another little studyblr

for who among us have touched the foundations of this world and deemed them solid? || ash. xxv. aero engin + public policy. ||

[notesbyash]

An Introduction:

Hello and welcome, you can call me Ash. A bit of info both above and under the cut for those interested. For a quick summary:

About---

25

MS in aerospace engineering + public policy, ex-PhD

Main/Tolkien: @shores-of-esgalduin

Aes/Hannibal: @pxrgatorium

Can and will gush about Remedy's Control forever <3

(Tag Navigation + more under the cut)

Current active tags ---

#notesbyash: Original studyblr content

#ash just yells: Rather self-explanatory, ramblings on whatever happens to come to mind.

#from the po box: Answers to questions that have been submitted

#advice: General advice, both original and reblogged.

#little reminders: Similar to advice, but positive in nature. Take care of yourself.

#control 2019: remedy's 2019 game control which I love to bits

Things I've posted that might be helpful ---

Work Smart, Not Hard: personally collected study tips

Efficiency vs Balance: thoughts on maintaining motivation

Paper/article databases: a short list of places to read interesting articles and papers

Read your uni spam: it got me a free laptop once

Picking a major/grad program: passing along advice I got from mentors wiser than I

Cold emailing faculty: how I cold emailed my way into a PhD program. sort of.

Welcome, enjoy, and I'll see you around.

- A

[kawuli]

random PSA, I know a lot of people use duckduckgo as a Google alternative search engine, but it always kind of annoyed me when I was using it because it felt like No Name Brand Google

I have switched to using Startpage.com and vastly prefer it. for one thing, instead of displaying an "AI summary" at the top of the search results (unless you turn it off, yes I know), it displays the first paragraph of the Wikipedia article, with link, whenever it finds one that's relevant.

also a waaayyyyy better sense of design than duckduckgo

also private, European based, least annoying search I've used lately (RIP old "don't be evil" Google)

[yomikoreadsbooks]

Keeping a list of Google alternatives just in case…

[saxifraga-x-urbium]

i have one of those, scraped from multiple different rec posts:

Search Engines

Infinity Search is an alternative search engine with a special focus on privacy

DuckDuckGo is a popular search engine for those who value their privacy and are put off by the thought of their every query being tracked and logged. Uses bangs, ![site] for in-page search (sells your data to microsoft and draws from fucking bing)

WolframAlpha is a privately owned search engine that allows you to “compute expert-level answers using Wolfram’s breakthrough algorithms, knowledgebase, and AI technology.” A data search engine.

Boardreader is a search engine for forums and message boards. It allows you to search forums and then filter down results by date and language.

Based in France, Qwant is a privacy-based search engine that won’t record your searches or use your personal details for advertising. Uses “&” as a bang search.

Another privacy-based search engine is Search Encrypt, which uses local encryption to ensure that users’ identifiable information cannot be tracked. Metasearch across multiple engines. 

Offering unbiased results from several sources, SearX is a metasearch engine that aims to present a free, decentralized view of the internet. Can be self-hosted. 

Gibiru’s tagline is “Unfiltered private search” and that’s exactly what it offers. Requires AnonymoX Firefox add-on for privacy. 

Disconnect allows you to conduct anonymous searches through a search engine of your choice.

Swisscows provides fully encrypted searches to protect your privacy and security. Built-in violence/porn filter cannot be overridden. 

MetaGer offers “Privacy Protected Search & Find” through its anonymised search. A plugin will allow it to be made a default.

Gigablast is a private search engine that indexes millions of websites and servers real-time information without tracking your data, keeping you hidden from marketers and spammers. Variety of filtration and refinement options for searching. 

Oscobo is a search engine that protects your privacy while you search the web. By not using any third-party tools or scripts, your data is protected from hacking and misuse. Has a Chrome extension to allow use in toolbar. 

https://search.marginalia.nu/ an independent DIY search engine that focuses on non-commercial content, and attempts to show you sites you perhaps weren't aware of in favor of the sort of sites you probably already knew existed. Use old-school searching rather than query-based for the best results. 

https://www.mojeek.com/ 

https://wiby.me/ - It’s goal is to index as many personalized websites as possible, and NOT commercial sites. 

https://4get.ca/ it works a lot like SearX, but honestly better. It doesn’t have its own index, but pulls from many others. I think it’s the best for research, since it allows you to search for answers from different indexes, is easy to configure, add free, and avoids censorship as much as it can.

https://www.searchenginemap.com/ for more on how search engines relate to each other.

https://yep.com/ is a crawler

https://www.etools.ch/ retrieves from Google, Mojeek, Bing, and Yandex, like Searx

https://www.dogpile.com/ 

https://searxng.org/ (next gen Searx)

https://luxxle.com/ - possibly conservative?

https://presearch.com/ - good for academic?

https://kagi.com/smallweb - free/randomised Kagi.

Other Searchers

www.refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.

www.worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.

https://link.springer.com - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.

www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.

http://repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.

www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.

www.base-search.net is one of the most powerful researches on academic studies texts. More than 100 million scientific documents, 70% of them are free.https://cosine.club/ is an electronic music similarity search engine

[antoniabishop]

[sweatermuppet]

this is going to be difficult -> i am capable of doing difficult things -> i have done everything prior to this moment -> this difficulty will soon be proof of capability

[studyblr]

this difficulty will soon be proof of capability.

[notesbyash]

anyone know when the waves of grief finally subside or are they never ending

[kosmogrl]

I will probably get through this just like I have gotten through everything before but I need to be really stressed and scared first

[batsandboba]

“scientists don’t want you know” is a phrase that always cracks me up because if you actually meet a scientist they will be shaking and crying like an overstimulated chihuahua with the need to let you know

[saxifraga-x-urbium]

[ralfmaximus]

The note inside a bullet.

B-17 bomber is riddled with German anti-aircraft fire but miraculously survives. Later they discover the explosive shells were all inert; sabotaged by Nazi slaves working in armament factories.

Inside one empty shell is a written note: it's all we can do for you now.

[gothlovingoth]

The most important part of all this is that these small acts of bravery and noncompliance cannot be known as long as the enemy still stands, and might never be known. Just because it doesn’t seem like anyone is doing anything doesn’t mean it’s true. The best malicious compliance or subtle sabotage is the one that’s never detected, but makes ravages nonetheless.

[anarchistmemedistro]

Blessed is the Flame

Serafinski Blessed is the Flame An introduction to concentration camp resistance and anarcho-nihilism 2016 Taken from the original book: Run

Audible Anarchism

Philosophy Podcast · Updated weekly · A podcast broadcasting Anarchist texts and audiobooks

[anarchistmemedistro]

[ineffag-swag]

I guess I must have amazing taste because somehow everything that I like are things that I enjoy

[notesbyash]

maybe I should take up poetry again

[oscarjamesleigh]

Tumblr is a fate driven website. You can't find posts through the search function, you see them when you're meant to.

[notesbyash]

every day I think thoughts. and every day they prevent me from sleeping

[fullyunsourced]

General Mills: Cereal, spy balloons, and submersibles

General Mills is a pretty large company. You might know them from many of their offerings like breakfast cereal, baking mixes, flour, deep sea exploration vehicles, or colossal spy balloons for surveilling other countries' nuclear capabilities..

That's right, it seems like every company that was around the 50s had a weird phase where they got into aeronautics research. In between inventing a 'puffer gun' for inflating cereal kernels and the cardboard tear strip on boxes that never works, General Mills also had an electronics division. This division was responsible for the construction of DSV Alvin, best known now for conducting the first exploration of the wreck of the RMS Titanic.

And then they got into surveillance balloons as well. The follow-up to Project Mogul was Project Genetrix, and it was bigger in every way. The balloons: Twenty stories tall and designed to fly up to sixty thousand feet up. Their number: Hundreds! Their mission: Overflying the Soviet Union to observe their nuclear program and other military capabilities.

You'd think unguided balloons would be easy pickings, but in 1955, the Soviet Union really didn't have anything that could hit sixty thousand feet. If a pilot wanted to take one down, they learned they could wait until sunrise. Overnight, the balloons would cool and sink to a lower altitude. This left them an easy target for a MiG.

Out of 512 balloons launched, the US only managed to get 54 back. So it might have not been a total smashing success. Really, it may have helped the USSR even more. Diplomatic protests were raised from most places that got overflown, leading the US to claim that international law is fuzzy on who owns the upper air.

What really helped the USSR was the balloons they were able to recover. The camera film in them was top-notch stuff, resistant to radiation and temperature extremes. Pop open a Genetrix balloon, take out the film roll, and stick it in a Luna probe. It's ready to go to the Moon!

And so the USSR did exactly that, taking their first photos of the far side of the Moon using captured Genetrix film.

General Mills didn't let their balloon-manufacturing experience go to waste. Former employees went on to found another company, which, for decades, manufactured the balloons used in the Macy's Day Parade. Okay, they might not quite be Genetrix-level complex, but neat.

[thebonewitch]

At the end of the day, my thoughts on job hunting are that it's incredibly stupid how every fiber of our current socioeconomic structure is screaming that you MUST have a job and nothing else matters because you MUST be working and that's the only thing of true importance so never forget that you MUST have a job, and I'm like damn okay so I'd like a job, can I have one? And the answer is No

[bonivers]

feeling like an academic flop will have you randomly thinking shit like You’ve Betrayed And Destroyed Yourself For Nothing and it’s like Ok girl tone it down it’s not that serious

[world-beauty]

Ganymede from Juno

Credits: NASA, JPL-Caltech, SwRI, MSSS, License, Kevin M. Gill

[kosmogrl]

[gay-hrithik-roshan]