Meil on saanud peaaegu igakuiseks poliitikast rääkimise institutsiooniks see, et üks kahest küsitlusfirmast on teinud järgmise erakondade toetuse küsitluse, tulemused on kajastatud meedias ja siis kõik mõtlevad ja kommenteerivad. Kes liikus kolm protsenti üles, kes kaks alla? Mida see kõik tähendab? Miks see on juhtunud? Enamus nendest küsimustest on täiesti tähtsusetud, kuna väikesed kõikumised…
It was maybe already a year ago when my friend Fede suggested an idea that we should try to do an analysis of punk lyrics. Because this was a side project for the both of us, things dragged on and it took a while before we could gather the lyrics (from www.plyrics.com — an awesome…
Anybody familiar with the process of academic publishing should know that there are a range of quirks in the whole process, which make publishing often a frustrating game of luck that can take years from submission to publication or eventual rejection. Journals are overburdened and get much more submissions than they can handle; editors…
A few days ago I watched two surprisingly good movies on a similar topic — how human future might be entangled with artificially intelligent robots. The first, Ex Machina, has a typically Hollywoodian feel to it — a totally implausible general setting and story-line, which reeks of idiocy. A genius programmer with a major hipster…
I recently finished, in terms genre, quite a classical self-help book for smokers to help quitting – Allen Carr’s Easy Way to Stop Smoking. I had heard some good things about the book, so my expectations were probably higher than they should have been – it did have some good and valuable points, but these…
The concept of a sequel usually means that a story and/or characters that are related to the previous movie appear in what is essentially a new film with a distinct plot. The original Star Wars movies were that, as well as the horrible disasters that George Lucas created later under that name. Indeed, this is…
Although I had seen the movie several times, it took me unjustifiably long to get to reading the book. I enjoyed the movie and especially in this case one could expect that the Hollywood machine would only ruin the original and that the book as always would be much better. Which indeed was so. Carl…
A few months ago I had the pleasure to (re)read some of the classics in the literature on political parties – Robert Michels, Moisei Ostrogorski (and yes, I did not read his mammoth two volume masterpiece in full, I skimmed through most and read just the more important parts) and some of the texts that…
While looking for recent science fiction books to fill my evenings, I ended up ordering Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice (yes, I have decided to go back to reading books on paper). With the amount of recognition it has received, it is rather hard to not notice it. When I finally received it and started to…
From the Great Library of Alexandria, where among other things much of the knowledge of Antiquity, rediscovered only a thousand years later, was concentrated to the Voyager spacecraft, the furthest from our plant that human artifacts have reached, the Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, nearly 35 years after it aired, is still an inspiring masterpiece of…