edelweiss

Thursday, 14th July 2022

As promised, I’m back with some notes – today I’ve started having a look at further pure 1, which is a further maths module we didn’t do. I’m also now reading Clockwork Lives, the sequel to Clockwork Angels, and am enjoying it a lot; the book itself is gorgeous, too!

17.03.19

Absolute beginner adult ballet series (fabulous beginning teacher)

40 piano lessons for beginners (some of the best explanations for piano I’ve ever seen)

Excellent basic crochet video series

Basic knitting (probably the best how to knit video out there)

Pre-Free Figure Skate Levels A-D guides and practice activities (each video builds up with exercises to the actual moves!)

How to draw character faces video (very funny, surprisingly instructive?)

Another drawing character faces video

Literally my favorite art pose hack

Tutorial of how to make a whole ass Stardew Valley esque farming game in Gamemaker Studios 2??

Introduction to flying small aircrafts

French/Dutch/Fishtail braiding

Playing the guitar for beginners (well paced and excellent instructor)

Playing the violin for beginners (really good practical tips mixed in)

Color theory in digital art (not of the children’s hospital variety)

Retake classes you hated but now there’s zero stakes:

Calculus 1 (full semester class)

Learn basic statistics (free textbook)

Introduction to college physics (free textbook)

Introduction to accounting (free textbook)

Learn a language:

Ancient Greek

Latin

Spanish

German

Japanese (grammar guide) (for dummies)

French

“I’ll find you in the morning sun

And when the night is new

I’ll be looking at the moon

But I’ll be seeing you”

This isn’t the first song NASA sent Opportunity. They had a playlist:

https://www.space.com/41434-mars-rover-opportunity-wakeup-music-playlist.html?fbclid=IwAR3uL6q4tOmLQTIEhiwYegGc99nv4N01HQKItpCLQiQYIptBOevNN6uIyT8

It’s on Spotify, it’s called “Opportunity, wake up!“

This is what’s great about NASA and it’s what’s great about people. These are world-class engineers. When they sent a rover to another planet they could have easily looked at it as just another scientific tool. But people don’t do that. We can and will get emotionally attached to the most inanimate of objects. We can and will anthropomorphize anything. And frankly Opportunity’s camera mast looks like a little face with eyes and everything, so why not?

So they started calling it her.

They nicknamed her Oppy.

They told her to take a selfie not long ago.

After 15 years of Oppy flipping the double bird to her original 90 day life expectancy, when a planet-spanning dust storm finally knocked her out and she stopped responding to the engineer’s wake-up messages, they started playing music for her.

And after 8 months and almost 1000 unanswered wake-up messages, when it was finally clear that Oppy was never going to wake up, the last thing these world-class NASA engineers did for their little rover on another planet

+ four sciences inspired icons

03 . 11 . 2017 old radicals notes + dodie yellow

How I got a 4.0 first year in college | academiix

Watch the video version on Youtube. 

(trigger warnings under the cut)

A Little Life, by Hanya Yanagihara

This book, which is about 800 pages long, is one of the best pieces of literature I have ever read. It follows four friends after they move to New York City and pursue their goals, but most of the story focuses on one of the men: Jude St. Francis, who has a mysterious past that has wrecked him emotionally and physically. But despite the darkness of the subject matter (and it gets DARK) the acts of love and kindness and friendship from the people in Jude’s life will bring you to tears. It’s a gorgeous study of trauma, human relationships, and the marriage of joy and pain that inevitably comes with living. I read it two months ago and have thought about it every day since. It’s one of those books you want everyone to read and no one to read. (DEFINITELY check out the trigger warnings for this one.)

The Traitor Baru Cormorant, by Seth Dickinson

This book is a sprawling political fantasy, packed with detail and diversity and some of the best, most complex worldbuilding I’ve ever seen. Baru grows up under the shadow of imperialism and eventually joins a rebellion to break free of the empire that has begun to take over the world. She’s also a lesbian, which is forbidden in the new empire, but against herself is drawn to the enigmatic Duchess Tain Hu. There are devastating twists, loves, and heartbreaks that will break your heart along with Baru’s. To say anything else would be a spoiler, but if you like complex, morally ambiguous fantasy, check this one out.

As Meat Loves Salt, by Maria McCan

This book follows a man named Jacob as he slowly falls in love with a fellow soldier during the seventeenth century English Revolution. After the war, they attempt to establish a utopian farming commune and keep their relationship together. This book is a really interesting foray into 17th century England, but it is ultimately a dark, passionate tale of obsession and vindication that will leave you as sick with the actions of the protagonist as he is with himself.

The People in the Trees, by Hanya Yanagihara

This book is written as a memoir of a disgraced scientist, who discovers a hidden tribe in a small Pacific island that he believes holds the key to a longer (and even immortal) life. You almost forget that the events of the book are fiction and not a real memoir–everything described seems meticulously researched and vividly real. As always, Yanagihara’s writing is gorgeous, absorbing, and well-paced. It’s a haunting tale of how science, hubris, and greed can lead to someone’s personal downfall, as well as colonialism and cultural genocide.

The Goldfinch, by Donna Tartt

You might have already heard of this one, but I had to put it on the list anyway! After a traumatic accident kills Theo Decker’s mother, his life is thrown into turbulence and eventual crime, all stemming from a stolen painting. The story is tense, beautifully written, and will make you root for yet another morally gray narrator. For fans of dark thrillers, art history, homoerotic friendship, and/or coming-of-age stories, this one is for you.

Daytripper, by Fàbio Moon and Gabriel Bà

Although Daytripper is a graphic novel, it deserves a spot on this list. It follows Bràs, a Brazilian writer, and his journey through specific turning points in his life, each represented as a “death.” The art is gorgeous and the story flows impeccably, capturing the beautiful mundanities and joys of life. This book will leave you touched, inspired, and deeply affected.

The Vintner’s Luck, by Elizabeth Knox

After a vintner saves his life, an angel named Xas visits him every year for a single night. As the vintner grows, so does their relationship, just like a fine vintage. It’s difficult to say too much about the plot without spoiling the story, but I can say that this book explores the nuances of human relationships and the love we feel for each other, as well as the hate and fear that can pervade those relationships.

Beloved, by Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison is one of the greatest American novelists and Beloved is my favorite of her works. The book follows Sethe, an ex-slave, and her daughter Denver as they reckon with a ghost from Sethe’s past that begins to haunt them more literally than metaphorically. The story is both captivating and difficult to read, but Morrison’s writing is gorgeous and the characters come to life on the page. It superbly explores the depth of trauma and motherhood, as well as depicting the horrors of slavery in a way that doesn’t feel cartoonish or exploitative.

go down a wikipedia research hole by clicking the first term you don’t understand

binge a crashcourse series end to end (personal recs: world history, history of science, big history, philosophy)

find free books on project gutenberg

download some western classics for free

borrow books and audiobooks from the libby app or borrowbox

start a commonplace book

take a khan academy course

browse MIT’s free online course materials

teach yourself to code

go on a google scholar essay dive

try the open access button to avoid some paywalls for academic media, or install unpaywall that does a similar thing

research the history of the place you where you live

tempt the wrath of the duolingo owl and learn a language

search for online streams of the local tv in your target language’s country and use as background noise for immersion points

print and scrapbook favourite poetry and literature quotes

improve your handwriting by doing handwriting exercises

learn philosophy with the philosophize this! podcast. actually just check out all the educational spotify podcasts there are many good ones

start a weekly club with friends to share new and interesting things you’ve learnt that week

clean and reorganise your study space, physical or digital

check out online museums

fave educational youtube channels that I adore: vsauce, crashcourse, smarter every day, kurzgesagt, school of life, tom scott, r. c. waldun, vsauce3, primer, mark rober, veritasium, asapSCIENCE, scishow, TED-ed

please use sparknotes. please use khan academy. please listen to school house rock songs and watch the history of the entire world i guess and tim and moby and bill nye. any documentary you watch in class can be found somewhere online with a quick google. get your books from project gutenberg and z-lib. download textbooks off the internet whenever you can find them. use desmos for a free online graphing calculator. if you’re learning something and you don’t get it look up the wikipedia page on it and put it into simple english to get the gist, then put it back into regular english to get the full story. cheat if you have to. school sucks so bad rn and if you’re like me and you get all your materials secondhand or from the lost and found, online resources are really useful rn; all of the above have helped me pass a class in some way, and i hope they can help you too.

Energy Management

A human-based organization method

click on images for better resolution; images also available here (link to google drive)

Other posts that may be of interest:

Getting stuff done: How to deal with a lack of motivation

Flexible time-blocking: A more breathable way to get things done

I believe in free education, one that’s available to everyone; no matter their race, gender, age, wealth, etc… This masterpost was created for every knowledge hungry individual out there. I hope it will serve you well. Enjoy!

FREE ONLINE COURSES (here are listed websites that provide huge variety of courses)

Alison 

Coursera

FutureLearn

open2study

Khan Academy

edX

P2P U

Academic Earth

iversity

Stanford Online

MIT Open Courseware

Open Yale Courses

BBC Learning

OpenLearn

Carnegie Mellon University OLI

University of Reddit

Saylor

IDEAS, INSPIRATION & NEWS (websites which deliver educational content meant to entertain you and stimulate your brain)

TED

FORA

Big Think 

99u

BBC Future

Seriously Amazing

How Stuff Works

Discovery News

National Geographic

Science News

Popular Science

IFLScience

YouTube Edu

NewScientist

DIY & HOW-TO’S (Don’t know how to do that? Want to learn how to do it yourself? Here are some great websites.)

wikiHow

Wonder How To

instructables

eHow

Howcast

MAKE

Do it yourself

FREE TEXTBOOKS & E-BOOKS

OpenStax CNX

Open Textbooks

Bookboon

Textbook Revolution

E-books Directory

FullBooks

Books Should Be Free

Classic Reader

Read Print

Project Gutenberg

AudioBooks For Free

LibriVox

Poem Hunter

Bartleby

MIT Classics

Many Books

Open Textbooks BCcampus

Open Textbook Library

WikiBooks

SCIENTIFIC ARTICLES & JOURNALS

Directory of Open Access Journals

Scitable

PLOS

Wiley Open Access

Springer Open

Oxford Open

Elsevier Open Access

ArXiv

Open Access Library

LEARN:

1. LANGUAGES

Duolingo

BBC Languages

Learn A Language

101languages

Memrise

Livemocha

Foreign Services Institute

My Languages

Surface Languages

Lingualia

OmniGlot

OpenCulture’s Language links

2. COMPUTER SCIENCE & PROGRAMMING

Codecademy

Programmr

GA Dash

CodeHS

w3schools

Code Avengers

Codelearn

The Code Player

Code School

Code.org

Programming Motherf*?$%#

Bento

Bucky’s room

WiBit

Learn Code the Hard Way

Mozilla Developer Network

Microsoft Virtual Academy

3. YOGA & MEDITATION

Learning Yoga

Learn Meditation

Yome

Free Meditation

Online Meditation

Do Yoga With Me

Yoga Learning Center

4. PHOTOGRAPHY & FILMMAKING

Exposure Guide

The Bastards Book of Photography

Cambridge in Color

Best Photo Lessons

Photography Course

Production Now

nyvs

Learn About Film

Film School Online

5. DRAWING & PAINTING

Enliighten

Ctrl+Paint

ArtGraphica

Google Cultural Institute

Drawspace

DragoArt

WetCanvas

6. INSTRUMENTS & MUSIC THEORY

Music Theory

Teoria

Music Theory Videos

Furmanczyk Academy of Music

Dave Conservatoire

Petrucci Music Library

Justin Guitar

Guitar Lessons

Piano Lessons

Zebra Keys

Play Bass Now

7. OTHER UNCATEGORIZED SKILLS

Investopedia

The Chess Website

Chesscademy

Chess.com

Spreeder

ReadSpeeder

First Aid for Free

First Aid Web

NHS Choices

Wolfram Demonstrations Project

Please feel free to add more learning focused websites.