TERRAFORM: Ambient Electronic Sci Fi Playlist For Space Kids Trying To Ace Their Finals

14/03/19 - Some more technology notes and diagrams. A slow but productive day today! 

Hello, lovelies! This week, I talk about how I got a 2300+ on the SAT without any outside tutoring or prep classes. Yes, it’s possible, and I tell you how to do it in the video.

I also put together a masterpost of resources below. Even if you aren’t self-studying, a lot of these things might be helpful:

PREP BOOKS

Official College Board SAT Study Guide (The Blue Book)

Direct Hits Vocabulary (Volume 1) // Direct Hits Vocabulary (Volume 2) — What makes these books stand out from other SAT vocab books is the use of pop culture references to explain definitions. For example, the first word in Volume 1, ambivalent, is given the sentence: “In The Avengers, Tony Stark, Steve Rogers, Bruce Banner, and Thor are initially ambivalent about joining S.H.I.E.L.D.’s Avengers Initiative.”

Barrons SAT 2400 — Fabulous book, helpful strategies. I didn’t read the whole thing or do all the practice problems; I only used it for extra help on the sections I struggled with.

Grubers SAT 2400 — Didn’t personally use it myself, but it was recommended by a lot of my friends.

CRITICAL READING

→ Non-SAT Critical Reading Advice

→ My favorite reading sources:

The Atlantic — mix of interesting articles

Variety — pop culture focus, but with more cultured language

New Yorker — very cultured, good place to pick up vocabulary

New York Times — classic SAT reading material

Boston Globe — I have a soft spot in my heart for their entertainment and style sections

National Geographic — exactly the sort of passages you’ll find on the SAT

→ Vocab Flashcards (mentioned in video)

WRITING

→ Top Writing Errors

→ Top Grammar Rules

MATHEMATICS

→ Khan Academy

Where to save up to $1600.00 in college supplies.

After the Stafford loan interest rate hike I researched further into ways to save for school and found some pages that would cover most of your basic college needs past textbooks. If you find cheaper things let me know and I’ll show those off too. If you need help researching a specific item feel free to lmk, I’m willing to help you out in my spare time. 

Textbooks

Scientific Calculators

Tablets and Computers

Headphones from $9.99

Notebooks and Writing Pads

Pack of Highlighters from a dollar

Towel Sets, Mattress pads, and Desk chairs

Dining Essentials for a Dorm or small Apartment

Backpacks and laptop carriers

Cell Phone Accessories

External Hard Drives

Printers and Ink

Mini-Fridge

Best of luck!

USMLE STEP 1 STUDY TOOLS AND TIPS

It is approaching that time of year where the second year medical students are preparing to cram for the United States Medical Licensing Exam Step 1. A test some consider to be the most important exam of medical school and subsequently determines the rest of your life. That is a little dramatic but I think it should be your goal to do the best you can. Here are some of the tools I used to study for Step 1:

First Aid for the USMLE Step 1 2017

This is the holy bible of USMLE Step 1 studying. I highly recommend this book and I think almost every medical student who has taken the test would say the same. I would read through this book 2-3 times to really have it sink in.

Pathoma

A lecture series made by a certifiable genius: Dr. Husain Sattar, a pathologist from the University of Chicago. This series was amazing and incredibly detailed. A lot of high yield material is covered in his lectures. 

https://www.pathoma.com 

USMLE World

The question bank of all question banks. Though it may be school dependent, almost everyone from my medical school chose to go with this question bank. A couple thousand questions covering the majority of USMLE Step 1 topics. The questions are challenging but you will see your scores improve as you continue to study throughout your first and second year. I’ve even used this product for Step 2 and I am currently (literally open on my computer) using it for Step 3. My number one goal would be to complete every question offered in this question bank, it is a lot but well worth it.

https://www.uworld.com

The rest are to cover my weakest subjects from USMLE Step 1: Biochemistry, Microbiology and Pharmacology. I recommend the following tools to turn your greatest weakness into your greatest strength:

Microbiology

Clinical Microbiology Made Ridiculously Simple

Lange Microbiology and Infectious Diseases Flash Cards

Pharmacology

Clinical Pharmacology Made Ridiculously Simple

Lange Pharmacology Flash Cards

Biochemistry

Clinical Physiology Made Ridiculously Simple

Lange Biochemistry and Genetics Flash Cards

So I was back in Mandarin class and the teacher let us know that in ancient times sometimes they wouldn’t even give their girl children names. Their attitude was why bother getting attached to her when she’s just going to grow up and belong to someone else? She doesn’t need her own identity because she is the property of her future husband. If they needed to refer to a woman they would say that’s Wang’s wife. In the same way you would say oh, that’s Wang’s car or Wang’s house. Let’s remember that we give names to dogs, horses, ships and buildings but some human women don’t deserve such recognition. She also touched on sex-selective abortion for a bit and it was all in all a pretty sad discussion today.

I was really moved but it felt like everyone else didn’t care or thought that stuff doesn’t matter because it doesn’t happen anymore. And yet even now women’s identities are being erased when they get married. Their personal history and family ties are untraceable because they are “adopted” into their husbands family. It’s disgusting and I hate that its so nomalized and I hate that even women’s names are not our own. We might as well never have been given names in the first place.

tips for classics majors

from a second-year classics major. i’ve acquired these tips from my seven years of being a latin student and one year of ancient greek. 

this post can be helpful for classics majors or people interested in self-teaching the classics. my concentration within my major is language and literature, so my tips will revolve around latin and greek. but if you’re studying any other ancient or modern language, my tips may still apply to you :)

~ make word associations. this is a BIG one. there are many nuances to this tip, so to start, i’ll explain why associations are useful, and then i’ll give several examples with different variations to cover the nuances. 

since many english words, prefixes, and suffixes are derived from both latin and greek, take the time to figure out one or two english words that come from each new word you learn - these can either be normal everyday english words or pop culture references. (also, latin is semi-derived from greek, so you can make associations between the two languages as well). if you learn any kind of word association, it will make remembering the word so much easier.

examples: 

pop culture: pane, which means bread in latin, is related to The Hunger Game’s city of Panem (panem is the accusative singular of pane). food insecurity is a big theme in The Hunger Games, therefore Panem is an appropriate name for the city that the series takes place in. 

latin/greek to english: in latin, vicina is an adjective meaning “close, neighboring,” and its english derivative is “vicinity.” in greek, παιδευω means “i teach” and its english derivative is “pedagogy” - aka “a method/practice of teaching.” κριτης means “judge” and its english derivatives are “critic, criticize” and “critical.” 

greek to latin to greek: sometimes it’s tricky to find out which word came from which language first, but usually it’s greek to latin. example: dea (“goddess” in latin) comes from θεα in greek.

think of those word associations as you learn your ancient language vocab. it will make recalling a word’s meaning so much easier. 

anD DON’T FORGET TO LEARN THE GENDER AND THE GENITIVE SINGULAR OF EACH NOUN YOU LEARN BECAUSE IT HELPS WHEN DECLINING THE NOUN AND MATCHING IT UP WITH ADJECTIVES LATER ON OH MY GOD thiS IS SO IMPORTANT

~ make a concentrated effort to remember lots of different sentence constructions. there are so many i literally don’t remember them all and i’ve been doing this for years. the major categories i can think of off the top of my head are subordinate clauses, conditionals, and indirect discourse, and, more generally, learn the difference between the primary and secondary verb tenses.

~ every so often, brush up on as much grammar and vocab as you can. i’m saying this because i’ve procrastinated reviewing greek all summer and i barely remember anything beyond the basics :/ pls don’t tell my professor. 

~ learn authors’ common themes and literary/rhetorical devices. for example: in the elegies of propertius, a roman poet, he used emptiness and unfulfilled wishes as motifs. learning words associated with emptiness and learning how to recognize the introduction of a wish made translating faster. i’ll confess though that i never really brushed up on the use of the optative subjunctive (the device used in wish statements), so i couldn’t recognize how exactly to translate certain sentence constructions. if i did review, it would have made translating in class a breeze. but hey, it was my first semester in college and i had no idea what i was doing at that level. please learn from my mistake! 

~ learn the political, cultural, and historical context of each piece of literature you read. it will make the experience richer. if you know the context of a fiction piece, whether its poetry or prose, you will understand so much more about it. for example: the aeneid, vergil’s masterpiece (and arguably one of the best works in latin literature), is an ode to augustus. augustus commissioned vergil to write the aeneid and to make comparisons between himself and the protagonist aeneas. he wanted people to see him like they saw aeneas - kind, pious, loyal, determined, and in charge. knowing that bit of information makes many parts of the aeneid clearer. you can apply this tip to any piece of literature, no matter the language.

this is also important in terms of non-fiction writing. i took a class on roman letter writers and i would’ve been completely lost if my professor didn’t share anything historical with us. these letter writers typically vaguely referenced local gossip because messengers often read letters that were meant only for the recipient’s eyes. my professor filled in a lot of what was missing from the letters themselves.

~ have fun with it. learning languages is supposed to be fun!! of course languages enrich your mind and bring you into close contact with other cultures and ways of life, but it is supposed to be fun too. example: propertius once wrote a whole poem about knocking on his lover Cynthia’s closed door while she sat inside… and the door was a metaphor for her vagina…. which means propertius was h0rny on main!! and he published that in a poem!!1! for people all over rome to read!!!! 

in terms of plays, my friend read one in latin by plautus about a prostitute who subverts the traditional roles associated with customer-prostitute relationships. he absolutely loved it bc the main character was a bad b!tch… and bc it was a comedic play. 

there are lots of metaphors and jokes written within latin and greek literature, so don’t be afraid to laugh :) it makes learning that much more enjoyable

~ when reading a work of literature, ask yourself what this reveals about the author’s culture. (suicide tw: mentions of su*cide as a plot point in tragedy) this tip is kinda related to the cultural context one, but different in that it looks for culture within literature, rather than looking at literature as a product of culture. and like the previous tip, you can apply this to any piece of literature no matter the language it is in. it’s important to think deeply a piece of literature as well as enjoy it for what it is. example: i’ve read most of sophocles’ plays and i can tell you that the greeks were very comfortable with suicide as a plot point. while murder is also common, suicide is much more common no matter the tragedy. the fact that this theme occurs throughout so many plays tells me that greeks viewed suicide as a tragic occurrence that affects people deeply, but also as a common way to die. it raises questions: what percentage of deaths were attributed to suicide in ancient greece? was it viewed as honorable or shameful? etc. 

and going back to vergil yet again (he’s my homeboy fr), when writing about dido and her people building the city of carthage, he specifically mentions that they are building the theaters first before almost any other building - and these few lines implicitly state that the arts were very important to carthage’s culture as a whole.

~ to sum it up: as a classics major, if you are intentional about learning the languages and truly engaged with the literature, the process will be that much more fun and you will gain that much more out of it. (<- and that sentence has a future-more-vivid construction by the way hehe)

general language learning resources

dictionaries:

wordreference - has spanish, french, italian, portuguese, catalan, german, swedish, dutch, russian, polish, romanian, czech, greek, turkish, chinese, japanese, korean, & arabic

reverso translation - has arabic, chinese, dutch, french, german, hebrew, italian, japanese, polish, portuguese, romanian, russian, spanish & turkish

bab.la - has spanish, arabic, chinese, czech, danish, dutch, finnish, french, german, greek, hindi, hungarian, indonesian, italian, japanese, korean, norwegian, polish, portuguese, romanian, russian, swedish, swahili, thai, turkish, vietnamese, & esperanto

digital dictionaries of south asia - has dictionaries for assamese, baluchi, bengali, divehi, hindi, kashmiri, khowar, lushai, malayalam, marathi, nepali, oriya, pali, panjabi, pashto, persian, prakrit, rajasthani, sanskrit, sindhi, sinhala, tamil, telugu & urdu

resources for learning words in context:

reverso context  - has arabic, chinese (in beta), dutch, french, german, hebrew, italian, japanese, polish, portuguese, romanian, russian, spanish & turkish (in beta)

linguee - has german, spanish, portuguese, french, italian, russian, japanese, chinese, polish, dutch, swedish, danish, finnish, greek, czech, romanian, hungarian, slovak, bulgarian, slovene, lithuanian, latvian, maltese, & estonian

for learning different writing systems

omniglot - an encyclopedia with literally any language you could think of including ancient languages

scripts - an app for learning other writing systems with a limited amount for free (you can do 5 minutes a day for free) - has the ASL alphabet, Russian cyrillic, devanagari, Japanese kana, Chinese hanzi, & Korean hangul

Wikipedia is also helpful for learning different writing systems honestly!

pronunciation

forvo - a pronunciation dictionary with MANY languages (literally an underrated resource i use it all the time)

a really helpful video by luca lampariello with tips on how to get better pronunciation in any language

ipachart.com - an interactive chart with almost every sound!! literally such an amazing resource for learning the IPA (however does not include tones)

another interactive IPA chart (this one does have tones) 

language tutoring

italki - there’s many websites for language tutoring but i think italki has the most languages (i have a referral link & if you use it we can both get $10 toward tutoring lol) - they say they support 130 languages!

there’s also preply and verbling which are also good but there aren’t as many options for languages - preply has 27 and verbling has 43

(obviously these are not free but if you have the money i think tutoring is a great way to learn a language!)

getting corrections/input from native speakers

hellotalk - an app for language exchanges with native speakers & they also have functions where you can put up a piece of writing and ask for corrections - honestly this app is great

tandem - language exchange app but unlike hellotalk you can choose multiple languages (although i think hellotalk is a little bit better)

LangCorrect - supports 170 languages!

HiNative - supports 113 languages!

Lang-8 - supports 90 languages!

verb conjugation

verbix - supports a ton of languages

Reverso conjugation - only has english, french, spanish, german, italian, portuguese, hebrew russian, arabic, & japanese

apps

duolingo - obviously everybody knows about duolingo but i’m still going to put it here - i will say i think duolingo is a lot more useful for languages that use the latin alphabet than languages with another writing system however they do have a lot of languages and add more all the time - currently they have 19 languages but you can see what languages they’re going to add on the incubator

memrise - great for vocab! personally i prefer the app to the desktop website

drops - you can only do 5 minutes a day for free but i still recommend it because it’s fun and has 42 languages! 

LingoDeer - specifically geared towards asian languages - includes korean, japanese, chinese & vietnamese (as well as spanish, french, german, portuguese and russian), however only a limited amount is available for free

busuu - has arabic, chinese, french, german, italian, japanese, polish, portuguese, spanish, russian, spanish, & turkish, 

Mondly - has 33 languages including spanish, french, german, italian, russian, japanese, korean, chinese, turkish, arabic, persian, hebrew, portuguese (both brazilian & european), catalan, latin, dutch, swedish, norwegian, danish, finnish, latvian, lithuanian, greek, romanian, afrikaans, croatian, polish, bulgarian, czech, slovak, hungarian, ukrainian, vietnamese, hindi, bengali, urdu, indonesian, tagalog & thai

misc

a video by the polyglot Lýdia Machová about how different polyglots learn languages - this video is great especially if you don’t know where to start in terms of self study

LangFocus - a youtube channel of this guy who talks about different languages which is always a good place to start to understand how a specific language works also his videos are fun

Polyglot: How I Learn Languages by Kató Lomb - this book is great and available online completely for free! 

Fluent Forever by Gabriel Wyner (on pdfdrive) - another great book about language learning

Anki - a flashcard app (free on desktop for any system & free on android mobile - not free on ios mobile) that specifically uses spaced repetition to help you learn vocabulary, it’s got a slightly ugly design but it’s beloved by many language learners & is honestly so helpful

YouTube - literally utilize youtube it is so good.

Easy Languages - a youtube channel with several languages (basically they go around asking people on the street stuff so the language in the videos is really natural) & they also have breakaway channels for german, french, spanish, polish, italian, greek, turkish, russian, catalan & english

there’s also the LanguagePod101 youtube channels (e.g. FrenchPod101, JapanesePod101, HebrewPod101) which are super great for listening practice & language lessons as well as learning writing systems!

This is a summary of college only using two pictures; expensive as hell.

That’s my Sociology “book”. In fact what it is is a piece of paper with codes written on it to allow me to access an electronic version of a book. I was told by my professor that I could not buy any other paperback version, or use another code, so I was left with no option other than buying a piece of paper for over $200. Best part about all this is my professor wrote the books; there’s something hilariously sadistic about that. So I pretty much doled out $200 for a current edition of an online textbook that is no different than an older, paperback edition of the same book for $5; yeah, I checked. My mistake for listening to my professor.

This is why we download. 

 Alternatives to buying overpriced textbooks

Textbooknova 

Reddit

Bookboon 

Textbookrevolution 

GaTech Math Textbooks

Ebookee 

Freebookspot 

Free-ebooks

Getfreeebooks 

BookFinder

Oerconsortium 

Project Gutenberg

why does it have to be a one-upmanship though? I've never heard people say doctors are better than vets, and even if some do, surely smugly saying 'we know so much more' makes you just as bad? Can't we accept that they are both very demanding, difficult jobs in their own ways? There are so many differences I think it's hard to even compare them.

Mk, I told you I wasn’t going to discuss this anymore unless you came off anon, but I think this is important because I know I have a few medblr followers and a lot of not-medical-at-all followers.

This is not one-upsmanship. “Real doctors treat more than one species” is a joke - in response to being treated like we’re not as good as MD’s. You can literally buy T-shirts and bumper stickers with that on them. As I stated when I responded to your original ask, all of us in the veterinary profession have respect for doctors. Another common saying in the field is “I’m in vet med because humans are gross.” But somebody has to treat them, and we’re glad it’s not us. Many of us would prefer that animals come in sans owners. During the rest of this post, keep in mind that I (and the vast majority of vets) respect MD’s because we need them just as much as they need us. But that doesn’t make us any less than them.

You say it’s hard to compare them - you must be on the human medical side. Want to know some similarities?- We go to school for the same amount of time.- The prerequisite courses for getting into school are nearly identical.- We accumulate approximately the same amount of debt from our schooling.- We learn much of the same material. Anatomy, histology, general/systemic pathology, clinical pathology, physiology, neurology, pharmacology, immunology, toxicology, bacteriology, virology, radiology, theriogenology (aka veterinary gynecology), ethics, business, medicine/treatment, surgery, public health, nutrition, epidemiology… except we learn it for every species, not just one. More on that later.- Vets have to learn about humans too, because we have to know how animals can infect humans. For example, we have to know how every single veterinary parasite in our 3-credit, semester-long parasitology class can potentially affect/not affect humans. Med students spend one or two lectures on parasites.

But you’re right, there’s a lot of differences.- Vet schools are 3-4x harder to get into than medical schools.- Vet school is harder, full stop. Not only are we learning the same things as med students, we have to learn it for every animal species plus some human stuff, and we have to be prepared to actually practice after four years of education without an internship or residency to catch us after school is over. Yes, some students will choose to go the internship/residency route, but the majority will not. Another common joke in vet school, which my professors have literally said to my entire class more than once, is “if you wanted it to be easy you should have gone to medical school.”- An MD is unlikely to be injured by their patients on an average day. A vet is.- When I graduate, I will have performed upwards of 50 surgeries on at least 4 species of animals, despite the fact that I have no intention of specializing in surgery. A human medical doctor has to wait until their residency to do even one surgery, and that’s only if they’re specializing in a field that requires surgery on a routine basis.- Upon graduation, for any given patient I may have to be a general practitioner, gastroenterologist, dermatologist, cardiologist, pediatrician, emergency doctor, radiologist, orthopedist, oncologist, behaviorist, endocrinologist, surgeon, dentist, neurologist, internist, pathologist, pharmacologist, pulmonologist, anesthesiologist, OB/GYN, physical therapist, opthalmologist, and more during their lifetime. Medical doctors have to specialize in a single one of these things. Lucky me, I don’t have to choose. Poor me, I have to know every single one of these specialties for every single animal. Hence, knowing more and doing more than MD’s.- Show me a human general practice clinic (or even hospital) where I can come in with a bellyache, vaginal discharge, and diarrhea and have an exam, bloodwork, x-rays, ultrasound, and emergency hysterectomy all in the same department, within 2-3 hours of arrival, and go home the same day if absolutely necessary or at least the next day. Yeah, not gonna happen.- Vets have to pay for equipment/supplies, building expenses/upkeep, and staff salaries in addition to their own salaries, and this is incorporated in the cost of vet care. Human clinics are subsidized so they don’t have to worry about this…- … and still charge upwards of 5-10x as much for the same procedure that a vet does. Here’s a total hip replacement comparison, for example.- Because of the two above points, if a client stiffs a doctor, it’s not a big deal - the government and the practice insurance will cover it. The lights will not go off. If a client stiffs a vet… well that one client might not make the lights go off, but now the vet isn’t going to be able to offer clinic-based payment plans because they simply can’t afford to be stiffed anymore. Some practices won’t even send a bill and instead require payment up front, because collections cost more than the bill is worth (that’s how low veterinary bills tend to be, comparatively), and these clinics will still get slammed on Facebook/Yelp/Google for “only caring about money and forcing me to pay upfront when my puppy was dying.”- Humans are required to have insurance, but pets are not. This leads to a lot of emotionally demanding decisions for both the vet and owner (I can’t afford his care - do I put him down? surrender him to the clinic if they’re able to take him? bring him home and let him die? toss him to a shelter and let him suffer?) and a lot of emotionally demanding owners ( “If you really loved animals you would treat him for free” - well yes Becky, but I have to eat and pay my student loans/mortgage too…)- Despite our similar educational debt load, my average salary will be less than half of an MD’s. And people still think we charge too much and make too much and try to guilt us into performing services or giving items at a discount or for free.- Vets can put patients down. While this is usually a blessing, it does mean that patients we’ve treated since they were babies are now dying because we can’t do anything to save them, whether due to owner finances or inability to cure a terminal illness. That’s hard enough as it is, but then you get clients who are moving, had a baby, don’t want the pet for whatever reason, and demand you put the animal down instead of doing something else to try to rehome it - “convenience euthanasias.” Both types take an emotional toll on vets, and euthanasias happen every day, usually multiple times.- A vet’s work-life balance is notoriously terrible. Non-ER MD’s can turn away people who walk in at 4:55 when the practice closes at 5. Vets often can’t (or don’t). Because our patient care is so much more involved, it’s rare for vets or vet staff to be able to leave on time even from general practice, and that says nothing for emergency care or the many vets who are on call nights, weekends, holidays… At the first practice I worked at, staff members got to choose one (1) holiday PER YEAR to get off, and were expected to work every weekend.- Due to the previous 5 points, suicide and mental illness in the veterinary field is at an all-time high. Vets are twice as likely to commit suicide than an MD. It’s alarming, and the field is working to change it, but not much can be done on a national scale.

In fact, maybe you’re right. Maybe there really is no comparison. If you read all that, I think you’ll understand that vets have earned a little bit of wiggle room to poke some harmless fun at their “real doctor” colleagues.

Oh, and not to mention the biggest difference between MD’s and DVM’s, but…

Notes taken during Physics lessons! Exams end in 5 days and I can’t wait!!!!!!