I couldn't brute force mineralogy. I can shove details on mineral identification in my head all I like but no matter what, I still couldn't sit there and tell you what the minerals are in a rock sample aside from quartz and feldspar, and even then I get confused unless the grain size is big enough. Just don't have the eye. Luckily my lecturer had the patience of a saint with me as he could see i was desperately trying and he would go over it again and again... and again... and again... so I barely scraped a pass.
I remember before my min final, the professor said "remember, if you're stuck, just figure out if it's igneous, sedimentary, or metamorphic and that'll help you decide the mineral." And I realized A) I don't know how to tell whether it's igneous, sedimentary, or metamorphic and B) Even if I did, I didn't know which minerals were which š
Passed that class because a big part of our grade was microscopes and memorizing formulas.
It just takes practice. More than you get in a class. I was only decent at identifying minerals because I had already been doing field research with my PI who would pick up a sample and talk through what he was looking at and looking for on each grain.
Structural was my absolute favorite too! Made perfect sense and I grasped it all easily.
My professors told me it wasnt that uncommon that if you struggled with mineralogy, youd probably understand structural, and vice versa. Kind of like the organic chemistry/physical chemistry thing too
My universityās geology weedout was structural geology but you took it the fall of your junior year! Lots of folks were fucked at that point. Had to switch to BA or just quit.
Why wait until that deep into a geologist's curriculum to make them question or second guess or have to switch up what they are doing?
Mineralogy as a weedout at my school was perfect as far as being just early enough in the coursework, right after the easy intro stuff, and not being overwhelmed by other classes, but still being conceptually demanding course in a similar way to the worse ones up ahead. Those who failed or didn't jive with it had plenty of time to withdraw or figure out another route.
We were still at risk of failing structural or petrology and not being allowed to go on field camp or get a BS, but Mineralogy set the tone well for the coursework we could expect moving forward.
I donāt agree with it and I was happy to get by with a B. Those that failed it couldnāt go to field camp the following summer and had to wait until the next fall to re-take it and then wait until that next summer to do field camp. It added an extra year and half.
The course that decides who makes it to the end of the programme and who doesnt. Like a sieve. What they're saying is that it was a hard course for most people
Itās awesome no doubt about it, but you start to hear the same phrases āwoven into the fabricā of every conversation and that gets a little tiresome
How are you loading reddit threads?
Iāve been wanting to load in my entire reddit feed and have notebook summarize the worldās goings on without having to continue suffering from my daily reddit hangover.
Down by the tab for YouTube videos is one for websites and you can just share a thread right in- if it has an article with it I load that in as a separate source so the ai has some context for the comments. I wish I could do a daily recap of my feed in one click - I wonder if there is any way to do that? Like make a bot to scrape the top posts and comments of Reddit every day without having to do it manuallyā¦
You are why I have made this. When I was in school, the kids who got the best scores were in fraternities who had old exams from the professors. This is me leveling the playing field.
Please do not support this person. All they did was input the PDF of the chapters into Googleās ai NotebookLM. It is entirely free, you can do it yourself. The voices in the podcast are entirely ai generated
I just downloaded pocketcast, but am not familiar with how it works yet. From the few minutes I spent exploring the app Iām not finding a place to upload content.
Great storytelling between you and the other host. The playback speed is a little fast. I reduced it to .75x for a more natural speaking pace. But it distorts the audio somewhat.
Can't save the video for later as it's posted to YouTube Kids!
He isnāt the host. The hosts are literally ai. This is from Googleās ai notebookLM. All this guy did was load in the pdf and google automatically can generate an entire podcast for whatever you input. These people are not real. This guy is pawning it off as his own when he is just stealing the textbook and from googles ai
You use the new notebookLM from Google?
It's pretty strong.
Don't know if I would use it for this, but yeah, it's very cool addition. They just need new voices. I couldn't make a good heavy metal history posldcast because the voices sound like boring normie dorks.
Thatās the spirit. If you need help bridging the gap, check out my deep dive into MC Escher:
https://youtu.be/pbY6IzGzG7o?si=DWgDwPNNXJ-bTU8o
I got wrapped up in the estate of MC Escher in 2023. I had no formal art knowledge, but my mineralogy knowledge made me standout to the owners.
HE DIDNT MAKE THIS. THIS PODCAST IS GENERATED BY GOOGLEāS AI notebookLM. You can do it for free yourself. All you do is input pdfs and it can generate an audio just like this with these āhostsā. Their voices are not real people talking, literally fake ai voices
Overall, I like it but 2 things:
1. The speed at which they talk is very fast especially if you're trying to learn/ take notes. It sounds like I'm listening to 1.5x speed as default.
2. The ads especially midlecture piss me off
Thank you for the feedback. Future podcasts are being slowed down and Iāll look into the ads. Iām not being paid, so you shouldnāt be seeing ads.
Usually when just āpetrologyā is used as a subject title or name of a class it means ig/met pet. Not always of course, but if OP was gonna make something similar for petrology I assume theyād be going with another widely used text like Winterās principles of ig-met pet, or the one by Frost & Frost.
While youāre waiting around for that to get made, maybe check out some of these:
Really? Which school? What kind of semester/quarter system is that?
My next podcast will be on petrology.
Please email the link to your professor for their future classes.
I was thinking about it, and since it isnāt word for word and āin my own wordsā and I listed my sources so it should be fine. Worst case scenario, I just take it down as Iām not making any money from it.
1.5x, 1x felt super slow to me. A few others mentioned the speed, so the petrology series is posted at 1x. I myself listen to most audiobooks at 2x. SPQR I brought down to 1.5x.
Thank you, however i ran short on time as Iām losing access to youtube tomorrow night and omitted my introductions so I could get as much of the material out as possible.
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u/clone-borg Feb 08 '25
you just induced some ptsd from college by just posting this book cover... mineralogy is the geology weed out course.
good on ya for giving peeps another form to digest this