[T-930] Weekly stats

Rine, sir,

Let me introduce a weekly stats table as well:

In conjunction with the daily:

Well that’s, I don’t know…

It’s not bad I’d say.

But won’t get me too far by the time a thousand days end.

I guess I’m keeping the oven warm, you know.

In cycling there’s the idea of “junk miles.” Have I spoken about this? I’m not sure. Let me search the archives.

Ha!

I did, from post 961, look:

Among cyclists, there’s this concept of junk miles. These are all the miles you ride that don’t contribute to your fitness. When you ride around without any plan or purpose, noodling around, neither slow enough for aerobic adaptations nor fast enough for anaerobic capacity gains, we call those junk miles.

Well, I think that most people, me included, accumulate a lot of mental junk miles throughout the day. That’s all the time we spend spinning trivial thoughts in your brain… looping over the same set of vague worries… thinking about money and bills or entertaining some other base instincts. There’s perhaps an opportunity to replace those mental junk miles with something more constructive. And if there are no other opportunities presently available, drilling tricky vocab may be a good choice, perhaps?

Well I also have some junk miles in immersion. My thoughts drift. So I manually trim down the clock records. For instance, when I clocked out today it measured an hour and fifteen minutes of immersion. But I arbitrarily removed 20 minutes to account for the few times I wandered off to Facebook.

If only I could become better at eliminating all the junk miles I accumulate throughout my days. Whether it’s while cycling, thinking, browsing the web. Days would be longer.

Oh, since I quoted post 961 it might be a good time to reflect on the experiment I ran, if you remember:

when I rode this Monday, I realized that this might be an excellent opportunity to do a mental subset review of a some items from my N5 deck that were giving me some trouble in the last few days: the ordinal numbers for days of the month.

You know: 1日、二日、三日，四日、五日… and so on all the way to 10 (after which they take on a predictable pattern). I kept messing them up and confusing them with each other.

So I thought if I can practice for long enough to nail them down while out riding, they will stop troubling me. And it would be a great use of time, relative to whistling the Indiana Jones theme on repeat.

The challenge I gave myself is to time my counting with my pedal strokes, which hover at a cadence of about 90 rpm.

I can tell you, for the first few kilometers while I tried to drill the numbers, my head was hurting, wanting to burst out of the vents of my helmet. My brain was, or so I imagined, burning more glucose than my quads. I was unable to count to three without stumbling and stuttering.

But I tried and tried and tried. It felt like I was clearing a neural pathway through a thicket, going back and forth, clearing more of the undergrowth with each pass.

After about an hour I mastered the first four digits. Then I practiced from the fourth to the eight. And then I tried chaining them all together.

And indeed, I can tell you, by the time I turned off from the main road for the last 10 km, the tricky ordinals became completely automatic and trivial. The next day, on my way back, I did a few more drills to verify, and indeed it was still easy.

Now, SuperMemo can take over the long-term maintenance of this newly cleared neural pathway, to prevent the creeping undergrowth of forgetfulness to take over again. I ran into a few of those items today and yesterday and I was able to answer them quickly, with no confusion or hesitation.

Whether this newly-acquired ease is a short-term effect or a permanent gain (as long as its augmented with SRS reviews) remains to be seen.

Well I can confirm now, about a month later, that I still have a solid grasp of those numbers.