Monday Link Salad

I rediscovered Khan Academy this week – I’ve had an account there for a few years but had faded out on using it. It does gamified maths tuition and the current way the site is set up has just the right hooks to keep me doing “just another set of questions” for hours. I think I lost 4 hours of Thursday to doing maths 🙂 Before I think you had to start with basic arithmetic and work your way up to the more complex stuff, and that got boring fairly fast. But now there’s a mode where it picks 6 random things to ask a question on, so you get a variety every time ranging from the basics through to things I’m not sure I ever learnt. You can always skip a question with “I haven’t learnt this yet” or get hints if you almost know what you’re doing but just can’t quite remember (or can’t figure out why you got it wrong). I think there’s also some degree of targetting the randomness so there’s a spread between stuff that’s doable and stuff that’s a bit of a stretch (as far as it can tell from your previous answers).

TV set to record this week:

  • The Story of Women and Art – 3 part series about female artists from the Renaissance onwards.
  • The Search for Life: The Drake Equation – one-off programme about the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence. Actually going to record it next week, I think the showing next Sunday has sign language interpretation which I find distracting.