#agriculture studyblr

[bunny-ology]

I started off in college as an education major wanting to be a middle school science teacher, but ended up quitting that because of how ableist the major was.

I switched to an agriculture degree because I grew up on a farm, and during 2020 I was constantly at home and convinced myself I could physically do the work, and I completed that degree despite the professors being ableist and morally questionable.

While I was an Ag major, I was working for the geology museum on campus, and decided to get my Masters degree in museum studies. During my studies, I realized how disabled people are constantly left out of deai discussions in the museum field, only ever seen as potential visitors and never potential workers, and so I finished my degree with independent research into how disabled staff are treated.

During my last semester in grad school, I started working as a substitute teacher and realized that my education major professors were wrong; I as a disabled person can totally be a teacher without a problem. My grad school advisor also told me that a lot of myself professionals go back and forth between the school system and museums. So I'm taking the leap to try to become a teacher

I just took my GACE (the Georgia certification test) and passed at a professional level! Once I am hired by a school, I will start taking the remainder of classes that I need to be considered a full fledged teacher

I've literally just made a circle, but the agriculture and museum studies degrees are still a huge help to me as a science educator. Other than space, agriculture perfectly set me up to understand everything required for students to learn and places me in a good spot to introduce an FFA chapter to the school, while my museum studies degree has allowed me to see education from a different perspective than my coworkers in order to more adequately come up with ideas in joint discussions. Additionally, I included disability and deai research in almost everything I did from work to school, and as a disabled person myself, I feel that my understanding of accessibility and empathy for other disabled people has prepared me more for interacting with disabled students in my classes.

Not a single bit of my journey was for naught, and I no longer feel ashamed or regretful towards my agriculture degree. I'm also excited to continue learning and eventually helping others to learn too

[missys-mansion-of-mistakes]

October 17th, 2024. Thursday.

What I accomplished:

First full day at my parent's house, watching their chickens, cats, and fish. It's going alright and I'm settling into having a big, three-bedroom house to myself for the weekend.

Went shopping because there was 0 food here.

Debated going to the local bookstore, or thrift store, but haven't gone yet.

Downloaded all the mods for Stardew Valley so I can play it with everyone while I'm here

Answered my dozen backed-up emails for not being at my desk 24/7 for a day

👩‍🌾 Very agrarian over here right now. Bucolic, even. I was getting rather depressed at my own place, so I'm very grateful for the freedom here and the massive change of pace. I'm not sure it's making the depression entirely go away-- maybe I need to sit out in the sun for an afternoon or two for that?-- but it's definitely not as present in my mind. Yay.

💕 All of this "having a house" stuff is just making me wish I'm like, 5 years more advanced in my life already. Living with my partner, we have our own space... One day, maybe. Just have to work a little harder for it...

[Photos: Evie the void cat; the schoolhouse they're building on the hill behind my parent's house; Butter, Henny, Cinnamon, Pepper, and ??? the chickens; Squeakers the cat begging for some food. Bottom: sunrise over the hills, the neighbor's goat, and Cinnamon examining my fingernails to peck.]

[blanketcat31]

plan for 10/25

necessities

farming so i don't need to do my midterm (done!)

scholarship info session

discussion post

climate strategy brief outline

conduct interview

read ch 15 for comm research

what i'd like to do

summary lead and ch questions assignment

relax with my boyfriend !!

[a-modernmajorgeneral]

At the 1937 International Exposition in Paris, two colossal pavilions faced each other down. One was Hitler’s Germany, crowned with a Nazi eagle. The other was Stalin’s Soviet Union, crowned with a statue of a worker and a peasant holding hands. It was a symbolic clash at a moment when right and left were fighting to the death in Spain. But somewhere inside the Soviet pavilion, among all the socialist realism, were drawings of fabulous beasts and flowers filled with a raw folkloric magic. They subverted the age of the dictators with nothing less than a triumph of the human imagination over terror and mass death.

These sublime creations were the work of a Ukrainian artist, Maria Prymachenko, who has once again become a symbol of survival in the midst of a dictator’s war. Prymachenko, who died in 1997, is the best-loved artist of the besieged country, a national symbol whose work has appeared on its postage stamps, and her likeness on its money. Ukrainian astronomer Klim Churyumov even named a planet after her.

When the Museum of Local History in Ivankiv caught fire under Russian bombardment, a Ukrainian man risked his life to rescue 25 works by her. But Prymachenko’s entire life’s work is now under much greater threat. As Kyiv endures heavy attacks, 650 paintings and drawings by the artist held in the National Folk Decorative Art Museum are at risk, along with everything and everyone in the capital.

‘A murderous intruder in Eden’ … another of Prymachenko’s grotesque creatures. Photograph: Prymachenko Foundation

It’s said that, when some of Prymachenko’s paintings were shown in Paris in 1937, her brilliance was hailed by Picasso, who said: “I bow down before the artistic miracle of this brilliant Ukrainian.” It would make artistic sense. For this young peasant, who never had a lesson in her life, was unleashing monsters and collating fables that chimed with the work of Picasso, and his friends the surrealists. While the dictatorships duked it out architecturally at that International Exhibition, Picasso unveiled Guernica at the Spanish pavilion, using the imagery of the bullfight to capture war’s horrors. Prymachenko, too, dredged up primal myths to tackle the terrifying experiences of Ukrainians.

Her pictures from the 1930s are savage slices of farmyard vitality. In one of them, a beautiful peacock-like bird with yellow body and blue wings perches on the back of a brown, crawling creature and regurgitates food into its mouth. Why is the glorious bird feeding this flightless monster? Is it an act of mercy – or a product of grotesque delusion? In another drawing, an equally colourful bird appears to have its own young in its mouth. Carrying it tenderly, you might think, but only if you know nothing of the history of Ukraine.

At first sight, Prymachenko might seem just colourful, decorative and “naive”, a folkloric artist with a strong sense of pattern. Certainly, her later post-1945 works are brighter, more formal and relaxing. But there is a much darker undertow to her earlier creations. For Prymachenko became an artist in the decade when Stalin set out to destroy Ukraine’s peasants. Rural people starved to death in their millions in the famine he consciously inflicted on Soviet Ukraine from 1932 to 1933.

Had she been an ‘intellectual’, she could have ended up in a gulag or worse …Prymachenko.

Initially, food supplies failed because of the sudden, ruthless attempt to “collectivise” agriculture. Peasants were no longer allowed to farm for themselves but were made to join collectives in a draconian policy that was meant to provide food for a new urban proletariat. Ukraine was, and is, a great grain-growing country but the shock of collectivisation threw agriculture into chaos. The Holodomor, as this terror-famine is now called, is widely seen as genocide: Stalin knew what was happening and yet doubled down, denying relief, having peasants arrested or worse if they begged in cities or sought state aid. In a chilling presage of Putin’s own logic and arguments, this cruelty was driven by the ludicrous notion that the hungry were in fact Ukrainian nationalists trying to undermine Soviet rule.

“It seems reasonable,” writes historian Timothy Snyder in his indispensable book Bloodlands, “to propose a figure of approximately 3.3 million deaths by starvation and hunger-related disease in Soviet Ukraine in 1932-1933”. These were not pretty deaths and they took place all around Prymachenko in her village of Bolotnya. Some people were driven to cannibalism before they died. The corpses of the starved in turn became food.

Born in 1908, Prymachenko was in her early 20s when she witnessed this vision of hell on Earth – and survived it to become an artist. But the fear did not end when the famine did. Just as her work was sent to Paris in 1937, Stalin’s Great Terror was raging. It is often pictured as a butchery of urban intellectuals and politicians – but it came to the Ukrainian countryside, too.

So it would take a very complacent eye not to see the disturbing side of Prymachenko’s early art. The bird in its parent’s mouth, the peacock feeding a brute. Maybe there is also survivor guilt, and a feeling of alienation from a destroyed habitat, in such images of strange misbegotten creatures lost in a nature they can’t work and don’t comprehend. One of her fantastic beasts appears blind, its toothy mouth open in a sad lamentation, as it stumbles through a garden on four numbed clodhopping feet. A serpent and a many-headed hydra also appear among the flowers, like deceptively beautiful, yet murderous intruders in Eden. In another of these mid-1930s works, a glorious bird rears back in fear as a smaller one perches on its breast, beak open.

There’s nothing decorative or reassuring about the images that got this brave artist noticed. Far from innocently reviving traditional folk art, her lonely or murderous monsters exist in a nature poisoned by violence. Yet she got away with it – and was even officially promoted right in the middle of Stalin’s Terror, when millions were being killed on the merest suspicion of independent thought. Perhaps this was because even paranoid Stalinists didn’t think a peasant woman posed a threat.

Her spirit survives … a rally for peace in San Francisco, recreating a work by Prymachenko called A Dove Has Spread Her Wings and Asks for Peace. Photograph: John G Mabanglo/EPA

Prymachenko remembered that, as a child, she was one day tending animals when she “began to draw real and imaginary flowers with a stick on the sand”. It’s an image that recurs in folk art – this was also how the great medieval painter Giotto started. But it was Prymachenko’s embroidery, a skill passed on by her mother, that first got her noticed and invited to participate in an art workshop in Kyiv. Such origins would inevitably have meant being patronisingly classed by the Soviet system as a peasant artist. An “intellectual” who produced such work could have ended up in the gulag or worse.

Yet, to see the sheer miracle of her achievement, you must also set Prymachenko in her time as well as her place. The Soviet Union in the 1930s was relentlessly crushing imagination as Stalin imposed absolute conformity. The Ukrainian writer Mikhail Bulgakov couldn’t get his surreal fantasies published, even though, in a tyrannical whim, Stalin read them himself and spared the writer’s life. But the apparent rustic naivety of Prymackenko’s work let her create mysterious, insidiously macabre art that had more in common with surrealism than socialist realism.

Then, incredibly, life in Ukraine got worse. Prymachenko had found images to answer famine but she fell silent in the second world war, when Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union made Ukraine one of the first places Jews were murdered en masse. In September 1941, 33,771 Kyiv Jews were shot and their bodies tossed into a ravine outside their city. Prymachenko was working on a collective farm and had no colours to paint.

In the 1960s, she was the subject of a liberating revival, her folk designs helping to seed a new Ukrainian consciousness. There’s an almost hippy quality to her 60s art. You can see how it appealed to a younger audience, keen to reconnect with their Ukrainian identity.

The country has other artists to be proud of, not least Kazimir Malevich, a titan of the avant garde famous for Black Square, the first time a painting wasn’t a painting of something. Yet you can see why Prymachenko is so loved. Her art, with its rustic roots, expresses the hope and pride of a nation. But the past she evokes is no innocent age of happy rural harmony. What she would make of Putin’s terror one can only guess and fear.

[technoregression]

ngl kinda pissed off with the way the world works like you spend your first 10 20 years just learning learning learning:

when you draw, by hand, a graph and it has an asymptote, you must not in any way indicate that the line diverges or moves away from the asymptote. the formula for calculating temperature loss in an environment!! that was my favourite :<

nutrient agar would be described as a control, a negative control to be precise because in this instance, no growth is expected. a "lawn" of bacteria in a Petri dish is when all individual colonies in an agar plate merge to form a field, or mat, of bacteria

Gel electrophoresis of DNA. endonucleases (restriction enzymes) hydrolyse (cut) the phosphodiester bonds at specific DNA base pair sequences. In the bacteria, the restriction enzymes cut DNA as a protective mechanism against invading foreign DNA. smaller fragments can move faster through the agarose matrix from the cathode to the anode, even though the larger fragments (i.e., 23kb) are more electronegative.

if animals are stressed before slaughter, you may end up with either PSE (pale, soft, exudative - severe short term stress) or DFD (dry, firm, dark - longer term stress). This is because they either suffer a rapid breakdown of muscle glycogen (PSE), or their muscle glycogen is used up during handling, transport, before and after slaughter (DFD).

the literary devices employed by the author work in tandem to elicit an emotional response from the reader by appealing to their sense of humanity, as well as an imagined psychological trauma.

data can be stored on a hard drive next to each other in physical space and we call this contiguous. It's useful for certain data structures, sometimes necessary. But you may not have enough free memory to access or execute programs if it needs to be contiguous. This is where something like a linked list data structure can come in handy.

Metamorphic rocks are are those that have been altered by external forces, such as (and typically) pressure and temperature. Eluviation is the process of clay leaving the A1/A2 horizons and heading toward the B horizon. Illuviation is clay accumulating into the B horizon. Leaching is just the movement of other things like phosphate, nitrates, etc, downward toward bedrock. The triangular soil texture (clay/silt/sand) diagram!

K(S) + H2O(I) → H2(g) + KOH (no idea what this even meant tbh)

I used to know all of that, and more, all at once. But now here I am filling out forms for people and scanning their documents and liaising with insurance, medical, financial, and other companies on their behalf.

"Why am I learning trig? When will we ever need this?" truth is little Timmy, you (on average) won't get to use it, you (on average) won't experience the joy of using these magnificent tools we get to learn at a young age, you (on average) will be robbed of every opportunity to experience this magic.

So. Enjoy it...

[slugzill4]

epidermal peel of Zea mays

[pre-dentalstudentdiary]

[evesprettylittlediaryy]

If you're a biology student and doing your internship in agricultural engineering, it's being way more difficult than you expected.

Both garden plants and fungus/bacterium studies are followed in this laboratory. I have been seeding bacteria, purifying fungal strains, taking care of plants and doing more.

I have learnt so many things, I got new aspects to the biology. But the most important thing was to learn how to believe yourself.

I would like to talk about it in another post so soon.

Hope everyone is doing well.

I know I do not post regularly and frequently, but I'm doing my best.

Sorry for these delays.

I'll take care of everything so soon.

[caffeinated-soup]

This grass is enemy #1 and the hoe isnt that sharp rn

[ammg-old2]

Surface water is all the water we can observe: ponds, streams, rivers, lakes, seas, and oceans. It coats almost three-quarters of the planet. When we imagine water, we usually envision surface water.

Our stores of groundwater, on the other hand, are invisible and vast.  Most of this water is stored in the gaps between rocks, sediment, and sand—think of it like the moisture in a sopping wet sponge. Some groundwater is relatively young, but some represents the remains of rain that fell thousands of years ago. Overall, groundwater accounts for 98 percent of Earth’s unfrozen freshwater. It provides one-third of global drinking water and nearly half of the planet’s agricultural irrigation.

Water is constantly cycling between below-ground stores and the world above. When rain falls or snow melts, some replenishes surface waters, some evaporates, and some filters down into underground aquifers. Inversely, aquifers recharge surface waters like lakes and wetlands, and pop up to form mountain springs or oases in arid lands.

Despite our utter dependence on groundwater, we know relatively little about it. Even within the hydrological community and at global water summits, “groundwater is kind of sidelined,” Karen Villholth, a groundwater expert and the director of Water Cycle Innovation, in South Africa, told me. It’s technically more difficult to measure than visible water, more complex in its fluid dynamics, and historically under- or unregulated. It “is often poorly understood, and consequently undervalued, mismanaged and even abused,” UNESCO declared in 2022. “It’s not so easy to grapple with,” Villholth said. “It’s simply easier to avoid.”

Take a crucial U.S. groundwater case, 1861’s Frazier v. Brown. The dispute involved two feuding neighbors and “a certain hole, wickedly and maliciously dug, for the purpose of destroying” a water spring that had, “from time immemorial, ran and oozed, out of the ground.” Frazier v. Brown questioned the rights of a landowner to subterranean water on the property. Ohio’s Supreme Court ultimately argued against any such right, on the premise that groundwater was too mysterious to regulate, “so secret, occult and concealed” were its origins and movement. (The case has since been overturned.)

Today, groundwater is still a mystery, says Elisabeth Lictevout, a hydrogeologist and the director of the International Groundwater Resources Assessment Centre in the Netherlands. Scientists and state officials often don’t have a complete grasp of groundwater’s location, geology, depth, volume, and quality. They’re rarely certain of how quickly it can be replenished, or exactly how much is being pumped away in legal and illegal operations. “Today we are clearly not capable of doing a worldwide groundwater survey,” Lictevout told me. Without more precise data, we lack useful models that could better guide its responsible management. “It’s a big problem,” she said. “It’s revolting, even.”

Water experts are certain, however, that humans are relying on groundwater more than ever. UNESCO reports that groundwater use is at an all-time high, with a global sixfold increase over the past 70 years. Across the planet, groundwater in arid and semi-arid regions—including in the U.S. High Plains and Central Valley aquifers, the North China Plain, Australia’s Canning Basin, the Northwest Sahara Aquifer System, South America’s Guarani Aquifer, and several aquifers beneath northwestern India and the Middle East—is experiencing rapid depletion. In 2013, the U.S. Geological Survey found that the country had tripled the previous century’s groundwater-withdrawal rate by 2008. Many aquifers—which, because they are subterranean, cannot easily be cleaned—are also being contaminated by toxic chemicals, pesticides and fertilizers, industrial discharge, waste disposal, and pumping-related pollutants.

Because these waters are hidden and can seem “infinite,” Lictevout said, few people “see the consequences of our actions.” She and other hydrology experts often turn to a fiscal analogy: All of the planet’s freshwater represents a bank account. Rainfall and snowmelt are the income. Evaporation and water pumping are the expenditures. Rivers, lakes, and reservoirs are the checking account. Groundwater is the savings or retirement fund—which we are tapping into.

“We have to be careful about dipping into our savings,” says Jay Famiglietti, an Arizona State University hydrologist and the executive director emeritus of the University of Saskatchewan’s Global Institute for Water Security.

[missys-mansion-of-mistakes]

Pepper, Poppy, Londy, Henny, Cinnamon, and Butter the chickens!

Heading home tomorrow. Managed to get a little bit of work done. Not tons, but I was working for about 4 or 5 hours or so. Good enough. Especially while I just have a couch and a chromebook.

[er-cryptid]

[a-modernmajorgeneral]

The two sides of the Standard appear to be the two poles of Sumerian kingship, war and peace.  The war side was found face up and is divided into three registers (bands), read from the bottom up, left to right. The story begins at the bottom with war carts, each with a spearman and driver, drawn by donkeys trampling fallen enemies, distinguished by their nudity and wounds, which drip with blood. The middle band shows a group of soldiers wearing fur cloaks and carrying spears walking to the right while bound, naked enemies are executed and paraded to the top band where more are killed. 

In the center of the top register, we find the king, holding a long spear, physically larger than everyone else, so much so, his head breaks the frame of the scene. Behind him are attendants carrying spears and battle axes and his royal war cart ready for him to jump in. There is a sense of a triumphal moment on the battlefield, when the enemy is vanquished and the victorious king is relishing his win. There is no reason to believe that this is a particular battle or king as there is nothing which identifies it as such; we think it is more of a generic image of a critically important aspect of Ancient Near Eastern kingship.

The opposite peace panel also illustrates a cumulative moment, that of the celebration of the king, this time for great agricultural abundance which is afforded by peace. Again, beginning at the bottom left, we see men carrying produce on their shoulders and in bags and leading donkeys. In the central band, men lead bulls, sheep and goats, and carry fish. In the top register a grand feast is taking place, complete with comfortable seating and musical accompaniment.

On the left, the largest figure, the king, is seated wearing a richly flounce fur skirt, again so large, even seated, he breaks the frame. Was it an epic tale of battle that the singer on the far right is performing for entertainment as he plays a bull’s head lyre, again, like the Queen’s Lyre? We will never know but certainly such powerful images of Sumerian kingship tell us that [whoever] ended his life with the Standard of Ur on his shoulder was willing to give his life in a ritual of kingly burial.

[strilondestudies]

📚 and 📖 for the studyblr asks!

Omgg hi sorry for the late answer HASDJHDJHS but tyy for sending in the asks!!

📚 favorite course you’ve taken?

My favorite gened course is probably Readings in Philippine History! I've always disliked learning history because I'm bad at memorizing dates and facts which at first is what I thought the course was going to be about, but turns out it was more about learning the cause-effect situations that lead to certain points in history, certain ideas or concepts that are prevalent in certain times that influence the occurrence of major events. While we were tested on some details of Philippine history, we also focused on how we use history as a guide for how to live now, like what to repeat, what not to repeat, etc which I think is what made this course rlly interesting to study and is now my favorite approach to History :DD

When it comes to the professional courses though, I rlly enjoyed Cost Accounting cause it was the easiest accounting course for me 😭😭 but a close tie would also be Economic Development which I enjoyed learning because it basically teaches that the common macroeconomic indicators like GDP or GNP aren't/shouldn't be the sole indicator or how good a country is doing economically, there's also factors like agriculture, population, literacy, equality, healthcare, etc.

📖 a book/reading from your field you’d recommend/really enjoyed?

Hairy Potter: The Twilight Edition by James Cristopher Domingo! I don't have my own copy but I borrowed my friend's copy when we were just starting out our first year and it makes accounting easier to understand since it's written in Taglish (A mix of Tagalog and English)

studyblr ask game here!

[mirastudiesphysics]

📚 for the studyblr asks

📚: favorite course taken

Hmm, this is a hard one. There's at least three that stand out to me, but for different reasons.

Probably my most favorite was Bayesian Statistics, which was my first statistics class. The professor was an awesome and chill instructor, and I felt like it gave me the background knowledge to understand a lot of papers better.

Another was Experimental Physics, which was solely lab based and the professor meant to prepare us for grad school. The experiments were interesting, we got a 5 minute crash course on soldering, and practiced writing formal papers.

One honorable mention is Environmental Ethics, which changed my view on deer hunting and gave me a lot of perspective on the agriculture industry.

[idk-studyblr]

*blog update 6.10.2020*

Hi, so I know I haven’t posted in forever but here’s some updates on class progress, this blog, and my college plans going forward after this semester. I’m going to be completely honest about what I have/haven’t been keeping up with because I find it helpful when other people are open about what they’re struggling with and frankly, I could use the space to vent lol. 

#1 - Class Progress

 This semester, I’m only taking two classes: chemistry 101 and pre-calculus. Right now, I’m weeks behind in homework, failed exams in both classes, and am seriously struggling to do anything. I completely tanked last semester when everything moved online. I struggled with severe academic anxiety and went through a depressive period as a result. I managed to get A’s in two out of three classes but I have an incomplete on the third because I’m still not finished with my final project. Thankfully, my professor and the department chairman are going to accept it but I don’t know if I’ll pass that class. 

I absolutely do NOT want a repeat of that this semester. I’m determined to get B’s in my classes this semester. I don’t think I can maintain my mental health while trying to keep my 4.0 so I’m aiming for a 3.8, minimum. I’m hoping that this blog will motivate me to get more stuff done regularly hence why I’m making this post.

#2- The Blog

I really want to post regularly with cute notes, study tips that work for me, and track my progress during the rest of this semester. I’m going to try to post at least once a week on Mondays with either what I did that week, cool projects I’m working on, or even just pics of my notes. 

I don’t really have any content planned out right now so feel free to leave recommendations.

#3 - Future Academic Plans

 The U.S.’s response to the pandemic and to social issues has made me seriously consider leaving the country permanently or at the very least, getting my degree abroad. Over the summer, I changed my degree from general studies to engineering with the hope to eventually get my bachelor’s degree in agricultural bioengineering. My ultimate goal is to work for environmental sustainability in farming, which I don’t know there’s enough support in this area for what I wanna do (still figuring that out too, lol).

 Basically, I’m seriously trying to consider the best options for my career and my personal wellbeing as a working class LGBT person.  This is why I’m planning to take next semester off to do volunteer work in my community, get my passport/papers in order, and look into potential colleges overseas (and whether or not I’ll need to learn a new language). I have a couple countries I’m looking at right now but I have a lot of research to do before making any decisions.