We are emotional and feeling creatures. We’re just really good at explaining our behavior after the fact. Happiness doesn’t come from gaining new things, but from being in a state of flow. Following our strengths puts us in a state of flow.
We also have free will, it’s just that our resources for self direction are limited. Our locus of attention can only exist on one thing at a time, even if it’s our own thoughts or nudging us to do something. It’s easier for us to snowball changes or actions than it is for us to do things in a big bang.
When bad things happen, we feel better when we know they’re inevitable.
Our outlook and expectations alter our results.
A wiki for handling all the presentation and supporting material for a course, allowing for online editing and correction, diagrams, illustrations, equations and annotations.
Slides and prose. Comments, questions.
It would be fun to use WordNet and language parsing to parse natural language commands in an adventure game.
So, I’m thinking of something like this:
Command -> [chart parser/link grammar] -> [predicate calculus] -> command intent
Use something like WordNet disambiguation to map words to known concepts/words
word -> spelling correction -> wordnet synset -> concept
So, the lucky use this heuristic: When something bad happens they imagine something worse occurring and feel relieved and luck that the bad thing didn’t happen.
Eventually I want to integrate this heuristic into my thinking.
Taking notes, copy and pasting snippets of code that you’re following the thread of into a notepad is helpful. Especially useful for understanding large pieces of code, it allows you to maintain context across multiple methods and classes.
So, the thing that’s running in the back of my mind is that I’m going to use my achiever talent theme in combination with my learning themes to just do stuff. Keep track what I’m learning, incrementally do things, maximize what I’m good at.
In that vein, I’m going to slightly alter my 30/30 work cycle. The 30 minutes of focused work does very well, but I need a better off-beat thing to do. Spending just a few minutes with my eyes closed meditating seems to be really effective, as does socializing or just writing notes, focusing on one article helps.
Another piece of information that is implicit in my emotional intelligence book, but was explicit from a review of a book I read. Calmly focusing on what you learned from anger or frustration is more effective than acting out aggressively. So, that’s a heuristic that I’m going to add to my repertoire and see how effective it is. That’s implicitly in the emotional intelligence book as each emotion is there to tell you something, what is it trying to tell you?
The other thing I have to keep in mind is not to try and do too many new things at once. I should only have ONE habit that I’m focusing on at a time. Right now that habit is keeping a sleep log.
So, I’m going to try a little experiment called sleep free-running. As much as possible, I’m going to let my body dictate my sleep cycle. I’m going to go to bed when I sense a rapid increase in drowsiness, if I wake up, I’ll get up and learn something. The eventual goal will be to use my sun alarm clock as a zeitgeber.
I really do enjoy learning, and my StrengthsFinder results are consistent with that. I think I’m going to spin up mnemosyne again and start learning the definitions of names. I’m going to put more emphasis on creating good “first chapters” and fundamental concepts to learn, rather than just cloze deletions. This may be a bit labor intensive, but I think it’ll be worth it.
I’ve been using “don’t break the chain” a lot recently. It’s been very effective at breaking habits, but not so good at instilling new ones. Maybe I try to instill too many new habits at once.
Anyways, we’ll see how this goes. I think that having a more natural sleep cycle will be helpful in a lot of things.
The ideas is simple, create a program/library to allow for literate programming in RST and Sphinx. Basically take labeled code blocks and combine them into files.
Use something like #< ># as insertion blocks
May need a special block to allow for cross references between code blocks.
It should also allow for pieces of code to be maintained externally.
I just took the StrengthFinder test and here are my top five strengths:
In this post, I’m going to explore how they can connect to each other and support each other. The first example I’m going to use is my interest in spaced repetition learning. This is definitely a “maximizer” type activity, but is useful to the two other themes of learner (by memorizing faster I can learn more information) and input (more memorization means more knowledge).
Similarly, code katas feed my maximizer need and give a good framework for achievement. They’re also definitely a form of learning.
And this, posts like these are intellection.
