Eduventure: The AR Edition - School Chat

No where in the south island does illustration, which is a huuuuge pain in the ass. I mean somewhere might if i did a little digging (Whanganui can't decide if illustration is photography or graphic design, wtf website designers) but the places my tutors have recommended are all up north.

Snooooooow

please keep snowing, I'd love an aegrotat for my ECOL302 tomorrow instead of having to sit it :c

I shall add to the snow vibes with having to hand in a four week project that i kind of haven't started yet tomorrow D:

I just had the best nap in a motel at Lincoln, about ten unhurried minutes on my bike down the road along the snow-slicked footpath. I will presumably have a best sleep to match in about three hours' time, then get up in the morning and see if exams have been cancelled yet.

The snow's also kept my molecular bio lecturer off campus, which means I have plausible deniability for having handed my hard copy of my final assignment on Tuesday (as was the agreed deadline) rather than tomorrow morning before he gets in.

On the downside, when I do go back home tomorrow I will have one exceptionally bellicose sister whose flight to Auckland to see Lady Gaga tonight was cancelled. I'm happy the interim.

School related woes soooorted

Talked to my tutor/coordinator person and it looks like doing fine arts for two years is indeed the way to go. It actually starts a week before second year ends, but that means more time between 3rd and 4th year, at which stage I will be escaping to Europe to visit the boyfriend :>

Also, my latest project is getting exhibited in town in a fancy gift shop-type place. Today has been a good day!

Worrying about provisional networking marks, looking like I might scrape just under a pass rather than over it.
Not quite sure what would happen then as I'm doing a fair bit higher than just passing all of my other modules, whether I'd have to do some programming over the summer or what, I've never actually failed anything school related before so it's scary.
I wish I'd just never taken that module it was terrible.

Nguuuuuh so tired

Relieved biometrics is over but seriously feel like I overstudied for it

Now I'm going in pretty much ass-blind backwards into Molecular+Behavioural ecology tomorrow, and probably gonna get routed for it

So I had an odd question pop into my head:

"Is there a website that has a searchable list of every known species?"

Turns out, The answer is, Almost.

Of course there is also wikipedia, but the information is scattered and incomplete.

I find the IUCN website particularly helpful, having each species subdivided by endangered status. Apparently it holds about 50k+ species in it's informative database...though that's a far cry from the total 1.9 million known species.

The encylopedia of life (which is basically a pretty picture-filled wiki-like version of the ITIS) claims to have a much larger selection to peruse. 1.1 + million pages, though I'm not sure if each page represents an individual species. It doesn't have a browsable list of it's million plus pages. So it is hard to spotcheck. (of course, I'm not certain what I would do with a comprehensive list of nearly 2 million living things shoved in my face. Though a suppose a "random species" link would prove entertaining, if just for a cursory glance)

After failing maths in my first semester, I find I still don't understand half of everything.

Also Thevenin equivalent circuits are the most aggravating thing I've ever come across engineering waaah

So I had an odd question pop into my head:

"Is there a website that has a searchable list of every known species?"

Turns out, The answer is, Almost.

Of course there is also wikipedia, but the information is scattered and incomplete.

I find the IUCN website particularly helpful, having each species subdivided by endangered status. Apparently it holds about 50k+ species in it's informative database...though that's a far cry from the total 1.9 million known species.

The encylopedia of life (which is basically a pretty picture-filled wiki-like version of the ITIS) claims to have a much larger selection to peruse. 1.1 + million pages, though I'm not sure if each page represents an individual species. It doesn't have a browsable list of it's million plus pages. So it is hard to spotcheck. (of course, I'm not certain what I would do with a comprehensive list of nearly 2 million living things shoved in my face. Though a suppose a "random species" link would prove entertaining, if just for a cursory glance)

IUCN is pretty great - if someone's done the research for a given species and determined whether or not it's endangered. The site in general focuses on the various factors that quantify "how endangered" a species is, so if your species of interest hasn't had anyone doing that yet you're shit out of luck. Wikipedia also mostly works off the ICUN's listings when they mention in their infoboxes its conservation status.

Case in point: Gecarcoidea, an entire taxonomic family of terrestrial crabs. Six genera; at least two dozen species unless I miscounted. I can attest that one species is Threatened at least (Gecarcoidea natalis, the Christmas Island Red Crab), being rapidly killed off by an invasive ant species, and would probably go extinct without human intervention. Not a single species in the family has been assessed for how susceptible it is to climate decline or other events that make it eligible to be on the Red List.

Add to the fact that species aren't as discrete and fixed as those hard and fast rules you learnt at high school would suggest, and the whole thing just gets hell of a lot more complicated. Salamanders in the genus Ensatina are a ring species - where A can breed with B, B breeds with C, C with D and so on, but A can't breed with G. You could argue they're in the process of becoming different species, but strictly speaking the two populations can still share genetic information.

The internet's definitely made it less of a pain in the arse when entire families get renamed or tossed in a different taxa, because you can just make a myriad notes on the Encyclopedia of Life about what the organism used to be called. I partially suspect a lot of the renaming and reshuffling (which is all done to better-reflect which groups of animals had closer common ancestors, rather than "these things all look the same or do similar things") is because the internet's made it quicker to spread the word, although that's conjecture.

That last one's interesting because my mum brought me back a field guide to Japanese birds from her trip. My Japanese reading comprehension is shonky at the best of times, but each entry had a scientific name so I could google them for more information.

The Crested Kingfisher caught my eye, but I had some initial trouble hunting it down because its name was listed as Ceryle lugubris. Its name has been revised since. The book was published all of a year or two ago.

And now, let's take a look at notetaking strategy.

Over the semesters and so on, I've found that an effective strategy is to assume that your future self is an idiot. Everything you explain needs to be done so without ambiguity, without excess fluff, everything that Future You needs to know should be there in your notes and easily accessible when they want it. This may cause some resentment towards Past You, but sadly that's just something that needs to be borne, and besides they can't feel bad anyway, not from where you're standing.

In particular, I have problems with formulae - when to use them, where to use them, and most importantly how to use them. I can't decipher meaning from a formula deposited in the middle of a textbook without an explanation as to the components and what they represent. The letter 'a' in particular seems intent on murdering my soul and having it for breakfast. It's been the length of a ellipsoidal flaw in a crystalline structure, the length of a widening crack in a stress-tested specimen and the coefficient of thermal expansion, all in the same unit!

In conclusion, no one follow my strategies of notetaking ever, because future you is probably not an idiot like my future me.

--SAMPLE: DO NOT EAT--

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Spoiler

How, oh bloody how do you find the time to write down that many decimals of pi in the middle of a lecture.

My notetaking strategies also involve thinking my future self is stupid, but the tendency to write everything down is usually stopped by me being a bit lazy and/or making a little drawing so that when I study my notes it's not so boring and terrible.

I tend to take notes in the form of doodling all over the paper and then downloading the slides that my lecturers conveniently uploaded onto the intranet for me
I uh... only have one module with an exam per year so I can't really attest to how effective this might be

and it requires having kind lecturers

I take notes on my laptop. It's super effective if you're a reasonably fast typist...

Not so much otherwise.

I tend to take notes by writing down whatever the lecturer writes on the board and occasionally noting other things. For my less engaging classes I tend to just doodle everywhere.

On the note of greater academics-chat, in about a week classes start for me again-- I'm not sure if I should be excited for the prospect of multivariate calculus and organic chemistry but at the very least it'll be good to be back in school.

So I do this thing where I fall asleep in certain classes and I'm not sure why. It's not that the classes are boring, or because I didn't get enough sleep (although it doesn't help when it happens). I just kind of clonk out. So I try a bunch of crazy schemes that include electricity or utility knives or large quantities of stimulants (of the legal variety).

Anyone else have/had this problem?

I do! I suspect the culprits are comfortable body/environment temperature difference and comfortable chairs, though not always both at once. And it may just be the chairs causing me to warm comfortably, causing the latter to fall into the category of the former, but damned if I don't always fall asleep in lecture courses with cushioned seats where the lights go dim because it's time for a ~slideshow~!

We have a two hour lecture in a repurposed auditorium that is also a movie theater in the holidays. Dim lighting, squishy leather seats...zzzzz

The solution is to be That Guy who always tries to answer the questions and make commentary on the lecture!

A combination of the mental stimulation and the scornful gaze of your peers will keep you conscious and ready to dodge projectiles.

ohno guys crap tomorrow is first day of school oh crap I have six classrooms of seniors and juniors who I have to talk to ohcrap oh gosh.

solution: make the chair unconfortable
sit on a book

I may try this. I think the solution in my case is still 'sleep more' though :3

Pulled an all nighter to set up part of my exhibition

Still not done and i am so tired

Gotta email Very Important People about shit I want to do next year maybe

Shit be scary.

Who sets a midsem exam at 7:30 at night on a Saturday?!