10.09
This article just blew my mind: Want to remember everything?
To quote (and summarize):
We are used to the idea that normal humans can perform challenging feats of athleticism. We all know someone who has run a marathon or ridden a bike cross-country. But getting significantly smarter — that seems to be different. We associate intelligence with pure talent, and academic learning with educational experiences dating far back in life. To master a difficult language, to become expert in a technical field, to make a scientific contribution in a new area — these seem like rare things. And so they are, but perhaps not for the reason we assume.
I’d love to try this kind of system out myself. It seems incredibly simple to implement, but I’ll look for an existing solution first I suppose. Basic idea is you have a set of facts that are stored in a database, and when you sit down to study, the facts are brought up based on their age and your past performance on remembering them, subject to the spacing effect (they explain the spacing effect in the article).
Another anecdote about using it for teaching from Hacker News.
Anyway, I feel like I have been learning everything lately. I need to implement some kind of heap for my reading material, so when I finish something I can ask the heap what is next. The item weight can be determined by some mixture of age and “importance” factor or something.
I’m finally starting to branch out a bit in Haskell. I feel that I have the language basics down fairly well, and can browse module documentation intelligently. I still feel like I really need to sit down and figure out what the monad thing really means. I’ve read several explanations, including Graham Hutton’s excellent treatment in his Programming Haskell book, but I have this nagging lack of a mental model for thinking about them. I’m firmly in the “magic incantation” stage I’d guess you’d say.
Anyway, a fun weekend of grading ahead of me, with hopefully some Haskell thrown in. Also have a social engagement with my advisor and some of the other students in the research group. Oh, and I now have two offices on campus!