"want to remember everything you'll ever learn?"

I run across this very interesting article about SuperMemo, on lifehacker's blog. It's about a feature called super memo, that helps you 'not to forget'. It's proven to be very helpful in learning a language. So I started reading this wired article you can get here. I'm gonna put some interesting parts from this article, so you can have a brief view on what's it about...but I assure you it's worth reading!
"The problem of forgetting might not torment us so much if we could only convince ourselves that remembering isn't important. Perhaps the things we learn — words, dates, formulas, historical and biographical details — don't really matter. Facts can be looked up. That's what the Internet is for. When it comes to learning, what really matters is how things fit together. We master the stories, the schemas, the frameworks, the paradigms; we rehearse the lingo; we swim in the episteme.
The disadvantage of this comforting notion is that it's false.
"To this day,most people think about forgetting as decay, that memories are like footprints in the sand that gradually fade away. But that has been disproved by a lot of research. The memory appears to be gone because you can't recall it, but we can prove that it's still there. For instance, you can still recognize a 'forgotten' item in a group. Yes, without continued use, things become inaccessible. But they are not gone."
In other words, the harder you have to work to get the right answer, the more the answer is sealed in memory. Precisely those things that seem to signal we're learning well — easy performance on drills, fluency during a lesson, even the subjective feeling that we know something — are misleading when it comes to predicting whether we will remember it in the future. "The most motivated and innovative teachers, to the extent they take current performance as their guide, are going to do the wrong things," Robert Bjork says. "It's almost sinister."

The person responsible for making all this is Piotr Wozniak.
"Wozniak takes an almost physical pleasure in reason. He loves to discuss things with people, to get insight into their personalities, and to give them advice — especially in English. One of his most heartfelt wishes is that the world have one language and one currency so this could all be handled more efficiently. He's appalled that Poland is still not in the Eurozone. He's baffled that Americans do not use the metric system. For two years he kept a diary in Esperanto.
He doesn't own a phone. He ignores his email for months at a time. And though he holds a PhD and has published in academic journals, he never attends conferences or scientific meetings.
Instead, Wozniak has ridden SuperMemo into uncharted regions of self-experimentation. In 1999, he started making a detailed record of his hours of sleep, and now he's working to correlate that data with his daily performance on study repetitions. Psychologists have long believed there's a correlation between sleep and memory, but no mathematical law has been discovered. Wozniak has also invented a way to apply his learning system to his intake of unstructured information from books and articles, winnowing written material down to the type of discrete chunks that can be memorized, and then scheduling them for efficient learning. He selects a short section of what he's reading and copies it into the SuperMemo application, which predicts when he'll want to read it again so it sticks in his mind. He cuts and pastes completely unread material into the system, assigning it a priority. SuperMemo shuffles all his potential knowledge into a queue and presents it to him on a study screen when the time is right. Wozniak can look at a graph of what he's got lined up to learn and adjust the priority rankings if his goals change."

For the end a checklist Wozniak wrote on a question 'how to become a genius';
"You must clarify your goals, gain knowledge through spaced repetition, preserve health, work steadily, minimize stress, refuse interruption, and never resist sleep when tired. This should lead to radically improved intelligence and creativity. The only cost: turning your back on every convention of social life."

Brain

very interesting talk about our brain and what goes on in it... you should check it out!! you get a link for it here and it's been brought to my attention by Sasa

choices

I must say even with some amount of doubt in my decision of going to another college, I have to admit that I meet so many great individuals there that make it all worth awhile... ;) and even stuff like programing, operation system do make sense in a way...but don't think I like everything...some things are still a big WTF to me... but I'm getting there...;) I like the way some of our 'professors' teach... and tell us about stuff we wouldn't even know if they wouldn't be there to tell us... so, yes.. in a way I'm always wondering if my decisions are the right ones...but as I read once in this little book ''there are no wrong choices, every choice you make is the right one in that situation in that time, if there was another -better choice you would have chosen that one! '' something like that...(I'll write down the title of the book, when I remember it!! )
so, I guess when you look at life from this way...we spend most of it-if not all- learning stuff...so why not go and learn and gain knowledge...;) I still can't imagine myself in some office working from 7am - 3pm...and yes I'm getting older... by now I should be in one of those ''labels'' - mom, wife, ...but I guess I'm still to much of a child to be that person society expects me to be at this age...
ow, ya...I've added a new blog under the ones I visit...Luka - it belongs to this 'professor' that's trying to teach us about programing and lot more than that ;)

love visualDNA

click on the title or here
this is my way of looking at things...let's say I agree with it in most of the part...it's an interesting test about you...how you love... and how you feel about love... it does make sense...;)