"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge."

        — Stephen Hawking, English cosmologist and physicist

Well, it might be April but we got our British snow, finally!

Update: I should add that only two days prior I was getting rather warm on my commuting journeys, and began to seriously entertain the idea of bringing out the shorts and summer jersey.

Scott Young's e-book

Scott Young is blogger that churns out some pretty high quality articles for his blog on an almost daily basis, and also seems to be gradually building a virtual bookshelf of e-book publications. He sort of strikes me as a younger version of Tim Ferriss.

I recently read an e-book by Scott Young on Holistic Learning. I'm not entirely sure what the term means to you, but Scott's treatment put emphasis on creating a mental model for whatever you're learning, in order to give your mind somewhere to hang ideas and, most importantly, link them together into a tight web of understanding.

I can't say it was a very illuminating read -- I found myself nodding along and thinking that this was pretty much describing my existing approach to leaning. What was illuminating, however, was the implication that people don't all learn like this already!

Is there any alternative?

The only mechanism for learning I can think of is the one described in Scott's book: building constructs out of ideas, linking different ideas, and forming a mental model that encompasses your understanding and allows you to reason about the subject area. This in turn allows you to make deductions of facts that you were not previously aware of.

I can imagine that if you try to learn a subject by rote memorisation alone you won't get very far at all. It's kind of like memorising that 1+1=2 and 1+3=4 -- it may allow you to answer those exact questions correctly, but it won't let you reason about the result of 3+6 unless you've learnt the meaning of addition. Sooner or later you'll reach a ceiling in what you can do with memorisation alone. Depending on how poorly designed tests are, you or your teacher may not even realise that you're not really learning about the subject area at all, but merely memorising individual facts. I suppose that's a reason that a lot of rote learning could get through early stages of education. Or it could also be down to poor teaching practices, if rote learning is being directly advocated.

My brush with a rote learner

I'm reminded of an incident in my first-year electronics class at University: We were scheduled to have a mid-term test imminently, and I was trying to explain some basic circuit analysis concepts to one of my classmates. She kept asking overly-specific questions like "if the question says blah, then the answer is blah", and I began to get increasingly frustrated as this continued. I was trying to explain that you need to learn the concepts, and understand the concepts, and then you'd know when to apply them to answer this question and any variants. All she wanted was a quick answer: "if the question says this, then the answer is this plus that divided by this". She seemed completely unwilling to even entertain the idea of learning a concept, which could then be applied to answer the question -- she was searching for a direct link between the question and answer.

I can see now that we had an impedance mismatch (pardon the pun): She was trying to learn by rote memorisation of specific concrete scenarios. (i.e. 1+1=2; 2+2=4.) Meanwhile, I was trying to communicate to her the mental model that could be used to reason about passive DC circuits. ("The + symbol represents the concept of addition, which can be applied as follows...") This continued until we both gave up in frustration, no-doubt each thinking that the other was an idiot.

Back to Scott Young

The e-book I read is entitled Holistic Learning, and at 27 pages it's a pretty quick read. It is available as a free PDF download from Scott's website and it actually started off as a controversial article, How to Ace Your Finals Without Studying, followed up by another article, Studying and Holistic Learning. Since then it's grown up into a more complete book of over 200 pages, so if you want something a little more in-depth you can read Learn More, Study Less.

Somehow I must have missed this popular science initiative from Rob Bryanton. It's been around since at least 2006, backed by a book, videos, website, blog, video blog, interactive media chat-room, and even cheesy songs written and performed by Rob.

Here's an introductory video that walks through imagining ten dimensions:

This animation illustrates the concepts presented in chapter one of the book "Imagining the Tenth Dimension" by Rob Bryanton.

One day, Mr P and Mr Q were having a test on logic by Professor White.

On the table in front of them there were 16 cards and both of them knew what they were:

Hearts: A, Q, 4
Spades: J, 8, 4, 2, 7, 3
Clubs: K, Q, 5, 4, 6
Diamonds: A, 5

Then all the 16 cards were turned upside down and reshuffled.

Professor White picked a card randomly and told Mr P the number of the card had and told Mr Q the suit of the card.

Professor White then asked if they could find out what the card was.

Mr P said, "No I can't."
When Mr Q said, "I knew you couldn't."
Having heard this, Mr P said, "ah, now I know."
Then Mr Q said, "oh, so do I now."

Can you tell what card it was by logical deduction?

Here's a sight I bet would freak you out if you weren't expecting it!

(Luckily I was expecting it.)

Shouldn't this be classed as child abuse, and therefore be illegal?

Update: Here's a clarifying article on religion as a form of Child Abuse.

Weird Al's White & Nerdy music video:

I can't wait to hear this song played out in a nightclub.

If you want to sing along, the lyrics are available here (and elsewhere).

(Discovered via the Freakonomics Blog.)

The ring was custom made at Ruberg Jewellery Butik, in Islington.