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Author Topic: what... are... you... READING  (Read 33174 times)

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Offline odeon

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Re: what... are... you... READING
« Reply #1110 on: July 28, 2017, 03:26:35 PM »
There are lots of cool books about non-English languages but most bookstores don't carry them. You need to visit Foyles in London. Me, I can spend hours browsing their languages shelves. It's really dangerous, too. I always end up buying something.

I have this book about Standard Arabic that is on my to read list now. It didn't want to stay on the shelf when I left. :-[
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Offline Queen Victoria

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Re: what... are... you... READING
« Reply #1111 on: July 28, 2017, 03:36:54 PM »
There are lots of cool books about non-English languages but most bookstores don't carry them. You need to visit Foyles in London. Me, I can spend hours browsing their languages shelves. It's really dangerous, too. I always end up buying something.

I have this book about Standard Arabic that is on my to read list now. It didn't want to stay on the shelf when I left. :-[

Don't get me started about Foyles.  I went there once and almost hid out trying to be locked in overnight.

Surprisingly the book was from Goodwill Thrift.  Also picked up a long book about campus newspaper humour published in 1955.
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Offline odeon

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Re: what... are... you... READING
« Reply #1112 on: July 28, 2017, 09:59:54 PM »
Yeah, Foyles is the one place I visit every single time I'm in London. There are others--Waterstones at Piccadilly comes to mind--but I can't go back home without going there at least once.

Books are good for the soul.
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."

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Offline Tom/Mutate

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Re: what... are... you... READING
« Reply #1113 on: July 26, 2018, 04:49:36 PM »

Kokoro by Natsume Soseki

wow. I read that years ago when I was looking for books set in Japan. It is poetic.

Offline odeon

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Re: what... are... you... READING
« Reply #1114 on: July 27, 2018, 01:37:50 AM »
Harvey Penick's Little Red Book
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."

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Offline renaeden

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Re: what... are... you... READING
« Reply #1115 on: August 01, 2018, 09:37:56 PM »
The Never-Ending Sacrifice by Una McCormack. It's a Deep Space Nine book but set in Cardassia.
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Offline odeon

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Re: what... are... you... READING
« Reply #1116 on: August 01, 2018, 10:01:34 PM »
"So, Anyway" by John Cleese
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."

- Albert Einstein

Offline Phoenix

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Re: what... are... you... READING
« Reply #1117 on: December 13, 2018, 02:36:43 PM »
The Bright Hour by Nina Riggs
“To rise, first you must burn.”
― Hiba Fatima Ahmad

Offline Lestat

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Re: what... are... you... READING
« Reply #1118 on: December 14, 2018, 06:01:53 AM »
Dangerous? it doesn't matter what KIND of book store. ALL book stores are spesh-traps.

Book stores are the autistic version of those UV-emitting electrically charged units mounted on walls to turn unwelcome, pestiferous winged arthropods into crispy critters. Only without the being electrically burnt alive and reduced to a smoking splodge of flash-broiled insect guts.

They lure you with their siren-song, they happily let you in alright, but once they have you in their scheming, malicious, machiavellian clutches, they don't let go again unless beaten senseless with a well-loaded cash card and a big sack full of heavy books.

Here's something you might like, or rather, will fucking LOVE.

Ever heard of library genesis? it's sort of like what sci-hub is for grabbing journal reference articles bypassing the paywalls used by the evil Big Publishing lot, a plague upon their houses be. For foul, moneygrubbing sleazy bastards like Elsevier (one of the really big journal publishing houses) employ such practices as to have drawn the absolute rage of not just end consumers who wish to read their hosted articles, but of universities, of the very scientists who have done the hard work, and then paid  for their peer-reviewed articles to be published by these whore-born rat bastard slime.

They are so big and wealthy and powerful (the wealth coming from their ripping off everybody but themselves) that unis and other institutions more or less have no choice but to comply and subscribe to access to their journals, which costs them MASSIVE sums of money, more than the unis can afford, many can't afford to pay for them, but they've no choice, since to get recognition and scientists have their published papers, if it isn't in a prestigious, well known journal, probably hosted by these evil monstrous twats, and is instead, in some minor backwater journal from some tiny and better behaved, less unethical publishing house, it'll far less likely ever be read.


The unis pay for the subscription to the  journal, the scientists themselves must pay a large amount per article, and even then, they are themselves, charged monkey money to merely view their  end published article as it appears within the journal, quite possibly out of their own pocket.

As for end-users like myself, if I paid for journal access, not a subscription to an entire journal, I couldn't afford that if I WAS willing to put money in their pockets, it often costs upwards of $40-60 for a mere 24 hour access permission, more still, if one wishes to print a copy, for one, single, lonesome article.

And to put that into perspective, say I'm beginning a new project, not running a reaction I've run before, and have my own personal lab notes to go off, and experience to rely on, but entirely new, working out a synthesis from scratch, by picking a target molecule to start the very first step with, making or buying this, or extracting it from something I can either grow, or harvest in the wild, I'd then have to design each step in the reaction, likely as not look up exactly how to make certain reagents I both haven't got right then and there on my lab shelves/cupboards/fridge (I've a separate fridge for keeping chemicals, they don't go in the fridge that is for keeping foodstuffs cold), how to make the reagent or solvent, how to make the things I need to make it with, possibly how to make those, then to design each single step in what could be anything from 'add one to the other, heat for a while, filter and dry' to 15 steps or more, each requiring my making or buying the various reagents needed if there be any I haven't got, and that I need journal access to do so.

Meaning that could be between one or two articles, that'd each cost me $40-60 for just 24 hours permission to merely look at it, without being able to print it or save a copy, per article, per step in my synthesis from starting material(s) to final, cleaned, distilled, purified product, tested  for purity and recrystallized, vacuum distilled, steam distilled, acid/base extraction or all of the above until it is clean to my standards.

If that's a 10 or even 20-step synthesis, requiring not hours, not days, not weeks but months of work, day in, day out, until my goal is reached and I have what I wished to make in a bottle, ready to be used for whatever it is created to be used for, that could mean 10+ papers PER STEP.

Just imagine how much that'd cost. I simply couldn't afford it if I WAS willing to put money into the coffers of those evil greedy shitbags............I don't HAVE that kind of income, and if I did, it'd all end up spent on reading journals, and then I'd have nothing left to buy and-or make the reagents, buy the solvents, any glassware needed I haven't got already, never mind money for food and drink.

Formerly I had to rely as did many people with no journal access through uni or other research institutions, on the good-will of those people within the private individual chemist communities, both clandestine chemist fora, and non-clandestine chemistry fora, to request the article, wait however long and just hope someone among us has access and can download a copy, upload to the forum for all to benefit from, and of course the various techniques developed by us private lab owners who practice chemistry  and biology/biotech because we enjoy it.

Now there is sci-hub.tw and other sci hub addresses that, despite elsevier and their foul allies launching court action after court action, forcing domain names to be taken down, the creator, she's based in kazakhstan, and basically the courts can shut individual domain names down, but they can do nothing to her, personally, they cannot stop her just registering several more addresses for sci-hub the moment one gets shut down. Basically she can't be touched, and she knows it, and pretty much gives the big greedy corporate paywalling, closed-access moneygrubbing publisher bastards two fingers and a bag of flaming dog muck on their metaphorical doorstep, pissing through their letterbox and  demanding they go measure how far it went across the carpet :D

A game of whackamole is being played, although now far, far more slowed down, addresses are taken down, rarely, I think by now the big greedy shits know that they might kill one address, but they know too that they cannot touch sci-hub's creator, that they'll take an address down, only for it to be replaced within a day or two, maybe even in hours. It's a game they cannot win. And even those WITH subscriptions through unis are using sci-hub out of principle to help force more open access (free access to full texts)

There is also library genesis. This is a library for books, of all kinds, not only scientific, but MILLIONS of books, scanned and uploaded by the people who own them, for free, so people can have open access to books too.

Some people might have to use TORbrowser, to bounce  the connection through other countries to access the site, because there are court orders forcing ISPs to block access to libgen utterly. TOR bypasses this as easily as a flamethrower can bypass a wall of tissue paper.

http://gen.lib.rus.ec/  This is the address. If ISPs in your country block it due to court orders, then just use TORbrowser, connect via another country. Bingo, job done.

Literally millions of books, all free to DL.
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Offline odeon

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Re: what... are... you... READING
« Reply #1119 on: December 14, 2018, 04:28:19 PM »
"Mindhunter" - the book that was the basis of the Netflix series. Pretty good.
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."

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Offline Lestat

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Re: what... are... you... READING
« Reply #1120 on: December 15, 2018, 06:41:20 PM »
A long wad of pages culled from an online scan of an old, old chemistry text, annoyingly, lacking the last and first pages now, so I can't find the fucking title, it's on sulfur chlorides, bromides, and oxyhalides. Along with some stuff on phosphorus trichloride and tribromide.
Beyond the pale. Way, way beyond the pale.

Requiescat in pacem, Wolfish, beloved of Pyraxis.

Offline Phoenix

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Re: what... are... you... READING
« Reply #1121 on: December 15, 2018, 09:09:12 PM »
The Alice Network by Kate Quinn. It's really good so far.
“To rise, first you must burn.”
― Hiba Fatima Ahmad

Offline Queen Victoria

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Re: what... are... you... READING
« Reply #1122 on: December 16, 2018, 11:34:55 AM »
Free Kindle books and Pinterest for the most part.

Started The Kitchen House paperback for reading while out the house.
A good monarch is a treasure. A good politician is an oxymoron.

My brain is both uninhibited and uninhabited.

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Offline Lestat

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Re: what... are... you... READING
« Reply #1123 on: December 18, 2018, 01:51:50 AM »
The alice network? sounds like some kind of sci-fi, ?

Whats it about? I like my scifi.

I'm reading a clandestine chemist's forum. And about to pose a couple of questions about a process I understand well enough, just want to know how a  couple of other ones perform when they are each performed equally well by the operator performing the task, and stacked up against each other in a controlled comparison.
Beyond the pale. Way, way beyond the pale.

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Offline Phoenix

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Re: what... are... you... READING
« Reply #1124 on: December 18, 2018, 08:08:35 AM »
The alice network? sounds like some kind of sci-fi, ?

Whats it about? I like my scifi.
It was so bloody good. 500 pages and I finished it in under 3 days. They need to make this one into a movie. It's a historical book about the women who were spies during the first and second world war. Some fact, some fiction. But the Alice Network was a real thing as were some of the characters in the book.

"In an enthralling new historical novel from national bestselling author Kate Quinn, two women—a female spy recruited to the real-life Alice Network in France during World War I and an unconventional American socialite searching for her cousin in 1947—are brought together in a mesmerizing story of courage and redemption.

1947. In the chaotic aftermath of World War II, American college girl Charlie St. Clair is pregnant, unmarried, and on the verge of being thrown out of her very proper family. She's also nursing a desperate hope that her beloved cousin Rose, who disappeared in Nazi-occupied France during the war, might still be alive. So when Charlie's parents banish her to Europe to have her "little problem" taken care of, Charlie breaks free and heads to London, determined to find out what happened to the cousin she loves like a sister.

1915. A year into the Great War, Eve Gardiner burns to join the fight against the Germans and unexpectedly gets her chance when she's recruited to work as a spy. Sent into enemy-occupied France, she's trained by the mesmerizing Lili, the "Queen of Spies", who manages a vast network of secret agents right under the enemy's nose.

Thirty years later, haunted by the betrayal that ultimately tore apart the Alice Network, Eve spends her days drunk and secluded in her crumbling London house. Until a young American barges in uttering a name Eve hasn't heard in decades, and launches them both on a mission to find the truth...no matter where it leads."
“To rise, first you must burn.”
― Hiba Fatima Ahmad