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Spaced Repetition: Beginner Guide/FAQ

I encounter the same misconceptions about spaced repetition over and over, so this article is an attempt to set some of them straight. The bottom line is that it's simpler than you think.

Even if you don't do spaced repetition, you probably should, so it's worth a read.

Full article (7–20 minute read): Spaced Repetition: Beginner Guide/FAQ

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Flashcard of the week

I have a huge book in my bookshelf called University Physics and it's awesome. I bought it for some class in university I don't recall, but I remember that it was very expensive for a student. As I leafed through it, I concluded that just the table of contents was worth the cost. It's great.

About a year ago I had a project to read a little of it and do some exercises every now and then, to brush up on things I'm not great at, such as anything that has to do with rotations, angular momentum, etc. I never got very far, but that's okay, because I did make flashcards! The flashcards mean that the next time I get the idea for the same project, I don't have to start over. Here's one.

A ballistic projectile separates into two parts mid-air, and the separation makes one part travel under the original trajectory and thus undershoot the target. Where does the other part go?

This seems obvious in hindsight but it wasn't at the time to me. I love these qualitative analyses because they do help build better, quicker intuition for physics problems than raw quantitative exercises do.

It must have overshot the target, because the centre of mass continued to travel along the original trajectory.

There's something vivid about the description of the centre of mass following the original trajectory that makes the geometry of the situation fall into place for me.

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