I’m long overdue for a “back in Florida” blog post. Better late than never.
I’m finishing a data structures and algorithms course through Coursera, offered by Stanford professor Tim Roughgarden, and it’s been great. The theory questions are of a good difficulty level, and the programming problems are thought-provoking and fun. I’m doing them in Python 2 (technically iPython, with Emacs as my editor), though I should redo them in a lower-level language to make sure I’m not cheating when implementing some of these algorithms. I’d like to post a summary of my experiences and the highlights of the course when I’ve completed it in a few weeks. I’d also like to go through Cormen et al. and achieve total mastery, but that’s going to take some time.
I just registered for a second Coursera course: Software Engineering for Software as a Service (SaaS), offered by a couple of Cal professors. I don’t know too much about it, other than the fact that I’m going to be doing some Ruby on Rails, EC2, git, and Extreme Programming fueled assignments if I decide to stick with it. I’ve been wanting to play with Ruby for a while now, and web programming interests me, so I’ll probably give it a go.
I’m playing bass for about an hour every day and improving rapidly. I tore through the top beginner book before grabbing two sequels: Bass Fitness for technical expertise and Jazz Bass Improvisation to really learn my scales. I did my fair share of improvising when I was playing trombone, but it was always, well, improvisational. I didn’t know most of the many jazz scales, and even if I could hear the key changes and occasionally play interesting transitions and melodies, it was pretty haphazard. I’m hoping to do a better job with improv this time around. It would be fun to post some videos in the near future, but unaccompanied bass isn’t awesome until you’re really good, and I’ve got lightyears to go before I get there.
I’ve developed a nice morning routine that’s centered around meditation and Lumosity. My meditation practice is guided by this book, which is a great starting point if you’re interested in meditation but haven’t taken the plunge. I haven’t achieved any serious breakthroughs as a result of meditating, but I enjoy the quiet, and based on observations from my travels around the Web, science has many good things to say about a consistent meditation practice.
Lumosity bills itself as “the web’s #1 brain training program,” and though I haven’t tried any of their competitors, the games are fun. Here’s my brain profile after two weeks of play:
My SAT (1520: 780 Math and 740 Verbal, with an 800 on the then-separate writing section) and GRE (1500: 800 Math and 700 Verbal) scores were both in the 99th percentile, and a similar performance in Lumosity would be kinda fun. Less likely, though, as Lumosity members are almost surely brainier than your average high schooler. As far as the games go, I liked Word Bubbles Rising and Raindrops from the start, and it was awesome to watch my Penguin Pursuit improve – for a few days, I just couldn’t do it, and then *bam*, Level 20 mastery. Rotation Matrix makes me want to cry, but that’s life. (Lumosity offers a free trial, so you can check these out if you’re interested!)
20 July 2012 edit: I’m keeping a copy of my most up-to-date Lumosity profile here. After 17 days, I abandoned their suggested daily training sessions and instead started focusing on the games that seemed likely to improve my percentiles the most. I figure, intelligent game selection should be a part of measuring intelligence, no?
I’ve also been reading quite a bit. My knowledge of history is abysmal, so I’m working my way through this guy at the moment. (In the first chapter, an ancestor of mine got a shoutout: Thomas Hooker, founder of a little colony called Connecticut. Maybe you’ve heard of it?) Musashi is another title that I’ve been enjoying lately. I wish it was possible to search Amazon for all books with more than 100 reviews and a 5-star rating. In terms of finding great books, it wouldn’t catch all the classics, but there probably wouldn’t be many false positives in the results either. Advanced Search doesn’t give you that option, though.
And finally, I’ve been trying to drop some bulky muscle mass in favor of a leaner, more functional physique. Weightlifting has mostly been put on hold in favor of swimming, yoga, and some MovNat-inspired circuits I’ve been doing in the yard. Is it just me, or does the MovNat Thailand workshop sound like the coolest thing in the world?
Hoxie you are sooooooooooo smart! I wonder if I would even know where to begin with these games.
Hi Hoxie,
Do you mind telling me what games you selected or the criteria with which you selected them? I’ve been doing the daily training for a 2 months but I’d love to make a leap in my gains.
Love your posts by the way.
–Matt
@Lindsey, you make me laugh
@Matt, it was mostly trial and error that I used to select games. Some brief thoughts on each category:
Speed: At one point, the interface told me that my top 3 Speed games would determine my Speed BPI, so I basically wrote off Rotation Matrix and focused on the three remaining ones. I’m not a rockstar at either Speed Match or Spatial Speed Match, but my Penguin Pursuit seems to be way up there. I made it to Level 25 the other day, and it seems pretty impossible to make it much further, given the speed limitations on your own penguin.
Problem Solving: I’ve only ever played Raindrops and Chalkboard Challenge. Raindrops is frustrating because it gets to the point where the screen totally fills up too quickly. I think the highest score I ever got on Raindrops was about the second time I ever played it, too. Chalkboard Challenge is fun, but my performance variability is high. It’s a tough trade-off between actually doing the calculations in my head vs. quickly choosing one based on which looks bigger. I should practice Chalkboard Challenge more.
Flexibility: For a while, it was mainly Word Bubbles Rising and Word Bubbles that I played. I have a very decent vocabulary, and years of crossword puzzles mean that I’m pretty good at coming up with words based on stems. After earning decent scores on those, I started playing Brain Shift and Color Match. The latter is pretty easy: just focus on the left word and let the right word blur so that you can’t read it but can still make out the color, then fly accordingly. Brain Shift took a while to get into, but eventually I got to the point where some characters looked ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ in the top and bottom windows. Could be better. Brain Shift Overdrive is my next challenge. Oh, and I think I maxed out Route to Sprout… I love puzzles like that.
Attention: Currently my weakest category by far. I’ve played most of them at this point, and I seem to be less than awesome at the quick-glance-numbers games (Observation Tower, Space Junk, Top Chimp). I instead focused on the other ones, basically maxed out Playing Koi and doing very well on Lost in Migration, probably my favorite. Eagle Eye is interesting… I have two computer setups, one with a beautiful, high-res 24″ monitor and one with a crappy, low-res 23″ monitor, and I always do insanely better on Eagle Eye when playing on the low-res monitor. Less space for everything to spread out, I suppose.
Memory: Got a perfect on Memory Matrix and haven’t played it since. Took a while to get there, and at the end, it was all about the patterns. Maxed out Familiar Faces, which got pretty ridiculous towards the end. The new one, Pinball Recall, is kinda cool, but I haven’t spent much time with it. Maxed out Monster Garden. Did very well on Moneycomb.
And then there are the n-back games (Memory Lane, Face Memory Workout, Rhyme Workout, Memory Match, Memory Match Overload). N-back games are loved by the hardcore brain trainers because (based on my totally limited understanding of this subject) because, if any kind of game play is going to really change your inherent intelligence, it’s the n-back. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N-back is a place to start.) I kinda avoided these at first and still managed to get my Memory BPI up into the 98-99 percentile, but I finally ventured in this morning with Rhyme Workout. I got up to Workout 6, the first to include 3-backs, and then got scared. But even a basically perfect, fast Workout 5 was enough to send my game BPI and Memory BPI through the roof. It’s currently my highest BPI.
That was a bit longer than I thought it would be, but I hope this helps!
You’re doing a very good job of maximizing your final score in Lumosity… but that’s not the purpose of the site.
You’re clearly a very smart person! But you seem to only focus on doing the things that you already do well, so that you can get the highest score, after which I assume you moved on from the site to some other challenge.
But did you stop to go back and improve in the areas where you were weak, or was the goal only to show off your strengths to yourself? I liked that in this post, you recognized and addressed a need to improve your knowledge of history. I’m curious, though, as to whether you ever went back to tackle Rotation Matrix – a game that did not come easily to you naturally?
I appreciate your comment, Kelly. I’m not sure that the site has a single purpose, though, as you claim. And even if it did, I thought I approached training in a fairly balanced way: I play games from all of the major categories every time I sit down to play, even if it’s much easier for me to improve in some categories than others. Besides, is it really wrong to prefer certain mental skills over others? If I were an athlete, I’d want to focus exceptionally hard on peripheral vision and mental flexibility. As somebody who does knowledge work, other skills are more useful to me, and in a world where we don’t have time for everything, focusing on the important stuff is key. Good luck with your training!