All posts by dick

Anki: The Path to Super Saiyan Memory

Anki is an Open-source flashcard application, with desktop and mobile versions, and a sync state function between devices. The idea is simply to outsource physical flashcards into an application which then automates “spaced repetition”. The purported result is better memorization in less active time studying.

Spaced repetition with forgetting curves

The flashcard process goes like this: Attempt to get it right, then award yourself a fail, where you put it back in today’s pile, or give it a pass, where you put it forward a certain number of days. If this is the first time you’re seeing this card, it might only go forward 1 day. But, given that you succeed with recall next time you see the card, you’ll send it forward the previous interval times 2.5. This continues the next time you encounter the card, inflating the interval each time (today I just sent one 1.5 years into the future).  You can adjust that down by marking it “Hard” or forward by marking it “Easy”. Fail the card and it all starts again. I do buy into this process well enough. I can’t tell you how much time and effort I’ve wasted in college going over stuff I already know and got fatigued/bored by the time I get to the stuff I actually need reminding.

I’ve used Anki for a bunch of years now, but let’s get to that in a minute. Even though I’ve used it for a while, I recently expanded my usage due to reading an article about it, which I can’t even find now. Many articles say stuff like “Superpower” in the title. There’s a ton of hype online when people think about the possibilities of nearly effortlessly learning random things like all the bones in the human body or every last street name in San Francisco. Sure. But, the article did make me think that I can memorize more things I care about, like Linux/Vim/tmux commands. Perhaps going for an augmented memory at age 45 doesn’t show great timing. Or, perhaps, it shows perfect timing.

I first started using Anki closer to a decade ago while trying to brush up on and maintain some of my Chinese character knowledge. You can find shared decks made by others, so I went ahead and looked up one for the 3000 most common characters. Easy-peasy, right? It actually turned out to be a disaster.

The problems were 2-fold. First, and you’ll see this posted everywhere as a critique and caveat of Anki, is that Anki is not a learning platform. It’s just flashcards, a way to solidify learned content into memory. Contrast this with some of the language learning apps, which present content contextually if not just in some sort of explanatory way. Once understood, then flashcards are appropriate.

Next, whoever made the Chinese character decks I used (and now use) clearly has no expertise in learning or teaching Chinese. Whoever made the decks clearly took lists of Chinese characters and made 2 cards for each: one for character recognition and one for character recall. Character recall is the problem here, because simply putting the single-syllable romanized “word” isn’t enough to differentiate it from perhaps many other characters with the same sound.

I could go on about this, but it recalls something Tim once noted to me about Wikipedia’s problem. It’s a great and valuable tool for being free, but it’s often written by non-experts and therefore contains a good deal of inaccurate or imprecise info. Fortunately for me, I am someone who happens to have some expertise in Chinese language learning. I was able to just add context to the single-syllable “words” in the character recall decks. The upside to Anki not being a specially-curated enterprise app is you can always edit decks as you see fit.

What all this has to do with my previous post should be pretty clear. I promised my minimal effort plan to learn and retain the a bunch of historical sword morphology, but I had to explain Anki a bit first. Next post, I’ll go over creating an Anki deck for the Oakeshott Typology.

The Oakeshott Typology

To understate it: I’m a sword guy. Always have been. Thinking as far back as I can, I can’t quite put a finger on where it first started. He-Man, the LEGO Castle set 6080, and The Legend of Zelda being obvious suspects. Suffice it to say I’m into swords and things sword-adjacent. The typical course of a thinking adult sword-admirer is to learn a little more about their historical existence. An inevitable stop in this journey is learning about the Oakeshott Typology of medieval European swords.

a bunch of swords
Continue reading The Oakeshott Typology

Champs-like

The Fucking Champs are dead. Long live The Fucking Champs!

The Champs are done, and have been for a while. Tim Soete allegedly moved to South America, Phil Manley continues with a myriad of other musical projects, and Tim Greene fills his gear-head needs exclusively through running Louder Studios. However, in the Champs’ wake is a riff legacy that a few brave souls are willing to shoulder.

Continue reading Champs-like

Dick’s Retro Gaming Center v1

Now that I’ve got room and I don’t plan to move houses again: let the hoarding commence.

I picked up a NES and I have a list of games that I aim to amass. Then I found a 27″ Magnavox CRT TV for $5 at my community’s yard sale. Why CRT? Some people even swear by CRT monitors for modern usage, but I don’t go that far. I simply think that if I’m going to be firing up old console hardware, I should also use retro display hardware. Continue reading Dick’s Retro Gaming Center v1

BCOG

A Shizz friend of mine has run a Tumblr blog for almost a year now that I participate in: beercanonground.tumblr.com, or just BCOG. It is, as the name suggests, a collection of photos of beer cans atop this here Earth. Here are a couple of my submissions.

A grocery bag of Natural Light cans found on the Goucher College campus. June 26th, Towson, MD.

Union Craft Duckpin can wedged into some rocks in Rocks State Park. June 29th, Jarrettsville, MD.

You can submit your own photos of BCOGs via this link: http://beercanonground.tumblr.com/submit

USPS EagleMan

I was going up some escalators in the mall this weekend, and there I saw a USPS logo they haven’t used since I was 14.

This was the first time I’ve seen this in a long time. It was the first time I saw it as it was supposed to be.

Meet the USPS EagleMan, the mascot for the US Postal Service who delivers your mail. I never figured out why his collar was so fucked up. I figured it was a 70s disco collar or something. That was obviously his beak, so I just had to do a little mental acrobatics to make the rest of it fit.

Pig Roast

I’ve been interested in new types of cooking since I read Michael Pollan’s book Cooked last year. The book divides itself into the 4 classical elements as means of transforming raw materials into “cooked” food: Fire (no explanation necessary), Water (cooking in pots), Air (making leavened bread), and Earth (fermentation).

In the Fire section, Pollan follows a few practitioners of the Carolinian whole-hog barbeque tradition, where meats are cooked over low heat overnight. I’ve dabbled with his takes on the last 3 elements, but, up until buying a house this passed fall, I haven’t had the yard space to try ambitious grilling projects. Now the time has come. Continue reading Pig Roast