dfan says

I have a terrible memory. I’m pretty good at remembering processes and techniques, but very bad at remembering raw information. Luckily, I went into computer science, which is all about the former, rather than biology or something. (My musical memory is quite good, but that’s definitely an exception.) I find it very frustrating to spend a fair amount of time amassing knowledge (say, reading a history of the United States because I feel embarrassingly ignorant of it) only to have forgotten most of it a year or two later.

So last year I was excited to read a Wired article about Piotr Wozniak and his SuperMemo program. The idea is that you can feed everything you want to remember into a program that is scientifically tuned to spit out the right flashcards for you at exactly the right times. What makes it work is the principle of spaced repetition, discovered in the 19th century, which asserts that the time between reviews of a given piece of information should increase (exponentially, in fact) over time. Since facts that you start out by needing to review every day can eventually be reviewed every hundred days or more as their period increases, you can regularly stuff more facts into the database and your daily quota of flashcards doesn’t need to increase too much. The SuperMemo program handles all of that automatically, as well as doing obvious things such as reducing the period of facts that you find you have forgotten.

I didn’t do anything about it until recently, when I was reading David Carlton’s posts about writing his own SuperMemo-like system to help him learn Japanese^[1][2][3][4]. I had been thinking for a while about using such a system to memorize my chess openings, and someone in a comment to his posts mentioned Mnemosyne, which is an open-source implementation of the same ideas, so I gave it a whirl.

Mnemosyne does handle images, but it’s a little painful to enter chess positions into it. I’ll put the technical details of how I do it in a postscript.  I dutifully started entering positions; my general technique is to play blitz games online, and for each game enter all the positions up to the point that I feel I should know to have a mastery of that opening (if they’re not already in the database).

One month later, I’m up to a library of 200 positions (and counting). The repetitions have gotten spaced out enough that I generally have 10 or fewer positions to review on any given day (of course, the whole thing only really works if you do daily reviews, but because of the system, it’s not much of a chore, and in fact I rather look forward to it).

Has it helped? I think it’s helped a lot. My former method of remembering openings was mostly to frantically cram every once in a while. Reviewing 10 positions every day, day in and day out, is much more productive. It’s also nice to know that a program is in control of the system. I trust that it is handing out positions to me when I should see them, and that my knowledge of my opening repertoire as a whole will be maintained at a decent level without me having to cram. In fact, one of the nicest results is just a large increase in my confidence. I don’t worry, “I should know this line, but I haven’t looked at it in a while, I should probably cram it again because I’ll feel stupid if I run into that person at the club who always plays it and I’ve forgotten what to do”; I trust that if the line is in the database, I have the appropriate chance of remembering it.

Learning and remembering stuff in Mnemosyne is so much fun that I actually picked up Esperanto again, which I had dabbled with years ago, just to have another thing to memorize. (I figured it would be more rewarding in a shorter time than if I relearned French or Latin — though maybe I’ll do one of them next…) That has also been working out great, and I feel like I’m retaining vocabulary much better than the last time I tried. Even better than the short-term benefit is the supposed long-term benefit that if I stop actively studying it but keep on doing daily reviews — and remember, the time needed to do that will go down if I’m not adding material — I’ll theoretically be able retain most of it instead of letting it all go down the drain once more. If that is really the case, it would be great. We’ll see.

[P.S. Here are the gory details of the system I use for storing chess positions, for the morbidly curious who are interested in following in my footsteps. I store my opening repertoire in Chess Position Trainer, a free application that nicely handles things like transpositions. When I want to store a position into Mnemosyne, I copy the position from CPT in FEN notation using Ctrl-C and paste it into a chess diagram generator (I use this one. Then I save off the resulting image into my .mnemosyne/images directory with a name like 0187.png (the number increases every time, of course). In Mnemosyne, I make a card with that image and the correct move, perhaps with additional notes that I should remember about that position. Importantly, I also enter an annotation like “[0187]” to the position in CPT, so I know that I’ve already added it to Mnemosyne and needn’t do so again in the future. It’s slightly tedious but not enough so to stop me from doing it.]

I am a sucker for modern takes on Victorian literature of the Charles Dickens / Wilkie Collins variety, Charles Palliser’s The Quincunx being for me the high point of said genre. The Meaning of Night got a bunch of very positive reviews and had a great first line (“After killing the red-haired man, I took myself off to Quinn’s for an oyster supper”) so off I went to read it.

And this is kind of a weird thing to say after spending most of a weekend feverishly plowing through it, but I was ultimately a bit disappointed. I try not to put spoilers of any kind in these reviews, so I don’t want to go into too much more detail, so I’ll just say that for me the ending of the book did not live up to the expectations set by the rest of it. Clearly most readers felt differently (it has 4.5 stars on Amazon), and I enjoyed most of the time I spent with it, so I don’t want to be too harsh, but I felt like there was a bit of a wasted opportunity here.

Dominion is a card game that came out last year. I heard it was the hot new game, got to play it this spring at the Game Developers Conference, immediately tried to buy it but found out that the first printing had sold out, finally bought it a month ago, and since then Liza and I have probably played an average of one game a night. So the short version is that it is awesome and I wholeheartedly recommend it, but I should probably go into a little more detail than that.

It is basically a deck-building collectible card game, only you build your decks in real time and the universe of cards to collect is randomly generated (25 varieties of cards come with the game but any given session only uses a random subset of 10). Like Settlers of Catan or Puerto Rico, it has the casual-gamer-friendly aspect of each player building up their little individual empire/deck/etc; even if your opponent beat you, you get a sense of accomplishment from your deck being cooler than it was at the start of the game. As with most CCGs, the base rules are incredibly simple and the cards add interesting exceptions on top of them.

I was originally a little concerned about the strategies becoming too obvious or the cards becoming boring, but we’re still enjoying it a ton and regularly having post-game discussions of how well our strategies worked and the various tough decisions we had to make during the game.

It plays great for 2 player but apparently plays well up to groups of 4 as well. And in a month or so an expansion set with 25 new card types will come out! Yes, we are well and truly hooked.

Highly recommended, especially for people who like more casual boardgames that they can think moderately hard about for 30 minutes as opposed to ones that you bust your brain over for two hours.

Continuing my chronological tour through Frank Zappa’s albums (I’m in no danger of stopping yet)… As I said last time, this group of albums is generally not regarded in very high esteem by Zappa fans. This incarnation of the band features the tandem vocals of Flo (who’s a guy, by the way) and Eddie, both formerly of the Turtles (the song you probably know is “Happy Together”). The music here takes a weird turn towards juvenile vaudeville, with leering and often offensive lyrics that are usually sexual and when they’re not still tend to be pretty gross.

And you know what, I like it a lot more than I thought I would. Part of it is reveling in the sheer musicianship of the band; the high points of the albums are live 20+ minute suites that even though they contain a fair amount of vamping still have an incredible amount of music that needs to be performed precisely, and listening to everyone nail their cues the whole way through is kind of exhilarating. They make it sound easy, and as someone who has had to memorize hours of complicated ensemble music, I know it’s not. It’s kind of a shame that the lyrics are often stupid, but after you hear them a few times, the words stop being so in the foreground. Yeah, that is about the most positive thing I can find to say about the lyrics.

Chunga’s Revenge (1970) is my least favorite album of this period, an unfocused grab-bag of leftovers from old sessions and new songs with Flo and Eddie.

Fillmore East — June 1971 (1971) is a live album featuring the infamous “groupie routine”, one of the aforementioned suites. The highlight for me, though, is the last track, “Tears Began To Fall”, a glorious soul song with, unbelievably, no trace of sarcasm (which maybe is why Zappa unfortunately never performed it again).

200 Motels (1971) is a double-album soundtrack to the movie featuring the band (and MCed, mystifyingly, by Theodore Bikel), and as you can tell from the clips on YouTube, the movie is a total mess and so is a lot of the music. I like big messes, but even I needed a few listens to get into it. Equal parts stupid rock and mostly-atonal orchestral pieces, with very little in between.

Just Another Band From L.A. (1972) is probably my favorite album of this era. Side one is occupied entirely by another suite, “Billy the Mountain”, which is a lot of fun and for once more silly than offensive. (That gets evened out by the second side, whose centerpiece song is a cringe-inducingly gleeful celebration of incestuous urges.)

Four albums of this is about all I can take, but “luckily” someone threw Zappa off the stage during the tour documented in Just Another Band From L.A. and he disbanded this group and spent the next six months in a wheelchair convalescing and composing. Stay tuned for Frank Zappa: The Big Band Years!

(Full disclosure: Matthew is a friend, and I reviewed an early version of the book. A couple of my suggested jokes even got into the final product.)

Every non-fiction book these days needs a colon and a subtitle, and the subtitle of Hungry Monkey is “A Food-Loving Father’s Quest to Raise an Adventurous Eater.” Amster-Burton is a food writer, and a few years ago he had a daughter, and this is the result. It’s a collection of funny anecdotes about his and Iris’s relationship with food, restrained advice, and recipes.

Taking those in turn: the funny anecdotes are really funny. This is because Amster-Burton is a really funny guy, and he and his wife, Laurie, are raising a funny girl. He’s a born storyteller, and there’s generally a chuckle every paragraph and a laugh every page. I’m sure that if I also had child-raising experiences to compare his with, I’d be laughing even more.

The advice, as I said, is restrained, and that’s really nice. There are tons of advice books out there about everything, and they all like to assure the reader that they are providing the one perfect solution to his problems. Amster-Burton’s advice generally consists of two types: 1) “Hey, this works for me, you might want to give it a shot,” and 2) “This other book that claims to know all the answers doesn’t really, so don’t take it too seriously.” These both strike me as laudably moderate.

We’ve only tried one of the recipes so far, but unsurprisingly it was great. The recipes are actually not generally particularly child-centric, because Amster-Burton’s main philosophy is (spoiler alert!) to pretty much cook what you were going to cook anyway (with some restrictions) and let your kid eat as much or as little of it as they want.

Anyway, I enjoyed it a lot, and I’d wholeheartedly recommend it, particularly to new parents. The first few chapters are available for free at the book site, http://hungrymonkeybook.com. OK, enough shilling. But I wouldn’t be shilling for it if it weren’t really good!