Thoughts from places: Keele University

Where has everyone gone? No one's posted in ages :( Don't worry, I know most of you have exams and deadlines, but come back soon? :) So on with my blog:

I found myself pondering what thought provoking and inspiring things that my University brings to mind. I thought for a very long time and got nowhere. So I looked at the many photos I'd taken to gain inspiration. Luckily James and I took a few photos only a couple of months ago!

When I think of my Univeristy, I think of this:

A big mass of concrete, in which one works hard, studies hard and parties hard. A metropolis, full of energy and stress. Lots of people. Many friends. Too much to do and too little time. Friendly but distant. A tool; a step in the staircase of life.

But that wasn't the story which most of my photos told. They painted a completely different picture. It's so easy to forget the true beauty which we have lying right on our doorsteps. So easy to get caught up in every day life. This is what I saw when I browsed through my photos:

I completely forget in day to day life, that infact my University is built on top of an old stately manor, has a massive woods and 9 lakes all on campus. These photos show beauty, richness and a peaceful place. I abuse the privilege that I have, by ignoring it and taking it for granted. The worst thing about it is that it's so easy.

How often do we do this in life? Get so caught up in who we are and where we're going that we're blinded and miss the beauty right in front of us. We live in a culture that is so privileged, we become immune. Immune to the simple gifts in life. The smell of freshly mown grass, the taste of home cooked meals and the cold side of the pillow on a hot summers night.

What I'm trying to say, is try and appreciate the good things you have already, rather than the things you used to have or don't have yet. 

Ali

Of Mice and Plurals

So slightly off topic:

A couple of weeks ago in the comments of my questions post Sarah asked why, in English, we use 'mice' as the plural of 'mouse', but 'houses' as the plural. Today I finally got around to asking my lecturer about it, like I said I would.

Firstly, the reason we say mouse in the first place. It's a remnant of an ancient plural form where '-iz' would be added to the end of words, and then a process called vowel harmony would make the vowel in the word sound like the i. So mouse (or its precursor, probably something close to the German 'maus') would become mouse-iz, which gets harmonised to mice-iz.

Now, languages hate redundancy, so when you can already tell the plural form from singular, with or without the -iz, the -iz will slowly get dropped from the word, leaving us with mouse/mice.

As for why this doesn't work for house? Well, as my lecturer said, the clue is in the Scottish pronunciation, of HOOOOOOOOS. See, back in about the 1400s, the English spelling system pretty much matched the way we said it, but over the course of a hundred and fifty odd years all the vowels moved around to... well, basically wherever they liked. So mouse, coming from something like 'maus', has always been that 'au' sound, and thus had developed the harmony from the -iz ending. Whereas house, having shifted from the totally different sounding 'hoos', never developed that, even though after the vowel shift it did develop the same sound as mouse.

Interestingly, the German word for house ('haus') has also been vowel shifted from this earlier 'hoooooooos' form, although early enough in the languages history that it now matches the rest of the 'au' type words.

And now you know.

Kid dreams

Hi everyone!
It's been a while since I last posted, but hopefully the first week of writtens is over, so here I am! (and I'm sorry that post is so late, I'll catch on the last one as soon as I get more time)

The first dream I can recall is actually wanting to become an archaeologist, and more specifically an egyptologist. After that I wanted to study Greek gods and civilization, and then, become a sociologist to understand people in groups and the way society works, because it seemed plain weird to me.
At some point, I wanted to be a opera soprano, (I had been singing since age 6 and already been a soloist in some concerts) but when my parents asked me if I wanted to go to a music school at the age 13, I said no, because I didn't want to leave my friends and science.
I then wanted to work on the canopy, because of the fascinating interactions between the trees and animals: the animals want to eat plants, that create poisons to protect themselves, and the animals then develop counter-poisons, and so on...
After that, my passion became the brain and artificial intelligence. It's been one of my longest dreams, trying to see if AI could actually work with a combination of computation and neurotransmitters. I learned a bit of programming at that time.

That's why I decided to chose scientific studies, actually; and since then, my interests shifted a bit: paleontologist, vulcanologist, and, of course, engineer in geology!

That's all I can remember for now...

Beach tales

                          

For freestyle week, I'll tell you about the trip I recently took with my coursemates to Pangkor Island in the state of Perak. It's about 3-4 hours drive and a 30 minute ferry ride away from the capital, KL. It's not one of the prettiest islands we have, but it's pretty popular cause it's one of the closest and easiest to access. That and it's famous for anchovy and cuttlefish by-products. We went in a ridiculously large group (19 people) so it was kind of like a class trip. Given that we took up half the bus, we made a crazy amount of noise to the disdain of the other passengers who just really wanted to sleep. Whoops. 

Anyway, we took a boat ride around the island and the adjacent privately owned island before heading to a snorkelling area. It was my first time snorkelling so I had to get used to the mask and breathing through my mouth. It doesn't help that I can't swim (I know, hopeless). It was quite hilarious cause everyone was looking for the fishes all over but when we returned to the boat, we found a whole school hiding under it. The rest of the day was spent frolicking on two different beaches, suntanning and playing volleyball. We also went on a banana boat ride (I'm assuming this is a common water sport, but I may be wrong) which was pretty frickin' awesome. 

But with all trips, it was the people and the stupid things you do together that make the experiences. The two nights were pretty much spent playing twister, taboo and drinking (in a moderate, healthy fashion of course). We even decided to play "3D twister" where you used your clothes or surroundings instead of the mats so we had our limbs on each other or the furniture. 

Because we had so much junk food by the last night, we decided to play an eating game to try and get rid of as much as possible. It turned out to be simultaneously disgusting and hilarious. People were eating marshmallows off each other's faces, trading half eaten chocolate, chocolate soaked in wine and rum and even marshmallows dipped in tomyam-flavoured instant noodles. 

This is a tldr version, the full one can be found... here on my blog. Till next time!

Unhelpful Tutorial

Hello, everyone! I am too lazy to write long ramblings and ponderings on things. In fact, I do not even have ponderings at the moment. Hence I shall show you a bit of the process of something I managed to create yesterday.

1. Watch an artistically inspiring video that makes you have ALL THE FEELS.



2. Feel a huge urge to draw something that comes from the heart but realize that you have no idea what to draw and the empty canvas on your computer screen is there to taunt you.

3. The need to do art cannot be shooed away, possibly has something to do with the fact that you watched that video two more times. So you end up drawing something random that isn't as full of creative energy that you hoped it would be, but you keep at it anyways because you figure it's better than doing anything useful.

4. Well here you go, you now have magically created line art, and a background you will not use because you are too lazy to shade the drawing to match that particular background and its painterly nature. You were also too lazy to use anatomical references for the head and the wings and you are painfully aware of that...but you wing it anyways. (oooo pun!)

5. Decide that you only like the circled part of the drawing.

6. Zoom in and begin to color with a shade of yellow that took you ten minutes to pick. Wonder what you are doing with your life.

7. Getting to this point took you way too long. Begin to wonder if you could pass this as a finished piece. Decide that no, this piece cannot pass as a finished piece. Whine about things to a person you have been talking to the whole time on msn. Also discuss what the shade of yellow you are using reminds you of. Proceed to watch two episodes of Friends.

8. Return to the drawing that annoys you and poke it again.

9. Somehow, art has happened. Proceed to post everywhere on the internet.




(click to see the finished piece)
10. Post a blog entry about it and fake work-in-progress shots convincingly. Go to the fridge and demand sustenance. 

How to survive revision/exam time

So, I was thinking to myself what I could write for freestyle week, and I was trying to work out what was going on with my life. Exams. That's what's going on. So I'm gonna give you a few hints and tips to get the study on!

Tidy room, tidy mind

When you're spending so much time, normally confined to one room whilst studying, having a messy room is not going to help at all! Even though you may not think, it's harder to concentrate when your in a messy/cluttered environment. I think that it's for two reasons. One, you probably don't feel as comfortable or at ease when your room is a tip, which is not going to help you at all. Two, it's a visual distraction. So try and stay on top of tidying/cleaning/laundry as much as possible.



Have breaks!


I know everyone always tells you to have breaks during revision, but it really is important. There's only so much your brain can handle! It's up to you how often you have them, and how long for, but I tend to go for 1 hour on, 15 minutes off (or sometime 2 hours on 30 minutes off), but it's about finding what's right for you.

Also, I would recommend having a separate room for studying/breaking if at all possible. This way you it stops you from being as tempted from checking facebook, watching a youtube video, or tumblring, if that's a bedroom thing, whilst your studying in the office say.

Work like clockwork


People always tell you it's important to wind down after a hard day of studying, which it is. Whether it's having a relaxing bath, reading a book or chilling in front on a tv, your brain needs a chance to process all the information you've bombarded it with, and slow down before attempting to sleep.

What people don't usually tell you is that you need to wind your brain up in the morning too. There's no way your brain's going to go from sleeping, to studying in an instant. Set yourself up for a good day by eating a nutritious breakfast (try and get both some fruit and protein in their is possible), have a shower and do something that gets you thinking, that isn't too hard (for example, I'll often have a go at a Sudoku puzzle, or play a brain training game). Trust me, your mind will thank you!


If it's all going wrong

Sometimes after yo're been revising for a while, your mind will just give up. It says "screw you", and then nothing will sink in. This just happens sometimes. You could go over the same paragraph over and over again and you wont understand a word of it. If this happens, just take 5 minutes out. Go and get yourself a drink, have a snack, go for a short walk. When you get to that point there's no use trying to push through out. It's a miracle what 5 minutes out can do.


Stay healthy!


Make sure you're getting your RDA's and if you struggle doing so take some vitamin/mineral tablets to give you a boost. Don't do caffeine. No seriously you might think it helps you in the short term, but it'll catch up with you already. Don't overdose on fatty/sugary foods because you'll end up feeling sluggish. Do some exercise, even if it's just a walk around the block, it'll get you heart pumping and also be a nice break from revision. Get plenty of sleep.






I'm not going to tell you not to cram


I'm not sure about all of your experiences, but whenever teachers told me revision techniques, they always told me not to cram the day of the exam. I disagree.
Don't get me wrong, I am not telling you to leave all your revision to the last minute, or infact that you have to go through your notes on the day of the exam. What I am saying is that it is okay to revise on the day of your exam if you want to. For me personally, I can memorize little chunks of information in the short term and by looking at my notes at the last minute can really help.
However this wont work for everyone. If you tend to get a lot of anxiety and tend to panic the day of an exam, I wouldn't recommend looking at your notes.


Okay, so that's it for my pearls of revision wisdom! Please take all of my tips with a pinch of salt however, as they are what works for me personally and different things work for different people.
I would encourage you to add any of your tips in the comments if you want :)

I hope everyones revision is going well, and good luck with exams! DFTBA!
Ali
xx

Why today is a good day

Ladies, gentlemen, today I'm having an especially nice day and I thought I should tell you about it. Nothing really special happened, but there were a couple of nice moments that just put me in a great mood (and I don't have those days often lately).
I slept like hell last night because I had a terrible headache that kept waking me up, so I'm a bit surprised myself that this day actually turned out nice (usually I'm in a bad mood the whole day when I sleep badly).

Today is a good day because...

~ it's warm and sunny and I was walking around only in T-Shirt (and pants).

~ everybody seems to be super friendly today, all the salespeople in the shops are nice and wish me a good day and I'm happy and wish them a good day back.

~ I helped a woman who didn't remember the german word for tissue (it's Serviette) and the sales girl didn't know what tissue means.

~ I ate frozen yoghurt with mango flavor in the new Frozen Yoghurt shop that recently opened here. It was very yummy.

~ I got a yellow rose as a bribe gift because we are electing a new major on Sunday.

~ I managed to test the headphones I want to buy, which is a longer story: I want new headphones (on-ear, big ones), but I don't want to buy them without trying, because then they are surely uncomfortable or have bad sound quality or something else. I already narrowed the choice to two headphones on Amazon (Amazon <3) and went to Saturn (an electronics shop) to see if they have those. They had them both, but packed. So I asked if I can try them, but apparently they are "hygienic articles" that can't be opened bla bla bla. But the music guy there said he has one of them in the room in the back because AKG (the brand) sent it to him or whatever, so he brought them for me so I could test them (which was a good decision, because they were even uncomfortable after a minute of testing). The other ones they didn't have, so I thought I could drive to the other electronics shop, Media Markt, to see if they have them. They actually did, AND unpacked, AND they were reorganizing the shop so they were not plugged and I was able to plug them to my iPhone to test them (when they are normally plugged, you can't use your own device and the sample songs they have there are really crappy quality, so you can't really say much about the headphones).
What's even better is that they cost 59,99€ in the shops and 30€ in Poland, so my boyfriend will order them for me and I can save a lot of money. Gotta love the cheap countries in eastern Europe!

~ I got an email that the meeting for a neurotraumatology course I thought I missed last week was move to today.

~ I got the result for the emergency medicine course + test we had last week and I have a 1 (best mark).

~ I had an awesome forensic medicine class today, where they showed us 3D reconstructions they can do from CT images. It's like in CSI or Bones, just... realistic. SO. AWESOME.

~ a drugstore here gives you 3% of the money you spend back and I found a voucher for 0,66€ in the trash in front of it. Might not sound much, but bought me the text marker I needed. Free textmarker!

~ the book I ordered arrived.

~ my cat didn't bring a mouse in two days.

~ I'm invited for dinner at my aunt's place.

~ my parents are in Spain and I enjoy being alone in the house very much.

~ the weekend is a long weekend (5 days) because May 1st is a national holiday.

Yup, that's it. How was your day, did anything good happen to you lately? :)

DFTBA,
Sarah

ANZAC day

Good morning everyone. It's Wednesday, the 25th of April.

I'm writing this at 9am, which is far earlier than I have any right to be awake, especially given that today is a public holiday. Except that the public holiday is the reason that I was up so early, because today is ANZAC day.

ANZAC stands for  Australia & New Zealand Army Corps, and ANZAC day is a day off we have every year on April 25th to commemorate the landing of soldiers at Gallipoli in Turkey in 1915. Over the course of the campaign, thousands of Australians and New Zealanders were killed (along with many more British, and opposing Turkish soldiers). Tactically it was... let's say 'limited in success'. It did end with one of the best-executed retreats in military history, though. I guess there's that. The day has sort of expanded to be a bit like remembrance day,

Despite not being our official national holiday (that'd be Australia Day, January 26th), ANZAC day is really important. Almost to the point of being sacred. Australia day has fireworks and parties, but only ANZAC day can drag thousands of people out into the cold for a dawn memorial service. I find it really fascinating, and I'm not sure why. I think part of it is the solemnity, that you can get so many people to be serious about something at once. Part of it is how big it is - like, everyone has some idea of what it's about, and it's treated with absolute respect. Part of it is the fact that we remember a very specific military failure instead of a great victory, which is significant in ways that I can't begin to express in this sleep deprived state. Part of it is that it's still so close in the past - only just passing out of living memory.

And part of it - which is why I'm posting this here - is how insular it is. I'd wager you probably haven't heard of ANZAC day. It wouldn't even rate a mention on any kind of international news. But here, it makes the front page, and closes down cities, and is one of the few public holidays for which my uni will actually cancel classes (Easter? Nope. Labour day? Nope. Foundation day? Nope. Queen's Birthday? Nope.). Which is a really interesting example of how, despite how much people like to rant about 'global villages' and 'monocultures', something like today manages to still have significance for one group of people and not others.

So I'm going to go ahead and drop some questions for you guys to answer in the comments. Have you ever heard of ANZAC day before this, even vaguely? And do you have any significant days where you come from, which you think I might not have heard of, and which have a particular 'feel' to them?

Thanks for reading.

Sharks are cute

When I was a little Sarah, maybe two or three years old, I wanted to become one of two things: a garbage (wo)man or a crane driver. At least those are the things I still remember.
I wanted to be a garbage woman because it looked like so much fun to stand on the back of the garbage truck and just drive around! At some point I noticed that garbage is pretty smelly though, and that I don't like that at all and thus that dream was over.
The crane driver ambition is easy to explain: those people we SOOOO high up in the air, how can that be not awesome? But my parents were not very supportive in that career choice and didn't send me to a crane driver school, so I had to find myself another occupation.

The next thing I remember that I wanted to become is a vet. Duh, original. It seemed pretty nice to play with kittens and puppies and bunnies all day long, but my mother, supportive as she is, told me that they bite and that you don't only treat small pets, but also horses and cows and that didn't seem so cool anymore. I was pretty scared of big animals back then (okay, let's be honest, I still have respect of them).

And then my big dream: marine biologist. I think that lasted the longest. More specifically, I wanted to become a shark scientist. I still have a huge fascination for sharks and I always want to watch shark shows on Animal Planet or Discovery Channel at my boyfriend's house (I only have cable and don't get those channels) and go to see shark at the aquarium in the city he lives in (though they are in the basement for a couple of years already because they build a new aquarium for them, so I never got to see them so far).
Anyway, I thought it would be pretty cool to travel to all those exotic places, swim with shark, study them, seems like an awesome life!
I don't really know what changed my life then eventually. I probably found out that you don't only dive in pretty places with pretty fish, but you also have to know about algae and microorganisms and stuff like that and that was something I really didn't want to. I also have a childhood TV show trauma where they were on an oil rig and were diving to the bottom of the ocean and there was a monster. I'm still panicking when I'm swimming and some plants are touching me, or, my biggest nightmare, the chains buoys are fixed with. I find that so disgusting and I always need somebody to check it out for me, if it is safe. Disgusting things wise. In retrospective, I probably would have made a very lousy marine biologist :D

I think other short dreams I had included: zoo keeper (ALL the animals!), captain of a ship and doctor (I wrote that in one of those friendship books that were so popular in the early 00's, but I'm not sure if I didn't just want to be cool).

I have to go, my cat is rioting in front of her cat door because I locked her out. She had a mouse. I don't want a mouse. I already spend an hour this morning catching a mouse that she brought and that hid behind my parents' bed. Damn you, Mischa!
Oh, the cat is inside. She broke in!? I have raised a monster cat.

DFTBA,
Sarah

When I Was Young I Liked Dead Things

Hello!

Today I shall tell you all about how, when I was younger, about 5 years old, I really liked dead animals and mud.

I wanted to be a paleontologist. Yes, I was that much of a nerd as a kid. I used to watch all of the dinosaur documentaries that were on TV, we had dinosaur movies, I had an army of dinosaur models that I played with, I even had an audio cassette tape (man I feel old saying that...) of a really awesome story about kids going to a dinosaur park. I knew pretty much everything I could about dinosaurs and could even pronounce all of their names.

Of course I have since forgotten most of what my 5 year old self knew about dinosaurs, but every once and a while it comes back to me. I still love dinosaurs, and when BBC came out with their Walking with Dinosaurs and spin-off series I was giddy with excitement.

Honestly, sometimes I wonder why I never made anything out of my love of dinosaurs. I will have to think of something. Maybe a dinosaur story or something. I did have that dinosaur dig diorama in grade school, but that's it really.

Oh, I almost forgot the mud. We had a dirt pit in the backyard that we would fill with water and I would pretend to dig for dinosaurs (which were actually rocks and sticks).

Until next time, DFTBA!

Matt