22.06.2022

i am a simple girl i seek academic validation and get absolutely destroyed when i don’t receive it

Supernovas, Nebulas, and Stars captured by Hubble space telescope ✨🌌 💫

math help bc i can’t watch ya’ll suffer anymore

I’m in my fourth year of engineering school and I didn’t get here without lots of outside help bc assigned math textbooks are lame and confusing and professors/teachers are more worried about feeling superior to bunch of groggy teenagers than actually teaching.

I have personally used all of these websites without receiving any security warnings from Bitdefender TrafficLight or AdGuard AdBlocker. They are all either completely free or have a free version that isn’t shit.

Wolfram Demonstrations (animated graphics)

Khan Academy (arithmetic through differential equations)

She Loves Math (arithmetic through differential equations)

math24 (calculus & differential equations)

Paul’s Online Math Notes (algebra through differential equations)

MIT OpenCourseWare (calculus through graduate-level mathmatics)

OpenStax Math (precalculus, trigonometry, & calculus)

Wolfram Alpha Examples

Desmos (online calculators)

GeoGebra (online calculators)

SparkNotes Math Study Guides (pre-algebra through calculus)

eMathHelp (calculators, but more specific)

Software for your TI calculator

ticalc (programs for your TI calculator)

Wikibooks Math Department (all the math)

Andy’s Cheat Sheets (calculus)

Cheatography (find free cheat sheets)

Open Access Math Textbooks

Engineer4Free (Calc, DiffyQ, & Linear Algebra tutorials)

Flammable Maths on YouTube (general high school/college level problems and derivations)

3Blue1Brown on Youtube (very, very good for understanding spacial concepts in calculus and beyond)

Vihart on Youtube (explaining math with doodles)

Bonus: Stay hydrated, take vitamin c, study next to a window during the day if possible, and remember not to let people base your worth on your aptitude for math. 

UGC 9391 by NASA Hubble

So many idiots have masters degrees maybe I could be the next

if it sucks hit da bricks <- litany against sunk cost

take it easy but take it <- litany against burnout/apathy cycle

fuck it we ball <- litany against perfectionism

now say something beautiful and true <- litany against irony poisoning

july 25th, 2022 || it’s finals week!!

There were many reasons why I stepped away from archaeology & academia just 16 months post-PhD but the one that still angers me most today has to be the ways in which the Institution™ categorizes folklore vs science when it comes to Indigenous people. Ancestral knowledge of the ‘Old World’ is seen as a form of early science—curiosity leading to rigorous study and eventual advancement—with their fairytales and folklore viewed as purposefully allegorical. The Indigenous people of Africa, Turtle Island, and the rest of the so-called Americas never got that same respect. Outside of a handful of tokenized and understudied societies, most Indigenous ancestral knowledge is viewed through the lens of folklore—and no grace is given to allegory or metaphor or philosophy, either. The assumption is that our people can only think in literal, concrete terms. And it’s fucking insulting. There’s this joke in academia that if archaeologists don’t know an artifact’s usage they’ll deem it as ‘ritualistic purposes’; and it’s funny or whatever but nine times out of ten those artifacts are from [insert literally any Turtle Island or Mesoamerican nation] and not from much-older Greek civilizations. But it’s not well-studied because we’re not well-respected, and therefore nobody bothered to ask our still-living people who are very much aware of what said artifact was meant for (spoiler alert: not ritualistic).

Early on in my first Master’s program I got into a huge fight with a white professor who wanted to use a widely misinterpreted SuPeRsTiTiOn from MY tribe as an example of a persistent folktale. The folktale being that: Chiricahua Apache women don’t take baths during pregnancy bc we think the water is evil. It is true that, after being moved onto the rez, birthing + postpartum women were becoming ill when they bathed. This isn’t some ancient happening stoked by mythology—this is 100 years ago to recent times; midwives saw it happening and acted by cautioning against bathing. My grandmother, an Indigenous midwife, saw it play out and is very hesitant to recommend bathing to pregnant women on the rez today. This isn’t because she or any other Chiricahua thinks water is evil; it’s because water quality has been so horrific that it quite literally was infecting the womb at its most vulnerable time. Had this been a European society, this knowledge would be considered evidence-based but since we’re Indigenous, they slap some contrived faux folkways mythos onto it and call it superstitious.

This is just one example of what happens on a constant basis when it comes to communities who are being oppressed by the same systems that set the standards for what science, history, and art are.

It’s maddening and sickening to me to this day.

(Tangentially, the next time I see a non-ndn upload or reblog our artifacts and crafts and tag it as “primitive art”, I’m going to scalp you. You’ve been duly warned)

ilove people who work at front desks of things. i can walk into a building and go to the desk and i ask how do i do this thing. and then they just fucking tell me !!!!