Of Poppy Flowers

Medical School Resources! (and other human biology,physiology,biochemistry-related resources)

Hi Everyone! 

Update: I am now officially done with my second year! I know i’ve been MIA on here for a while now - but that’s only because I was drowning in textbooks and assignments! I will be writing a whole other post on what my second year in medical school was like - so watch out for that :)

I, for one, can not just rely on one method of learning. Meaning, I’ll jump from videos, to textbooks, to flashcards. In this post I’m going to list some of my holy grail youtube channels that have helped saved me. 

1) Handwritten Tutorials

https://www.youtube.com/user/harpinmartin

Every video in this channel is short, but not so much that you feel like you’re missing out on information. Definitely one to save as a favourite!

2) Armando Hasudungan

https://www.youtube.com/user/armandohasudungan

The best thing about this channel is the fact that there are over 300 videos, covering a wide range of core topics in endocrinology, neurology, physiology and pharmacology. Another pro is the presentation of topics (otherwise considered snooze-worthy) in an artistic manner!

3) Speed Pharmacology

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-i2EBYXH6-GAglvuDIaufQ

Raise your hand if you’ve ever fallen asleep trying to read about the mechanism of action of opioids, their side effects and contraindications. I know I have. Fret not, for this youtube channel will introduce you to a world where pharmacology is actually interesting.

4) Wendy Riggs 

https://www.youtube.com/user/wendogg1

Wendy Riggs is a very down-to-earth professor in Northern California, and she covers a wide range of  topics in Anatomy, Physiology and General Biology. 

5) Anatomy Zone

https://www.youtube.com/user/TheAnatomyZone

A better way to learn anatomy is to supplement your textbook information with videos from this channel. The explanations and visuals provided are absolute gold.

I hope you all find these channels as helpful as I did!

Candle reading made easy

Hey loves, I don’t want to make this post suuuper long so imagine me blowing a welcome kiss to all of you and let’s get started…

The generic practice of reading fire is called pyromancy. 

We can break a candle reading session down to 3 main parts:

Observation (flame watching)

Gathering & understanding (decoding fire’s messages)

Final question & Goodbye (ask if there’s anything else you should know before leaving, thank and salute fire/salamanders)

During the observation phase, watch for:

Length of the flame 1-2 min to know WHEN-the timing = PAST

Shape of the flame 2-3 min to know WHAT-the actual matter = PRESENT

Direction & behavior of the flame 3-4 min to know HOW-the true nature of it = hints at the FUTURE (see where the fire is pointing to know what type of matter it is; concentrate on the opposite direction telling you how to counteract to solve or banish whatever it might be; it also indicates what elemental energy is strongly supporting/protecting you in taking action as well as in related spellwork)

Presence/Absence of Smoke 2-3 min to understand the SOURCE of your awareness 

*Keep a compass handy!

Salamanders/fire will try to communicate with you as soon as you light the fire/candle so pay attention from the very beginning. Fire energy is impulsive, blunt, active, carefree and wild.  This type of divination detects negativity like WOW because it easily speaks the brutally honest truth regardless of how you feel or what’s happening. It brings up issues that we refuse to deal with. Again, it’s pure blunt energy. Because of its wild nature, fire will also charge us with optimism and explosive determination to overcome problems and bad news: typically after pyromancy we feel motivated and “ready to go”.

Length

Long-extra long: something has been bothering you for a very long time now (trust your intuition, probably for years) which you never actively faced; you’ve been quiet for too long; unsolved problems from the past are challenging your patience; relevant stuff that had to be cleared much earlier

Medium: Something that has been lurking in the back of your mind for 1-3 months, a plan or an idea that could change/shake your life but is not currently a priority to you; it might be something you heard from another person or a vague thought

Short: something intense that happened within the last couple days, a very recent thing is bothering you and has almost caught you by surprise; unexpected news from day to day, a new sudden event that physically or emotionally shook you

Shape 

Double: Two things that were generated consequentially or have a common link, two entities/people united by a common theme

Super-thin line: Something you felt or suspected but never had proof of evidence about, a subtle suspicion, a doubt, an insinuation; a sneaky or secretive individual

Regular: Something/someone that you accept and is part of your routine, your own mindset, something very close and not disturbing; a solid milestone in your daily life

Round: One thing in particular that constantly “fills you up”, makes you feel complete, full, exploding or either extremely delighted; a person who represses/suppresses you, someone ghosting you on purpose just to humble you or to make you feel lesser

Behavior

Steady: things are happening in the background, far from the “public eye” and without you even realizing; you - and people around you- are calm, clueless, peaceful and the surroundings seem safe; good vibes are in the air but definitely keep your eyes open and intuition awake

Shaky, wiggly: things are visibly happening before your eyes, making you confused, uneasy or giving you mood swings; anxiety; you are able to feel bad vibes around you: take control of the situation and protect yourself Weak, petite & almost extinguished: matter/person X is now annihilating you before the eyes of everybody, but still no one defends you; seek help in others, protect yourself and take action to win this ripe, suffered battle

Directions

EAST: AIR - communication, mindset, mental/spoken/written things, logical reasoning, ideas, plans, spring, morning, sunrise, masculine… WEST: WATER - emotions, unconscious, gut feelings, passivity, illogical reasoning, intangibility, blue, flow, moisture, fall, sunset, feminine… SOUTH: FIRE - action, guidance, strength, activity, blood, warmth, creativity, masculine, red, impulse, summer, noon… NORTH: EARTH - stability, firmness, art, finance, grounding, material things, tangibility, stillness, death, birth, winter, midnight, green… (+ ALL YOUR PERSONAL KNOWLEDGE about the elements and how they can be interpreted, what meanings they have in our lives and their specific correspondences) 

Smoke

Absence: you are the source of awareness: your body and soul have sent you signals about matter X and you had an inner awakening which led you to this reading 

Presence: someone else enlightened you with their words and made you fully aware of matter X; something popped up as an obvious proof that you weren’t expecting to find: this has awakened your inquisitive mind and led it to this reading. 

Hopefully you’ll get inspired by this post and learn something useful to spice up your divination practice:) I thank you so much for reading, xox msmoonfire

Dark and silent, the river runs. Flowing like twilight through the earth, forward and forward, the river runs. if you fell in, would you become yet another writhing shadow beneath the surface? would it be death– or baptism? or nothing at all? The river is a place to dream. 

dark green is a nice color. underrated

Why Yule Needs to Stay Creepy

“…There’ll be scary ghost stories and tales of the glories of Christmases long, long ago…”

So I have been thinking about our Contemporary conceptualization of the Christmas season a lot lately and it’s kind of interesting. So many things we associate with Christmas – Christmas trees, greeting cards, Santa Claus, his reindeer and elves, gift-giving in general – all of these things came into vogue in the 19th Century and are very sticky-sweet, in my opinion. They’re lovely, but not filling. If we just scratch the surface of the Christmas we know and love and peek back into its history, we find something much meatier.

Before the cheerful Christmas tree, a number of other plants were associated with Christmas. The holly, associated with sacrifice and the blood of Christ, and the parasitic mistletoe, associated with the death of Baldur in Norse mythology – these were the plants associated with Christmas before the Christmas tree became the standard.

Also, the Yule log. The Yule log, meant to provide light on the darkest night of the year, was a magic charm in and of itself. If it did not burn through the night, it would be a terrible omen. By watching the fire and coals of the Yule log, one could also predict who would give birth and who would die in the coming year.  

When our simple Santa Claus is reduced to his predecessors, one is left with Odin, ancient Norse God of battle, Saint Nicholas, the canonized former bishop of Turkey, and Father Christmas, the hard-drinking gluttonous representation of holiday merriment. And all of them brought ghastly friends – Odin, the spirits of the Wild Hunt and Saint Nicholas, his helpers (including Knecht Rupert, Krampus, etc.). Father Christmas, more of a personification of the season than a night visitor, undoubtedly brought many hangovers.

Before stories about reindeer, snowmen, or things of that ilk, there were ghost stories. Charles Dickens did not invent the Christmas ghost story in “A Christmas Carol,” but popularized an already-existing folkloric trend. If we look to the old tales of Christmas, we find stories about witches that rode the night air, cursing the birth of the Savior. There are stories about fairies, ghosts, and Devils that wreak havoc, frightening livestock and damaging property. In an era before television or radio, homemade storytelling was one of the primary forms of entertainment. And winter was the storytelling season.

You also have mumming, wassailing, and caroling – dressing up in colorful costumes and (sometimes drunkenly) begging for money door-to-door. As John Grossman notes in his book “Christmas Curiosities,” Christmas before the Contemporary Period resembles our Halloween more than it resembles the Christmas we know now.

Let us not forget, those of us who acknowledge the Wheel of the Year, that the season of darkness extends from Halloween to Christmas. This darkness only begins to fade when we gain back the Sun at the Winter Solstice. From Halloween to Christmas, the dead may roam the Earth and weird things may happen. In his classic “Mastering Witchcraft,” Paul Huson notes that Yule is not a time for pleasant spell work, but cursing! It is a time of dark magic and mystery. And we need this time. To understand the light, we must understand the darkness – the witches, ghosts, and Devils of the old Yuletide. Like the trees that go dormant, we must embrace the darkness of winter to grow and thrive.

“Don’t worry”

Virgo ears: “Your problems are insignificant and I don’t see why anybody needs to care”

Things to Research as a Beginner Witch

• The history of witchcraft • Famous witches, if you’d like • Types of witches • Types of magick (white magick, chaos magick, etc) • Types of spells (curses, hexes, etc) • Types of divination (tarot, scrying, etc) • Talismans vs Sigils (and what each are) • Seals • Maybe some alphabets if that’s your thing • Some witchy symbols • Deities (For pagan witches) • Let it spread from there!

Solar System 10 Things: Two Years of Juno at Jupiter

Our Juno mission arrived at the King of Planets in July 2016. The intrepid robotic explorer has been revealing Jupiter’s secrets ever since. 

Here are 10 historic Juno mission highlights:

1. Arrival at a Colossus

After an odyssey of almost five years and 1.7 billion miles (2.7 billion kilometers), our Juno spacecraft fired its main engine to enter orbit around Jupiter on July 4, 2016. Juno, with its suite of nine science instruments, was the first spacecraft to orbit the giant planet since the Galileo mission in the 1990s. It would be the first mission to make repeated excursions close to the cloud tops, deep inside the planet’s powerful radiation belts.

2. Science, Meet Art

Juno carries a color camera called JunoCam. In a remarkable first for a deep space mission, the Juno team reached out to the general public not only to help plan which pictures JunoCam would take, but also to process and enhance the resulting visual data. The results include some of the most beautiful images in the history of space exploration.

3. A Whole New Jupiter

It didn’t take long for Juno—and the science teams who hungrily consumed the data it sent home—to turn theories about how Jupiter works inside out. Among the early findings: Jupiter’s poles are covered in Earth-sized swirling storms that are densely clustered and rubbing together. Jupiter’s iconic belts and zones were surprising, with the belt near the equator penetrating far beneath the clouds, and the belts and zones at other latitudes seeming to evolve to other structures below the surface.

4. The Ultimate Classroom

The Goldstone Apple Valley Radio Telescope (GAVRT) project, a collaboration among NASA, JPL and the Lewis Center for Educational Research, lets students do real science with a large radio telescope. GAVRT data includes Jupiter observations relevant to Juno, and Juno scientists collaborate with the students and their teachers.

5. Spotting the Spot

Measuring in at 10,159 miles (16,350 kilometers) in width (as of April 3, 2017) Jupiter’s Great Red Spot is 1.3 times as wide as Earth. The storm has been monitored since 1830 and has possibly existed for more than 350 years. In modern times, the Great Red Spot has appeared to be shrinking. In July 2017, Juno passed directly over the spot, and JunoCam images revealed a tangle of dark, veinous clouds weaving their way through a massive crimson oval.

“For hundreds of years scientists have been observing, wondering and theorizing about Jupiter’s Great Red Spot,” said Scott Bolton, Juno principal investigator from the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. “Now we have the best pictures ever of this iconic storm. It will take us some time to analyze all the data from not only JunoCam, but Juno’s eight science instruments, to shed some new light on the past, present and future of the Great Red Spot.”

6. Beauty Runs Deep

Data collected by the Juno spacecraft during its first pass over Jupiter’s Great Red Spot in July 2017 indicate that this iconic feature penetrates well below the clouds. The solar system’s most famous storm appears to have roots that penetrate about 200 miles (300 kilometers) into the planet’s atmosphere.

7. Powerful Auroras, Powerful Mysteries

Scientists on the Juno mission observed massive amounts of energy swirling over Jupiter’s polar regions that contribute to the giant planet’s powerful auroras – only not in ways the researchers expected. Examining data collected by the ultraviolet spectrograph and energetic-particle detector instruments aboard Juno, scientists observed signatures of powerful electric potentials, aligned with Jupiter’s magnetic field, that accelerate electrons toward the Jovian atmosphere at energies up to 400,000 electron volts. This is 10 to 30 times higher than the largest such auroral potentials observed at Earth. 

Jupiter has the most powerful auroras in the solar system, so the team was not surprised that electric potentials play a role in their generation. What puzzled the researchers is that despite the magnitudes of these potentials at Jupiter, they are observed only sometimes and are not the source of the most intense auroras, as they are at Earth.

8. Heat from Within

Juno scientists shared a 3D infrared movie depicting densely packed cyclones and anticyclones that permeate the planet’s polar regions, and the first detailed view of a dynamo, or engine, powering the magnetic field for any planet beyond Earth (video above). Juno mission scientists took data collected by the spacecraft’s Jovian InfraRed Auroral Mapper (JIRAM) instrument and generated a 3D fly-around of the Jovian world’s north pole. 

Imaging in the infrared part of the spectrum, JIRAM captures light emerging from deep inside Jupiter equally well, night or day. The instrument probes the weather layer down to 30 to 45 miles (50 to 70 kilometers) below Jupiter’s cloud tops.

9. A Highly Charged Atmosphere

Powerful bolts of lightning light up Jupiter’s clouds. In some ways its lightning is just like what we’re used to on Earth. In other ways,it’s very different. For example, most of Earth’s lightning strikes near the equator; on Jupiter, it’s mostly around the poles.

10. Extra Innings

In June, we approved an update to Juno’s science operations until July 2021. This provides for an additional 41 months in orbit around. Juno is in 53-day orbits rather than 14-day orbits as initially planned because of a concern about valves on the spacecraft’s fuel system. This longer orbit means that it will take more time to collect the needed science data, but an independent panel of experts confirmed that Juno is on track to achieve its science objectives and is already returning spectacular results. The spacecraft and all its instruments are healthy and operating nominally. ​

Read the full web version of this week’s ‘Solar System: 10 Things to Know’ article HERE. 

For regular updates, follow NASA Solar System on Twitter and Facebook. 

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com

Weird Little Habits That Are Actually Magick

Knocking on wood Blowing on dandelion seeds Using a fallen eyelash to make a wish Kissing under mistletoe Throwing spilled salt over your left shoulder Don’t put shoes on the table/bed Don’t open an umbrella indoors Finding four leaf clovers for luck Carving jack-o-lanterns Wearing masks/costumes on Halloween Using flower petals to play ‘Love-me, Love-me-not’ Wishing on a falling star

That’s all I can think of at the moment, add more!

cheap, easy ways to decorate your altar for the sabbats

Imbolc/Candlemas: seeds or bulbs, candles, red and white

Ostara: flowers, eggs, milk, honey

Beltane: flowers, ribbons, acorns

Litha: oak leaves, sun symbols, sunflowers

Lammas: bread, wheat, beer, honey, corn dolls, iron

Mabon: fall leaves, cornstalks, grapes and grape vines, pomegranates, apples

Samhain: tarot cards, mirror, food offerings, mulled wine, dark bread

Yule: holly, pine cones, mistletoe, fruits, nuts, bells