Don’t publish your PhD with these guys…

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2014/03/lap_lambert_academic_publishing_my_trip_to_a_print_content_farm.html

Your time is going to come

Heard this for the first time in years in a pub on Saturday. According to Wikipedia, record producer Rick Rubin has remarked, “It’s like the drums are playing a big rock song and the guitars are playing a gentle folk song. And it’s got one of the most upbeat choruses of any Zeppelin song, even though the words are so dark.” Very true, Rick, very true.

A left position on the Scottish Independence debate

http://www.counterfire.org/index.php/articles/opinion/17091-five-reasons-why-english-radicals-should-support-scottish-independence-

A view on public intellectuals

This blogpost is just a note of a pithy little quote from an article by K Sivaramakrishnan:

Political activism requires the public intellectual—not necessarily a cosmopolitan metropolitan figure, but a social theorist capable of clear, independent articulation of issues in public venues. This may be a person who speaks in a vernacular or local idiom but who manages to provoke debates in popular and scholarly media that intersect and enrich each other. Activism is impoverished when the social production of the public intellectual becomes threatened. Rajen Harshe and Sujata Patel have recently argued that this has indeed happened in India. They note, ‘social science scholarship has degenerated into utilising simplistic forms of theorising, based on binary opposites, such as male versus female, brahminical versus dalit, modern versus indigenous, caste versus class, state versus civil society, together with such opposites based on language and region’ (Harshe and Patel 2003: 527).

– in K. Sivaramakrishnan (2011) “Thin nationalism: Nature and public intellectualism in India” Contributions to Indian Sociology, 45: 85, p105.

Publication of archives of two Marathi progressive magazines

http://www.socioacademy.org/magowa-archive/

Philosophy comics

http://existentialcomics.com/comic/19 – nice one. Helps with the existential angst.

Catch-22

There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one’s own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn’t, but if he was sane, he had to fly them. If he flew them, he was crazy and didn’t have to; but if he didn’t want to, he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle.

(respect to Joseph Heller)

Pollution in New Cross

Useful info about my neighbourhood: http://www.newsshopper.co.uk/news/11038665.New_Cross_Road_and_Blackwall_Tunnel_among_most_polluted_roads_in_the_country/