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maia comments on Open thread, August 26 - September 1, 2013 - Less Wrong Discussion

3 Post author: philh 26 August 2013 09:00PM

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Comment author: philh 26 August 2013 09:34:22PM *  7 points [-]

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).

Comment author: maia 27 August 2013 12:56:48AM 2 points [-]

I don't really see much use for Anki for everyday life, honestly, because I don't have too many things I need to memorize right now.

However, some people at the LessWrong DC group have started learning Lojban, and Anki is just the biggest possible stick to hit the "learn words in a new language" problem with. I've learned a lot of words just doing that for a week. I still have to learn grammar concepts, but having a bigger vocabulary at my fingertips is pretty great.