Open thread, August 26 - September 1, 2013

philh

If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.

What (not necessarily LW-related) things do people find useful to Anki? (Or have Ankied but they turned out not to be useful, etc.)

Some things I have:

the NATO phonetic alphabet
mass of Earth/Moon/Sun, radius of Earth/Moon
log_2 of 1.25, 1.5 and 1.75, and log_10 of 2 through 9
The 68-95-99.7 rule
Some things that I noticed I had to keep looking up: which is which between SQL left and right joins; the argument order to python's datetime.datetime.strptime function; the spellings of irrelevant and separate

I think only the latter group have had any use worth speaking of so far, though the third and fourth are things that I have more than once wanted to know and not known. The first two may just be almost-useless (though I like knowing them, so not necessarily worthless).

Things I kind of want to remember but suspect they wouldn't be worth it include other alphabets, and locations of countries/US states/UK counties/London underground stops (the aggregate may be useful, but there's an awful lot of cards there).

Some stuff I used Anki for:

Japanese (I have decks for kana, vocabulary, grammar rules...), that's the one I've used the most consistently for the past six months or so.
Paris subway map (which color is line 8? Which is the green subway line? What lines pass at Montparnasse-Bienvenue? What is the east terminus of line 1?); not particularly useful but should help consolidate my mental map of Paris; I haven't been reviewing that very consistenly but know it pretty well by now.
A few misc. facts in AI and robotics; I made the mistake of putting too much stuf

... (read more)

0[anonymous]13y

A related question: What sort of time per card have long-term Anki users experienced? As a first "project" with Anki, I've been learning english vocabulary. Half are new words, and half are words I recognized but understood only vaguely. I have 2300 cards, and spent around 18 hours reviewing and 8 hours collating cards, which is around 40 seconds per card. Three months out, I'm reviewing ~30 cards a day in ~2 minutes. I feel like a fool when I think that I've spent 26 hours studying vocabulary this summer, but I'm pretty pleased with the equivalent "40 seconds to learn a new word". More generally, the cumulative time spent on any habit will sound pyschotic when quoted over long time periods: 4 minutes a day is 24 hours over a year.

2David_Gerard13y

If you live in London, the tube map can become suffiiciently memorised to serve for pegs in itself.