You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

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

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

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (148)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

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: David_Gerard 27 August 2013 09:49:52PM 0 points [-]

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

Comment author: Risto_Saarelma 28 August 2013 06:35:49AM 3 points [-]

London cabbies probably have a great foundation for building memory palaces.