Learning
🙂
I continued my mnemonic language setup with notes on the scope and characteristics of the language. Some key characteristics:
- The language is a mental one used for communicating with oneself, so its expression in English is a transliteration.
- In addition to the English transliteration, it will have an icon-like script, if I’m prepared to spend the time on it.
- To represent information in a highly flexible manner, it will have an alphabet, a syllabary, and a logography, or at least that’s the aim.
- It will draw from numerous sources, which I’ll cite in the etymologies.
- I’ll use the usage labels to identify the mnemonic techniques the entries belong to.
This week I aim to finish up the setup, and then next week I’ll move on to math.
I switched my PAO number alphabet from Dominic O’Brien’s to one based on letter shapes. The idea came to me while I was slightly struggling to convert a speed limit sign to Dominic letters and I realized I already had a tendency to associate numbers and letters by shape. I had to flip and rotate some numbers, but my new alphabet feels pretty straightforward, and the conversions are much easier for me: 0 = O, 1 = I, 2 = N, 3 = E, 4 = A, 5 = S, 6 = G, 7 = L, 8 = B, 9 = P. I can reuse about half of my names from the Dominic alphabet, so now I just need to come up with the new ones, plus the actions and objects I never finished.
Math
😎
From David Tall’s How Humans Learn to Think Mathematically (overview) I learned that he and Jo Boaler don’t disagree on visual math learning after all. He explains that many mathematicians take an embodied approach to thinking about formal math, most famously Einstein and Feynman. The main value of the book for me, other than inspiring me to keep pushing ahead in math, is that it pinpoints the struggles students have learning particular math concepts, which will hopefully give me a shortcut in getting through them.
Productivity
🤔
Since I’m finally caught up on weeknotes and since compressing my writing time for them rarely works, I’m going to try working on them throughout the week before they’re due. I’ve mostly resisted this approach in the past because it’s hard to assess my week while it’s in progress, but only some of my topics cover the whole week. Others take place on a single day, and writing about those as I go might be easier. I’m guessing it’ll be a relief to spend my several days of blogging before my (self-imposed) deadline instead of after it, and I imagine I’ll feel more in control of the process.
Nature
😎
I believe I spied a great egret building a nest on my walk near work. It was standing on a low tree branch over the water, picking up twigs in its beak and carefully laying them in the branches. But I read they normally nest in April and high in the trees, so maybe that’s not what it was doing.
View this post on Instagram
Holidays
🙂
For July 4th I walked at a park with a big flag display while listening to some of our founding documents. I don’t think I’d ever read the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution all the way through, and I thought it’d be a perfect way to try out ElevenLabs’ new Reader app, and it turned out Bill the Old American Male was ideal for reading them. It was interesting to pick up on some of the ways the Constitution protects against the abuses described in the Declaration and to recognize some of its procedures from the news. The flag display was created by a veterans organization, and each of the 2,000 flags represented an individual.
View this post on Instagram
