just about everything is on SciHub, because there are always people motivated to make the findings of their fields available, just like there’s always someone who wants to distribute the latest Game of Thrones right after it airs, even though HBO doesn’t like this.

The easiest way to use scihub is to use Google Scholar, which is Google for scholarly papers like these, to search for subjects you are interested in, and then to paste in the title or  more reliably DOI number (which is a purely technical number that most papers have, sort of like their social security number) into scihub, which will typically get you the pdf of the paper. There’s also Book4You, which is similar, but for books.

Most of the papers you find through this will not be this will not be accessible from common language, which is partially a result of scholars needing specialized terms for new ideas they’ve developed, partially because of how any group of people starts using words distinctly, and partially because they’re afraid that other people will think they’re stupid. But reading a wikipedia page on the subject will often make things a little (if not always a lot) clearer.

(Hopefully this answer was itself written clearly!)

[oodlenoodleroodle]

To explain a little further why some people feel like all these texts should be freely available: many researchers (people who write these papers) work in universities or other formal research organisations and their work is often at least partially funded by government money in form of grants that they have to apply for. 

So the idea is a little bit offensive to some, that you, a Tax Payer, pay for research to be done through your taxes, but some commercial entity then gets all the rights to the results and you have to pay through the nose to read the stuff – when you paid to have it made in the first place! And when it’s put like that, well, hell yes it sounds like bullshit! 

[i-mindtraveller]

On top of that, even if research was 100% conducted in the researchers’ own time, using their own resources (I’m talking here from a social science/humanities perspective, in other disciplines where you need expensive lab equipment, that may not be possible), 0% of the extortionate prices for journal papers flow back to them. As a researcher, you work hundreds of hours collecting and analysing data and writing up the results. You submit your paper to journals with a very sketchy review process that is based on further unpaid labour of overworked academics that may reject your paper just because they are of a different academic school of thought or didn’t have the time to properly consider your work. And when you finally manage to get your results published (of research you conducted to make a positive impact on society), there is no monetary reward and a good chance that the results are overlooked, because your target audience are policy makers, not academics (for much of social science/social medicine research) , but you need highly rated journal publications to keep your (comparatively poorly paid) academic post.

[biodiverseed]

Appearing like trenches dragged into the earth, sunken lanes, also called hollow-ways or holloways, are centuries-old thoroughfares worn down by the traffic of time. They’re one of the few examples of human-made infrastructure still serving its original purpose, although many who walk through holloways don’t realize they’re retracing ancient steps.

- Allison Meier in Atlas Abscura

[chroniclebooks]

[johnnybravo20]

[ladyrosenred]

Big Siberian Tiger (by MIke Kolesnikov)

[corgli]

[lohrien]

Illustrations by lovelimzy

[howling-science]

[valleyofstrangers]

Ian Miller

[kaenith]

I was lucky enough to see a hummingbird up close this morning!  I felt inspired after that :D

[randomtinywords]

Scots 1: Yes, it is a language!

So, since there’s been some interest in Scots here since that post about Harry Potter in Scots appeared, I thought it’d be nice to do some posts about the language and the history and so on (since I speak it and am way too interested in it)! This first post in basically an overview of the history and some main differences between Scots and English. Later on, I can go more in depth into vocabulary, grammar and dialects, depending on what people want.

History

Scots is a part of the Anglo-Frisian branch of the Germanic language family, very very closely related to English. In fact, Scots evolved from the Northumbrian dialect of Old English that was spoken in southern Scotland from the 7th century. During the 12th and 13th centuries, Old Scots diverged from the early Middle English spoken just over the border and began to spread up the east coast, replacing Gaelic. Middle Scots became a prestige language by the 16th century used by the Scottish royal court and developed literary and orthographic norms independent to English over the border. 

In 1603 Queen Elizabeth I died, leaving no children to succeed the English throne. The only heir was King James VI of Scotland, so he moved himself and his court to London and became James I of England too. This shift lead to English becoming the prestige language, reducing Scots to a vernacular language. 

After the Union of Parliaments in 1707, the use of Modern Scots and even the notion of Scottishness was strongly discouraged. In literature, the language was revived during the 18th and 19th centuries by poets like Robert Burns, but even until 30 years ago children were punished for using it in school. Nowadays, Scots is becoming more prominent with more books, poetry and television shows being produced in the language; even the New Testament was translated into Scots!

Geography

Scots is spoken mainly in the south, north east and Northern Isles of Scotland. In the north and west, Gaelic is more common than Scots. There’s also some people in Northern Ireland who speak Ulster Scots, after around 200,000 Lowlands Scots emigrated there during the 1600s.

Fun Facts

According to the 2011 census, 1.9 million people (38% of the population) can either speak, read, write or understand Scots

Scots is recognised as one of Europe’s Regional Languages, alongside Welsh and Gaelic, but it is not an official language in the UK

English has strongly influenced Scots over the centuries, but Scots has also influenced Standard English (eerie, glamour and raid all come from Scots)

Feel free to ask if you have any questions! 😄

[tastefullyoffensive]

Seven very majestic seconds.

[xxstargoddessxx]

Fear | Mariusz Lewandowski