I have recently acquired a new tool in my arsenal that I hope will help me learn things more effectively and efficiently.

I shall discuss it now.

Anki and spaced repetition

Actually I won’t waste both of our times by trying to describe it.

Wikipedia or other places do a better job than me so if you are curious you should read that.

But if I were to describe the core idea for why I was attracted to Anki, it would go something like:

Imagine a note-taking system that collects all of your individual notes, shows you each one and gives you the opportunity to rank each one depending on how easy you recollected it, and then schedules the next time you will review the notes so that you don’t waste time reviwing notes you can easily recollect.

That is not an explanation of what Anki is about, merely what initially drew me to it, so there is actually a lot more to be said and a lot of other amazing concepts within.

There is a nice summarizing image that explains the usefulness and effect of repeated testing:

I don’t really think that image needs any explanation, it speaks for itself.

This gradual increase in decay time underlies the design of Anki and similar memory systems. It’s why Anki gradually expands the time periods between testing.

This is interesting reading, by the way.

This is also interesting reading.

I want to stress that you should read that last article atleast, because no matter what you are doing right this instant, if you have never encountered this concept of spaced repetition before, This is 100% worth the time, so, just .. read it.

You should also watch this first part of a video on Evidence-Based revision tips, the one we’re interested in is in part 2, where Ali talks about spaced repetition.

A couple of memes never hurt …

My other interest I suppose is none other than …

Manim, the mathematical animation engine

I’ve had my eyes on Manim, the mathematical animation engine developed by Grant Sanderson, also known as 3Blue1Brown for quite a while now, the reasons are two-fold, one, I was just absolutely curious and wanted to try and see if I could make my own animations/creations, two, if you remember the fleeting ideas post, see if I can modify it or even use some of its components to create fitting constructs to help me animate solutions or such.

Didn’t really think much on what constructs I would need in particular, since I don’t want to fall into my tunnel vision, and I know how easy it would be to fall into that, AND I know just how “productive” I can be when I’m paralyzed, so I will look back at this question later with a better stance (hopefully) after I’ve seen what I can do with the engine.

For now …

For now I shall attempt increasing my math fluency and maybe I’ll pick up SICP tomorrow or something.