Python As A First Language: A Roadmap To Getting Started.

saga in black and white

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Tumblr Resources to Get You Through the School Year!

Hi guys!! Thank you all so much for your support!!! Happy 250 (EDIT: I SPENT A DAY ON THIS AND NOW IM PAST 300) and hope you all have a great start to the month! The community is more welcoming with all of you - I haven’t faced negativity from anyone at all. None of these are my posts - but they’ve helped me out a lot. With that said - let’s get started:

For bujos/planners:

This is one of my side blogs, and has tons of inspiration for weekly and monthly spreads, as well as a few aesthetic ideas and how to start one. I update this constantly.

How to start a studyblr - Studyblrs with creative fields

Lighting (for photos)

Study spreads

Planning your month

Printables (the same as some used down there but in a different category):

Weekly printable

To - do printable

Cornell Notes printable

Back to school printables

Daily Planner  @theorganisedstudent

Weekly Planner II @theorganisedstudent

Essay Planner @theorganisedstudent

Assignment Planner @theorganisedstudent

Assignment Tracker

Novel Notes

Plot Diagrams

Correction Sheets

Grid & lined paper

Weekly schedule for studying

Printables masterpost

Exam printable & how to use it

2018 Calender set (by my QUEEN @emmastudies)

For students:

Exams & Studying:

Exam revision guide

How to beat different types of procrastination

How to deal with a crappy teacher (this has to do with studying ig)

Study tips!! (its a masterpost)

Exam Printable & How to Use it

Exam & Homework tips

Coping with hell i mean exams i mean hell

A cool studying outline to try

This is my favorite thing and it’s when to use certain remembering techniques

Correction Sheets

Memorization tips for different learners

Weekly study schedule

More sites to use in normal studying routines

How to study smarter and not harder

Study smarter II

Exam printable & how to use it

Self discipline 

Study methods

Hoe tips for school and studying

Studying masterpoint

Tips and tricks to studying

Study tip - so easy

How to stay organized to study

Note - Taking:

Lecture notes

How i set up flash cards (these are nice to study from but be determined to finish setting them up)

Nifty highlighting idea (this post is so old)

Highlighting idea that i actually use

How to take Cornell Notes

Cornell style notes printable (gridded)

Notebook paper (grid & lined)

Tips for pretty notes!!

How to take notes

Notes for different classes

Life, man & general school stuff:

Back - to -school guide

Things I learned as a college freshman

Get ORGANIZED

Textbooks are expensive so here’s some free ones…

Tips for working students that sound extra but may work for u ily don’t overwork urselves

Masterpost for motivation and stuff

Get ur life together again bc haha i stay organized for like a day anyway

School supplies that u should have just to stay minimal

Grad school tips

Organization masterpost

Productive afterschool routine

30 websites to kill boredom

Back to school masterpost

Get confident in presentations

Overcome procrastination

Succeeding in school masterpost

For bad days 

For bad days II

A GOOD MASTERPOST for getting ur life together 

General school tips 

Free online courses

GOOD POWERPOINT TIPS

Sites to learns stuff

More learning stuff sites

Dealing with a trashy class

Study resources masterpost

Summer Productivity

Summer life tips

PLEASE READ THIS THIS IS SUCH AN IMPORTANT MASTERPOST 

Honest guide to college 

University tips

SCHOOL MINDSET

What to do on Sundays

Back to school masterpost

Useful things for going back to school

How to clean your house

Cute self care tips!

More self care tips

Plant care tips!

English:

A handy list of words to fit into ur essays

How to write an article like a journalist

Words to replace over-used words

ESSAY STRUCTURE IDEA this is in bold so u losers don’t miss this bc it’s not just for English u nerds

Get gucci while reading and be an active reader

Get gud reading them academic articles amigo

Words to replace “the author or whatever shows…” bc that is baby writing and i accidentally used that on an essay and i failed so

Novel notes

Plot Diagrams

Reading Lists

Literary techniques (what themes, personifications, metaphors are etc)

Discussing in English

How to top a literature class

Literature class masterpost

Strong/weak verbs

More essay tips!!

MLA format - a how to

ESSAY GRADER.

How to avoid essay cliches

Chemistry (I’m taking chem so i have a few resources aha)

Da terms on exam papers

Chemistry resources masterpost

Cute periodic tables

Study chapters

History/Social Studies

How to write a history paper

AP world history powerpoints masterpost

Math 

General tips

Resources

Understanding math masterpost

Test Prep

PSAT I

PSAT II

ACT tips!

100 words for the SATs (start studying early!!)

Thank you so much for the support! I couldn’t have done it without all of you. A simple reblog or like will help others see these tips, and will be very appreciated. I hope these links work - feel free to message me with questions and other links!! A possible part 2 might come out at the end of august, and one for languages!!!

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This makes me sound stupid but what does a feynman diagram mean?

You don’t sound stupid! They can be pretty confusing at first, and I’m sure you’re not they only one that doesn’t fully understand them (myself included) so let’s learn how to draw Feynman diagrams!

You do not need to know any fancy-schmancy math or physics to do this!

I know a lot of people are intimidated by physics: don’t be! Today there will be no equations, just non-threatening squiggly lines. Even school children can learn how to draw Feynman diagrams. Particle physics: fun for the whole family.

For now, think of this as a game. You’ll need a piece of paper and a pen/pencil. The rules are as follows (read these carefully):

1. You can draw two kinds of lines, a straight line with an arrow or a wiggly line:

You can draw these pointing in any direction.

2. You may only connect these lines if you have two lines with arrows meeting a single wiggly line.

Note that the orientation of the arrows is important! You must have exactly one arrow going into the vertex and exactly one arrow coming out.

3. Your diagram should only contain connected pieces. That is every line must connect to at least one vertex. There shouldn’t be any disconnected part of the diagram.

In the image above, the diagram on the left is allowed while the one on the right is not since the top and bottom parts don’t connect.

4. What’s really important are the endpoints of each line, so we can get rid of excess curves. You should treat each line as a shoelace and pull each line taut to make them nice and neat. They should be as straight as possible. (But the wiggly line stays wiggly!)

That’s it! Those are the rules of the game. Any diagram you can draw that passes these rules is a valid Feynman diagram. We will call this game QED. Take some time now to draw a few diagrams. Beware of a few common pitfalls of diagrams that do not work (can you see why?):

After a while, you might notice a few patterns emerging. For example, you could count the number of external lines (one free end) versus the number of internal lines (both ends attached to a vertex).

How are the number of external lines related to the number of internal lines and vertices?

If I tell you the number of external lines with arrows point inward, can you tell me the number of external lines with arrows pointing outward? Does a similar relation hole for the number of external wiggly lines?

If you keep following the arrowed lines, is it possible to end on some internal vertex?

Did you consider diagrams that contain closed loops? If not, do your answers to the above two questions change?

I won’t answer these questions for you, at least not in this post. Take some time to really play with these diagrams. There’s a lot of intuition you can develop with this “QED” game. After a while, you’ll have a pleasantly silly-looking piece of paper and you’ll be ready to move on to the next discussion:

What does it all mean?

Now we get to some physics. Each line in rule (1) is called a particle. (Aha!) The vertex in rule (2) is called an interaction. The rules above are an outline for a theory of particles and their interactions. We called it QED, which is short for quantum electrodynamics. The lines with arrows are matter particles (“fermions”). The wiggly line is a force particle (“boson”) which, in this case, mediates electromagnetic interactions: it is the photon.

The diagrams tell a story about how a set of particles interact. We read the diagrams from left to right, so if you have up-and-down lines you should shift them a little so they slant in either direction. This left-to-right reading is important since it determines our interpretation of the diagrams. Matter particles with arrows pointing from left to right are electrons. Matter particles with arrows pointing in the other direction are positrons (antimatter!). In fact, you can think about the arrow as pointing in the direction of the flow of electric charge. As a summary, we our particle content is:

(e+ is a positron, e- is an electron, and the gamma is a photon… think of a gamma ray.)

From this we can make a few important remarks:

The interaction with a photon shown above secretly includes information about the conservation of electric charge: for every arrow coming in, there must be an arrow coming out.

But wait: we can also rotate the interaction so that it tells a different story. Here are a few examples of the different ways one can interpret the single interaction (reading from left to right):

These are to be interpreted as: (1) an electron emits a photon and keeps going, (2) a positron absorbs a photon and keeps going, (3) an electron and positron annihilate into a photon, (4) a photon spontaneously “pair produces” an electron and positron.

On the left side of a diagram we have “incoming particles,” these are the particles that are about to crash into each other to do something interesting. For example, at the LHC these ‘incoming particles’ are the quarks and gluons that live inside the accelerated protons. On the right side of a diagram we have “outgoing particles,” these are the things which are detected after an interesting interaction.

For the theory above, we can imagine an electron/positron collider like the the old LEP and SLAC facilities. In these experiments an electron and positron collide and the resulting outgoing particles are detected. In our simple QED theory, what kinds of “experimental signatures” (outgoing particle configurations) could they measure? (e.g. is it possible to have a signature of a single electron with two positrons? Are there constraints on how many photons come out?)

So we see that the external lines correspond to incoming or outgoing particles. What about the internal lines? These represent virtual particles that are never directly observed. They are created quantum mechanically and disappear quantum mechanically, serving only the purpose of allowing a given set of interactions to occur to allow the incoming particles to turn into the outgoing particles. We’ll have a lot to say about these guys in future posts. Here’s an example where we have a virtual photon mediating the interaction between an electron and a positron.

In the first diagram the electron and positron annihilate into a photon which then produces another electron-positron pair. In the second diagram an electron tosses a photon to a nearby positron (without ever touching the positron). This all meshes with the idea that force particles are just weird quantum objects which mediate forces. However, our theory treats force and matter particles on equal footing. We could draw diagrams where there are photons in the external state and electrons are virtual:

This is a process where light (the photon) and an electron bounce off each other and is called Compton scattering. Note, by the way, that I didn’t bother to slant the vertical virtual particle in the second diagram. This is because it doesn’t matter whether we interpret it as a virtual electron or a virtual positron: we can either say (1) that the electron emits a photon and then scatters off of the incoming photon, or (2) we can say that the incoming photon pair produced with the resulting positron annihilating with the electron to form an outgoing photon:

Anyway, this is the basic idea of Feynman diagrams. They allow us to write down what interactions are possible. However, you will eventually discover that there is a much more mathematical interpretation of these diagrams that produces the mathematical expressions that predict the probability of these interactions to occur, and so there is actually some rather complicated mathematics “under the hood.” But just like a work of art, it’s perfectly acceptable to appreciate these diagrams at face value as diagrams of particle interactions.  Let me close with a quick “frequently asked questions”:

What is the significance of the x and y axes?These are really spacetime diagrams that outline the “trajectory” of particles. By reading these diagrams from left to right, we interpret the x axis as time. You can think of each vertical slice as a moment in time. The y axis is roughly the space direction.

So are you telling me that the particles travel in straight lines?No, but it’s easy to mistakenly believe this if you take the diagrams too seriously. The path that particles take through actual space is determined not only by the interactions (which are captured by Feynman diagrams), but the kinematics (which is not). For example, one would still have to impose things like momentum and energy conservation. The point of the Feynman diagram is to understand the interactions along a particle’s path, not the actual trajectory of the particle in space.

Does this mean that positrons are just electrons moving backwards in time?In the early days of quantum electrodynamics this seemed to be an idea that people liked to say once in a while because it sounds neat. Diagrammatically (and in some sense mathematically) one can take this interpretation, but it doesn’t really buy you anything. Among other more technical reasons, this viewpoint is rather counterproductive because the mathematical framework of quantum field theory is built upon the idea of causality.

What does it mean that a set of incoming particles and outgoing particles can have multiple diagrams?In the examples above of two-to-two scattering I showed two different diagrams that take the in-state and produce the required out-state. In fact, there are an infinite set of such diagrams. (Can you draw a few more?) Quantum mechanically, one has to sum over all the different ways to get from the in state to the out state. This should sound familiar: it’s just the usual sum over paths in the double slit experiment that we discussed before. We’ll have plenty more to say about this, but the idea is that one has to add the mathematical expressions associated with each diagram just like we had to sum numbers associated with each path in the double slit experiment.

What is the significance of rules 3 and 4?Rule 3 says that we’re only going to care about one particular chain of interactions. We don’t care about additional particles which don’t interact or additional independent chains of interactions. Rule 4 just makes the diagrams easier to read. Occasionally we’ll have to draw curvy lines or even lines that “slide under” other lines.

Where do the rules come from?The rules that we gave above (called Feynman rules) are essentially the definition of a theory of particle physics. More completely, the rules should also include a few numbers associated with the parameters of the theory (e.g. the masses of the particles, how strongly they couple), but we won’t worry about these. Graduate students in particle physics spent much of their first year learning how to carefully extract the diagrammatic rules from mathematical expressions (and then how to use the diagrams to do more math), but the physical content of the theory is most intuitively understood by looking at the diagrams directly and ignoring the math. If you’re really curious, the expression from which one obtains the rules looks something like this (from TD Gutierrez), though that’s a deliberately “scary-looking” formulation.

You’ll develop more intuition about these diagrams and eventually get to some LHC physics, but hopefully this will get the ball rolling for you.

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☪⚛

Here are some posts about cosmology, astrophysics and physics. I separated some of the main posts about space. Follow the list below ↓

Space-Time Fabric

What are Gravitational Waves?

What is Dark Energy?

What is Gravitational Lensing?

What are white holes?  

Interacting galaxy

Quark epoch

Cosmic microwave background

The collision of two black holes holes

What is a Quasar?

What are Gamma-Ray Bursts (GRBs)?

What are Pulsars?

What is a Supernova?

What are white dwarfs?

What are brown dwarfs?

How did a solar eclipse prove the theory of relativity?

Black hole vs star

Millisecond Pulsar with Magnetic Field Structure

Some intriguing exoplanets

Cepheid star

UY Scuti

TRAPPIST-1 planets

Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) 

Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART)

Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA)

Very Large Telescope (VLT)

What is the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA)?

ESO Telescopes Observe First Light from Gravitational Wave Source

Keck Observatory

Coronal mass ejection

Stars

Interesting facts about stars

Stellar parallax

Edwin Hubble

Interstellar asteroid Oumuamua

The most distant supermassive black hole ever observed

X-ray binary

Black holes

What is an Exoplanet?

Smith’s Cloud

Type Ia supernova

Protoplanetary disk

Magellanic Clouds

Herbig–Haro

Constellations

Solar system: Formation

Comets

Sunspot

Plasma Sun

Mercury

Venus

Mars

Ceres

Jupiter

Saturn

Uranus

Neptune

Pluto

67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko

Zodiacal Light

Eclipse

Excitation of atom by photon

String Theory

Quantum Entanglement

Quantum Particles

What are the four fundamental forces of nature?

Nine weird facts about neutrinos

IceCube ( IceCube Neutrino Observatory)

What are Quarks?

Quantum Vacuum

Fermions and Bosons

30 years after the detection of SN1987A neutrinos

The Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO)

The Large Hadron Collider

Vampire squid

This Photo of a Single Trapped Atom Is Absolutely Breathtaking

Halo (optical phenomenon)

Dirty thunderstorm

Bioluminescent Plankton

Where Your Elements Came From 

IG: astronomy_blog

My blog

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10 Captivating Short Stories Everyone Should Read

1. The Most Dangerous Game by Richard Connell — The story of a big game hunter finding himself stranded on an island and becoming the hunted.

2. The Last Question by Isaac Asimov — A question is posed to a supercomputer that does not get answered until the end days of man.

3. The Last Answer by Isaac Asimov — A man passes away and has a conversation with the Voice in the afterlife.

4. The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman — A collection of journal entries written by a woman whose physician husband has confined her to the upstairs bedroom of the house.

5. The Lottery by Shirley Jackson — The story of one small town’s ritual know only as “the lottery.”

6. Hills Like White Elephants by Ernest Hemingway — A couple has a tension-filled conversation at a train station in Spain.

7. All Summer in a Day by Ray Bradbury — A group of schoolchildren live on Venus where the Sun is visible for only two hours every seven years.

8. Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut — It is the year 2081, and all Americans are equal in every possible way.

9. The Monkey by Stephen King — The story of a cymbal-banging monkey toy that controls the lives around it.

10. We Can Get Them For You Wholesale by Neil Gaiman — A man named Peter searches the phone book for an assassin to kill his unfaithful fiancée.

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Pro-tips for rookie academic writers after grading about a quarter of the midterm papers for my undergrad Shakespeare class:

If your entire argument can be made in one sentence, it’s too simple. 

If your argument cannot be summarized in one sentence, it’s too broad.

If your argument can’t be argued with, it’s not an argument.

Teachers don’t want you to fawn on the material; they want you to engage with it. Just fangirling over Shakespeare isn’t going to get you an A.

Avoid big sweeping generalizations in your opening sentences (and everywhere else). “Since the dawn of time” or “Of all the playwrights who have ever lived,” etc. etc. are superlatives you can’t possibly prove.

If you’re going to say that an author/text does something, you’d better be ready to demonstrate how. 

Your opinion is not analysis. Learn the difference. 

“Interesting” and “intriguing” are useless words that tell a reader nothing about the text. Be more specific.

Don’t assume you know a character’s motives without evidence from the text. Don’t assume you know an author’s motives, full stop.

If you’re a man making an argument about female perspectives in a text, have a woman read it before you turn it in. Just trust me on this one. 

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Researching for a project? Looking for open-access, high quality databases, encyclopedias and resources to help you write your next paper? Here’s a list of some great ones to help you find exactly what you were looking for.

Research Managers

Zotero

Mendeley

Qiqqa

General

List of academic databases and search engines 

Our World in Data

Search Engines

100 Time-Saving Search Engines for Serious Scholars

Top 11 Trusted (And Free) Search Engines For Scientific and Academic Research

Ten search engines for researchers that go beyond Google

12 Fabulous Academic Search Engines

The 6 BEST Search Engines for Academic Research

20 of the Best Search Engines for Students

Best Educational Search Engines For Academic Researchers

Databases 

Directory of Open Access Journals

New York Public Library Articles and Databases

UCSB Article Indexes & Research Databases

DATABASES: Library of Congress E-Resources Online Catalog

FINDING CURRENT RESEARCH USING FREE ONLINE RESOURCES

Free Databases for Magazine/Journal Articles, etc. 

Free Full-Text Resources for Grad School Papers

Online Reference: Open Access Databases

Free Online Full-text Articles 

Free scholarly resources

International Education Research Database

PubMed

Sci-Hub

Database checklist: Key academic research resources — both free and restricted

Research Databases and Other Online Tools

Encyclopedias

Top Encyclopedia Sites for Student Research Papers 

RefSeek’s Encyclopedias

Encyclopedia.com 

Infoplease

Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy 

Medline Plus

Dictionaries

RefSeek’s dictionaries and thesauri

The 10 Best Online Dictionaries

Essay and Paper Writing

Essay and Paper Writing Masterpost

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heres a compilation of my bio 2.4, 2.5 and 2.7 notes (requested!) - this isnt everything and theres mistakes so dont rely wholely on my trashy notes ;-;

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college advice from someone who’s been on both sides of it

So I’m finishing up my Ph.D. and preparing to depart for the real world (no, just kidding, I’m going to be in school forever, only in a different capacity) and I thought I’d put together a list of some college tips to share with you all. I graduated with my B.A. in 2012, magna cum laude, with 2 majors, 1 honours thesis, 2 on-campus jobs, and 3 music things. Since then, I’ve gone to grad school and also taught six semesters of first-year seminars. Now I’m going on the job market for teaching positions. All of this means that I’ve seen both sides of the college experience, as a student and as an instructor. There are a lot of great & useful college advice posts going around studyblr this time of here, and I wanted to add my own. I hope it’s useful. So here we go, with a “read more” because it’s long (sorry if you’re on mobile):

academics

find your classrooms ahead of time (profs’ offices too)

figure out how long it will take you to walk between places

figure out where your best seat will be & claim it

say hi to the people next to you, learn their names

take notes in class

take advantage of extra credit

try your best not to fall asleep in class (and if you do fall asleep, apologise to the prof afterwards)

bring your glasses if you need them, don’t be stubborn about it

check out the library, wander in the stacks, talk to the librarians

figure out how & where to print

buy used books/textbooks, or rent them, but be careful with ebooks (some profs don’t allow them)

plan breaks into your class schedule, or block everything together, whichever works best for you

work out the pros & cons of 8am classes and/or night classes

plan ahead – have a planner, put things in it, do them

fake deadlines are a thing (write down earlier deadlines, trick yourself into meeting them, bask in satisfaction)

grades won’t be what they were in high school

keep in mind GPA values: a 3.5 will see you graduating with honours

be nice to the departmental administrative staff, thank them for helping you (even with small things)

office hours versus emailing profs: both will get your questions answered (probably) but if you can go and talk in person, do it

profs & TAs are people too, they have lives, they have bad days

if something comes up, talk to your prof, be honest but don’t overshare, just show them you’re trying

on that note, try

Keep reading

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26.12.20 / i wore this knit cardigan yesterday and got reminded of fuminori nakamura’s books on account of the red color. i highly recommend his books if you’re into crime fiction. anyway, how’s your saturday? i hope the holiday season has been kind to you this year ♡

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