The Thinkulum | Pages from My Notebook

Weeknote for 7/7/2024

Posted on July 9, 2024 by Andy

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.

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.

Posted in Holidays, Learning, Math, Math relearning, Memory, Nature, Productivity, Weeknotes | Leave a comment

Weeknote for 6/30/2024

Posted on July 6, 2024 by Andy

Learning

🙂

I outlined some preliminary topics for setting up my mnemonic language and wrote some notes on my rationale for the project. The key argument is that learning a consistent vocabulary and rule set for the system would keep me from having to slow down and make them up on the fly as I’m using it. Here’s a similar sentiment about shorthand. This week I’ll continue my setup notes.

Math

😎

In Math-ish Jo Boaler makes an inspiring case for teaching students multiple ways to understand math, what she terms “math diversity.” “Math-ish” is her learner-friendly term for estimating, which she views as a key everyday math skill and a way to relieve some math anxiety. I was especially interested in her criticism of the idea that “there’s a hierarchy of sophistication where you start out with visual and physical representations and then build up to the symbolic,” and though the book only touches briefly on a visual approach to later math, it points to other sources I can look into, such as the calculus resources on her website. I was also intrigued by her focus on the central prerequisites for college math (arithmetic, data analysis, and linear equations) and her related work on California’s math standards.

Productivity

😌

Getting more sleep was such a benefit that I decided to try giving myself a weekly day off from evening productivity for an early bedtime. It’s going to take some experimenting to figure out how to make it happen.

Nature

😎

Monday I had a fascinating time at the park down the street from work. The water level had risen a bit, and taking a closer look at the creek showed me a bunch of strange little creatures. I also got a better look at the carp I dimly see all over the place, and I found some barn swallows nesting under one of the bridges.

Posted in Learning, Math, Memory, Nature, Productivity, Sleep, Weeknotes | Leave a comment

Weeknote for 6/23/2024

Posted on June 28, 2024 by Andy

Productivity

😌

My productivity finally climbed back to an almost normal level thanks to getting more sleep. Either that or my brain decided two months was a long enough break. It’s a relief to feel like my new old self again.

😎

Eliyahu Goldratt’s classic management novel The Goal about his Theory of Constraints presented me with lots of food for thought. It gave me another chance to consider how I could apply operations management principles to my life, an approach I didn’t get far with a few years ago. The book especially drew my attention to identifying and managing my bottlenecks and making my whole system of time management more visible to myself.

On visibility, I reworked my daily schedule tracker to give myself a better overall view of my time, merging my work and home schedules, which should improve my awareness of how the two interact.

Since my weeknotes act as a kind of bottleneck, to simplify writing them even more I spent Saturday afternoon creating a weeknote dashboard in Notion, and I set another limitation on the weeknote content using the analogy of sports commentary. The dashboard lets me set the date of the weeknote and automatically display all the Notion tasks and documents that I updated the week before. On the sports commentary for my week, I’m thinking I could devote most of each post to a play-by-play of the projects I’m tracking and then limit myself to one “color commentary” topic.

🙂

To nudge myself to keep my current memory project in mind, I made a phone background with AI to represent it. The mnemonic language I want to try creating will ideally have a logographic writing system, so I had the model generate a bunch of colorful icons.

Learning

I’m going to spend the next week or two setting up my mnemonic language in FieldWorks Language Explorer. According to my original project schedule I should be a few weeks into my math project, but since I want to use that project as a lab for developing my mnemonic system, I want to set up the lab notebook first. The project schedule is always subject to change, so I’ll probably move the end date of the math iteration back so I’m not cutting it too short, but I’ll decide that when the time comes.

AI

🤔

I found a therapeutic use for LLMs—as hot button calmers. A lot of times when an issue comes up that pushes my buttons, all I really want is a discussion of the pros and cons, and then I can put it away for a while, but what ends up happening is that I spend an hour or three reading every random discussion I can find hoping to absorb enough insight to feel settled. LLMs are great at summarizing issues, so I’ve started staging little debates where a chatbot writes the main arguments from one side of the issue, then the other side’s responses, then maybe the first side’s replies to those, and lately that’s been enough to get the issue off my mind.

Movies

🤔

The Wolf Hour was a stark contrast to Tenet—a still tense but much quieter story with loads of characterization. I could feel the oppression and threat in June’s living situation, and while hers is a much different life from mine, I found it relatable in a troubling yet strangely comforting way. I can already tell scenes from this movie have implanted themselves in my mind.

Posted in AI, Learning, Memory, Movies, Productivity, Project management, Projects, Weeknotes | Leave a comment

Weeknote for 6/16/2024

Posted on June 24, 2024 by Andy

Productivity

😌

I got tired of my tiredness and prioritized sleep. This is part of an approach of trying to aim my activities at key tasks in my schedule rather than simply focusing on each one as if it were the most important and I could take all the time I needed. I’ve known for ages that sleep is the key to my productivity, but that week was one of the rare times that I convince myself to “waste” a day catching up on it, and as always, it helped a lot.

I took a page from agile software development and tried writing my weeknotes in thin vertical slices. That is, I identified each feature of my weeknote format, and I add them each in steps across the whole weeknote I’m working on—so all the headings, then all the summary statements, then the emoji, then each elaboration statement, then links and images. That way I can stop working when I run out of time and still have some form of usable post.

Food

🙂

I inched back into cooking with my old taco salad mix. I found myself craving it recently, so I decided it’d be a good place to start adding some cooking back into my routine. I’m still going to rely mostly on family size frozen meals so I have several days of meals with little effort, but it was getting kinda boring, so I figure adding one of my custom meals every cooking cycle or two will still let me save time while adding some variety.

Movies

🤔

I continued my movie watching trend with Tenet: 4 out of 5. It was certainly confusing in places, partly because of the concept and partly because political/spy stories always confuse me. And while the puzzley aspect of the story was interesting, I felt the human elements of it were kind of flat and overly tropey, and that repeatedly pulled me out of the experience. Still, it was well executed and overall fun, and I could watch it again, so it gets 4 stars from me.

Posted in Cooking, Movies, Productivity, Sleep, Weeknotes | Leave a comment

Weeknote for 6/9/2024

Posted on June 18, 2024 by Andy

Learning

🤓

I filled in my linguistics knowledge with Essentials of Linguistics and “Introduction to Lexicography for FieldWorks Language Explorer.” These helped me contemplate the features of my mnemonic language.

Nature

🙂

I set up a tentative sequence for rotating through my walking spots during the work week. I chose each day’s location based on my mood that day, and I planned to repeat the cycle the next week to see if it still felt right. I also decided that in contrast with my earlier policy of walking inside on hot days, I care enough about my nature walks now to raise my heat threshold from 80 to at least 85 (about 27 to 29 for the Celsius users among us).

The rain has done its job of filling the ponds—a little too well in some places. One exception is the continuing low level of the lake close to work, and I think the reason is it has to share its water with the new pond the park landscapers seem to have dug a little way up the creek.

Movies

😎

I gained a new appreciation for short films thanks to Tim Egan’s Curve, a suspense about a woman in a precarious situation. The mysterious scenario was intriguing enough to stick in my mind long afterward and send me down a rabbit hole learning about the Hoover Dam and down a water hole with a drone’s eye view through the Lake Berryessa spillway. Egan’s film reminded me that when it’s done well, short fiction can pack a punch. So I watched a few more, including Final Moments about a boy facing a nuclear strike.

Posted in Learning, Memory, Movies, Nature, Weeknotes | Leave a comment

Weeknote for 6/2/2024

Posted on June 16, 2024 by Andy

Learning

🤔

I collected more miscellaneous ideas and resources for my memory system.

I found out interpreters have a visual note-taking approach similar to sketchnotes to give them a basis for translating a speech, which I could use as another source of ideas for my mnemonic language.
Thinking more about using familiar bodily movements for mnemonics, I realized I’m already very familiar with one kind—playing an instrument.
Inspired by the AI VTuber Neuro-sama I’d discovered, I contemplated creating an AI character I could chat with to explore and learn the world of my mnemonic language.

Productivity

🧐

I learned about Make.com automations while developing a scenario that will let me easily register in Notion that I worked on a task on a particular day. I find the Make platform cryptic, so I’m having to understand its visual programming language by experimentation. I didn’t finish the automation by the time I decided to move on, but my copious notes should prepare me for the next attempt.

I started exploring alphabetic shorthands that will be quicker to learn than Gregg and let me both write and type faster. In contrast with symbolic shorthands like Gregg that redesign the letter shapes, alphabetic ones use regular longhand letters and focus on abbreviating the words. It turns out there are a lot of the alphabetic kind to choose from, so it’ll take some time to evaluate them and decide on one.

Fiction

😎

My questions about the mysterious original Backrooms photo were answered when I found out Internet sleuths had finally tracked down its source (Broogli announcement video, Know Your Meme article).

Q: What kind of business was it? A: Formerly a furniture store, then a hobby store at the time of the photo.
Q: Where was it? A: Oshkosh, WI.
Q: Why was the photo taken? A: To document the process of remodeling the space because of water damage and plans to convert it to an RC car racing track.
Q: What would the photographer think of what became of their photo? A: The people involved are taking it in stride. The manager said, “I find it a little fascinating that a picture that was taken over 20 years ago has created as much interest as it has” (The Northwestern).

Posted in AI, Fiction, Gregg Shorthand, Learning, Liminal spaces, Memory, Productivity, Weeknotes | 2 Comments

Weeknote for 5/26/2024

Posted on June 12, 2024 by Andy

Learning

🤯

I had the epiphany that my memory system should be a language. Reading about the grammar of American Sign Language in the Gallaudet dictionary made me realize that memory techniques sort of have a grammar too as well as the vocabulary I’d already been working on, and it struck me that maybe I could make this grammar and vocabulary consistent and treat a memory system as a language, which would let me use the many resources of linguistics to fill out the system. Similarly to when I first encountered ChatGPT, it’s been a captivating thought, though the flow of ideas has been slower, and it’s reminding me of the power of a unifying idea to draw in work from a variety of fields.

As usual in my projects I immediately launched into a search for resources and tools to work with, and in this case the main ones I found were the r/conlangs subreddit, the open textbook Essentials of Linguistics, and SIL’s lexicography software FieldWorks Language Explorer.

So even though I’m past due to wrap up this iteration of the memory project and move on to other areas, there’s no possibility I’ll be dropping it, and instead I’m doubling down on the experiment of having this project live in symbiosis with the others—they will be labs for developing my mnemonic language, and the language will help me learn their material.

Productivity

🤔

I analyzed my weeknote process again to see how I could write them more easily. My weeknotes were taking too long to write, which is unhelpful when I’m trying to catch up, and they were putting me in procrastination mode. I decided to go back to my old pattern of four sentences per topic and then add other patterns as I discovered them. I’m also planning to move some of the writing to other places, mainly articles on the wiki side of the site, which would make a weeknote less of a self-contained report and more of a log with links—maybe less satisfying to read, but it could help me spread out my writing more naturally and maybe let me post on time.

Nature

🙂

The cicada emergence gained steam in my area, and I’ve been surprised at how much I’ve been enjoying it. I thought they were gross when I was growing up, but in the past few years my revulsion at bugs has morphed into curiosity, so now I find cicadas interesting and funny, like an insect version of frogs, with a beautiful, whirring chorus in the trees, and I feel kind of protective of them. Great timing, cicadas!

Fiction

🤔

I finished listening to the Liminal Archives version of the Backrooms levels. I was set on that path by the thought that I could memorize the long list of Backrooms levels as a mnemonic peg system, and I used the idea as an opportunity to familiarize myself with them, since it was a large project I’d been putting off since last October when I started taking liminal spaces more seriously.

But there’s more than one place to find Backrooms levels, and some investigation into the various communities (family tree, basic descriptions, Fandom history, Liminal Archives description and history, assorted opinions) showed me that Fandom was the first, but it’s the least restrained and gets kind of ridiculous; so I tried the next one, Wikidot, which exercises more editorial control, but it still sounded too much like SCP when I felt that the Backrooms deserved its own, quieter tone; so I put memorizing the full set of levels on hold and settled for traveling the much smaller set on Liminal Archives, which I take to be a distilled, more thoughtful version of the others.

But while it’s interesting to imagine the Backrooms as a system and as a place where societies might form, I’m drawn to the simpler setting of the Kane Pixels series and the even simpler one of the r/TrueBackrooms subreddit, which wants to shed all the inhabitants and other levels and appreciate the solitude and mystery of the original concept, which returns me to the question I pondered during my creative writing project last year of how many story elements you could remove and still have a story worth telling.

But Liminal Archives was still effective at bending the mind with vastness and mystery, and it reminded me of my similar impressions of mathematics, so I wondered if math could be treated as a Backrooms-like universe, sort of like in 3D fractal animations (a nice example set to Chopin), which I might explore in the background of my upcoming math project.

Posted in Blog, Learning, Liminal spaces, Memory, Nature, Productivity, Weeknotes | Leave a comment

Weeknote for 5/19/2024

Posted on May 30, 2024 by Andy

Learning

🤓

I took my mnemonic wanderings in new directions—poetry and movement—while continuing my experiments with narrative. I finished listening to Memory, Memorization, and Memorizers, transcriptions of lectures by Marcel Jousse introducing his groundbreaking work from the 1930s on the orality of ancient Palestine. He revealed their culture to be based significantly on a “rhythmo-melodic” style of speaking meant for creating and sustaining an oral tradition, which is an idea I want to look into for my own memory practices. So I picked up an encyclopedia of poetics to help me explore forms, along with some books of a evocative words and names to help me name landmarks and a dictionary of allusions for extra metaphor ideas.

Taking a queue from Anastasia Woolmer‘s comments quoted in Lynne Kelly’s Memory Craft, I began looking into various types of movement as a source for mnemonics, focusing on dance and sign language. On dance, I concluded I needed to familiarize myself more with the territory before I invested in reference books, but on sign language I concluded my long-standing search for an authoritative dictionary, choosing The Gallaudet Dictionary of American Sign Language, published by Gallaudet University, a leading institution in the deaf arena.

On the neighborhood narrative experiment, I had an image generator show me my characters and had Bing AI create a backstory for it, then asked some bots for five-act stories based on that before deciding it’d be easier to base the stories on the landmarks than to name the landmarks based on arbitrary stories.

For my PAO list, I asked ChatGPT to come up with actions, objects, and locations for my people, but although its ideas were on target, they were much more generic than I needed, so I’ll have to iterate on it.

Images

😎

I finished assembling a Windows background slideshow of a bunch of my liminal space photos from the past year. So now I can pretend I’m working in empty hallways and forgotten corners.

Nature

🧐

The woods down the street had another surprise for me Monday—the lake’s disturbingly low water level. In some places the lake was more like a trickle. I spent extra time looking around again.

😬

Friday I spent a damp afternoon at work after a weather miscalculation on my lunchtime walk. Alas, the downpour wasn’t enough to fill up the local lakes.

Posted in Learning, Liminal spaces, Memory, Nature, Weeknotes | Leave a comment

Weeknote for 5/12/2024

Posted on May 27, 2024 by Andy

Learning

😎

I continued exploring ideas and collecting resources for my memory system. (1) I finished collecting PAO names for my number memorizing list, and the next step is collecting their associated actions, objects, and perhaps locations. (2) I experimented with narrative ways to set up a memory palace using the neighborhood next to work as my lab, asking various chatbots for story ideas using the street names as characters and a setting, stories I would use to name the landmarks. (3) For more help finding mnemonics, I picked up dictionaries of rhymes, proverbs, images, descriptions, mythology, idioms, and similes. (4) I started dropping by the Memory League streams on Twitch to get to know the community a bit and find some inspiration in the memory athletes’ performance, which is easy when you see them whipping through the items they’re memorizing.

Music

🤔

I settled into Dreamscape ambient. Since I’ve drifted into a liminal space and Backrooms frame of mind, I decided to find some fitting music, so I merged a bunch of Backrooms playlists on Spotify to sift through. It added up to a lot of music, over 1500 songs and 64 hours, so making my way through it is taking a while. Most of it is from a genre that seems popular now, a sort of melancholy chillhop ambient that doesn’t seem to have a consistent name but is mostly released under the Dreamscape label. The songs have titles like “hope to see you again” and “blurry vision” with lonely, foggy cover art. Even though my idea of a Backrooms soundtrack is more like distorted music boxes, mechanical hums, and muffled 1940s music, I’m getting into this reflective type of ambient.

People

🙂

I colored greeting cards for the Phil’s Friends charity. Confession: I’m bad about volunteering my time, at least when it comes to one-off events. But my health insurance troubles this year gave me a sense of solidarity with people in desperate medical situations, so when my employer hosted an event to support cancer patients, I took a baby step towards more volunteering and signed up. I didn’t know what to expect, but we watched an inspiring video introducing the charity, and then most of us colored supportive cards while others packed very practical care packages. An enjoyable experience I recommend.

Nature

🧐

I took a long walk Friday getting used to the new landscape of one of my regular walking spots. The park down the street from work isn’t one of the big attractions in the area, but I often find my walks there interesting and surprising. My walk on Friday had a bigger surprise for me than usual—the woods in the northwest region had been majorly thinned out, I’m assuming on purpose, judging by the splintered wood all over the ground and large tire tracks everywhere and lack of charring from any fire. I imagine they took the opportunity of their current park remodeling to remove some invasive species, the usual explanation I hear for plant destruction. I was sad for a minute, but mostly I was curious what the place looked like now, so I spent extra time looking around.

Posted in Learning, Liminal spaces, Memory, Music, Nature, People, Weeknotes | Leave a comment

Weeknote for 5/5/2024

Posted on May 20, 2024 by Andy

Learning

😎

I continued taking memory palace photos, choosing number names, and exploring resources for creating more mnemonic tools. I picked up a pair of symbolism dictionaries by Steven Olderr to help me think about visualizing abstract concepts. For ideas on number symbolism and archetypal characters, I picked up a Humble Bundle with books on tarot, numerology, and astrology. And for ideas on assigning stories to everyday objects, I listened to The Rural Setting Thesaurus from the terrific Writers Helping Writers series, though I’ll need to study it to really glean what I’m looking for.

AI

😎

A project at work gave me the opportunity to dip my toe into several AI technologies I’ve been curious about. I looked into the tool chain frameworks LangChain and Llama Index, the ReAct framework for autonomous agents, retrieval augmented generation (RAG) to let the language model query a document library, and multimodal models to include computer vision in my queries. I concluded that these techniques weren’t a good fit for the project, but exploring them gave me back the feeling I was performing informational alchemy using these models.

Nature

😎

Saturday I spent the afternoon making a custom Google map of all my walking spots, plus a few I still need to visit. I ended up with about 50 pins. I used the hiking icon to show which places I’ve already walked and the icon color to represent the surface type so I can pick a less muddy trail after it’s rained. The map is way better for picking a nearby spot than the spreadsheet I was going to make.

Posted in AI, Learning, Memory, Nature, Weeknotes | Leave a comment

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