I've started studying daily using Anki Flash Cards to revise. Every day I add at least one card to my study deck. Every day the study deck gets more valuable to me.
Emacs and Jupyter
Today I discovered the sheer awesomeness that is Emacs with EIN. This lets my Emacs environment to to Jupyter Notebooks. Through it, I have the power of Emacs Python completion and editing while writing iPython functions. It works really well! I can display matplotlib graphs inline in my Emacs buffer. There is even symbolic computation via the sympy package! Bliss!
Using Mathematical Models to Reward Behaviours
Today I was thinking about creating a mathematical model to represent my own personal "Klout" score. Instead of providing a measure of social influence, it would actually be a day-to-day score of how social I had been. Lately I have been quite reclusive. Other than Helen, I haven't had much contact with people. I have also been a lurker on social media, such as Twitter and Facebook. In order to encourage more social interaction, my score would keep track of how many interactions I have. Whether the people I interact with are new people to me, or whether they are friends. If I construct the model properly and use it on a daily basis with an aim to improving my score, it should get me out of this reclusive rut I am currently in.
Effective Study
I have been studying continuously for many years now. I am still refining my studying technique though. One of the things that I am being forced to do with the maths I am doing at the moment, is to read and re-read the course materials over and over again. My workflow at the moment is:
- Skim the chapter. Scan the headings and sub-headings and try to build up the outline in my head.
- Skim through the problems within the chapter.
- Speed read the chapter. Get more of an idea of what is going on.
- Read through the problems and the answers.
- Read the chapter more thoroughly. Try and get a good understanding.
- Work through the problems.
- Repeat 5 and 6 until either clarity or the exam arrives!
Old Comments
I was just going through an updating a few things on my blog. I had accidentally removed Akismet, and accumulated a massive amount of comment spam in the last day or so. Anyway, I reinstalled and was going through cleaning out the spam comments, when I found a number of actual comments from human beings! Ones that I had completely ignored because I wasn't updating my blog regularly. Anyway, if you left me a comment a few years ago, and I ignored it - please forgive me! I'll try and be better at responding!
Ram Murty - Introduction to Analytic Number Theory
I just found Ram Murty's short course on YouTube - Introduction to Analytic Number Theory. So good! I am studying Apostol's book "Introduction to Number Theory" at the moment, and it is fantastic to get an insight into the subject from someone so brilliant! I ordered Murty's book "Problems in Analytic Number Theory" after watching the first lecture.
Altered Carbon and Riverdale
Helen and I started watching two shows on Netflix last night. The first is one that I've been looking forward to for awhile - Netflix's adaptation of Richard K Morgan's book Altered Carbon. The second is Riverdale - a reimagining of the old Archie comics, but set in the present day around a tale of mystery and murder!
Dreams and Visualisation
This morning I was wondering why my dreams can be almost indistinguishable from reality, yet when I visualise something, it lacks vividness and clarity. Not only that but I often get distracted when I visualise something - I vanish down a stream of consciously only to snap out of it a few seconds later and realise that I had lost focus.
No-etch Circuit Boards
There is an interesting video over on YouTube about creating no-etch circuit boards using a laser printer. I want to give this a try!
Centaur Living
The World-champion chess player Gary Kasparov concluded that "Weak human + machine + better process was superior to a strong computer alone and, more remarkable, superior to a strong human + machine + inferior process." He created "Freestyle Chess", pairing a computer and a human to make a stronger chess player. This hybrid combination is sometimes called a "Centaur".