Today was a funky sort day. On the work front, I did not accomplish much. I had been following the GTD methodology, but I have become tacky in doing my reviews and followups. I will fix that.
In my personal life, I am going through a rough patch. Not much to talk about there, but let us just say that I am living through interesting times, I am sure I will be a better person after passing through this patch in life.
Let us see what else is happening around the world.
The old iphones seem to be more valuable than the newer and cheaper iphones (half the price at $199), as the older iphones are easier to crack.
In her blog titles "Readin', Ritin', and Rithmetic, by Rote" , Vicki mentions that rote memorization is useless. I am not sure if memorization can be dismissed easily. I think having the raw data in your memory helps in solving a problem at hand faster.
I came across this small story by Douglas Adams today - The Private Life of Genghis Khan.
Here are some interesting fractions I came across today.
- express 1/81 as a repeating decimal, you are in for a surprise! the surprise is that we get an answer as .012345679.
- express 1000/998999 as a repeating decimal. You will get 0.001 001 002 003 005 008 013 021 034 055 089 ... (fibonacci series, if you failed to spot it)
If you work on a Unix system, you can use bc to check this out
rshekhar|~$ bc bc 1.06 scale=40 1/81 .0123456790123456790123456790123456790123 1000/998999 .0010010020030050080130210340550891442333
Comments
Also, I would argue that using something over and over causes you to memorize it without trying. I memorized German words in German class even though my class did not require us to memorize vocabulary and I think I learned better. I have memorized many Perl functions by usuing them.
Perhaps if we could choose what to memorize (things we need to think of quickly in our lives) rather than being told what to memorize (counties in a state where I have not lived for a very long time.)