Sans Forgetica

by Volker Weber

Sans Forgetica is a downloadable font that is scientifically designed to help you remember your study notes.

Bullshit detection meter looks nervous. Me thinks handwritten notes work better. My handwriting works like encryption. I can read it, sometimes.

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RMIT Study Note.jpeg

Comments

The font was developed using social science’s standard lab rat: the undergrad student.
This opens it to two flaws:
- age bias. Reading habits change with age
- context. A student’s core task is text ingestion, so they are “pre-trained”

And yep, writing down beats reading only by a magnitude.

Stephan H. Wissel, 2018-10-06

Things that make you hmmm...

Ingo Seifert, 2018-10-06

I don't believe for a moment that making something harder to read is likely to make it easier to retain, at least not at scale. On a single paragraph, it would likely make you read more closely and absorb more. For five pages, I'd skip it and go for a walk, thus retaining nothing.

Ben Langhinrichs, 2018-10-06

I agree on skipping 5 pages continuous text, but as the font was developed for study notes, continuous text shouldn't be the use case.

Nina Wittich, 2018-10-06

My point is that it may work, but it is unlikely to be better than simply taking handwritten study notes.

Volker Weber, 2018-10-06

I agree on that. I am a big fan of handwritten notes or of giving someone the task to write a sentence ten times by hand.
But in my class some of my fellow students couldn't follow the class and taking notes simultaneously. They worked with my notes. These notes transferred to that font would have worked better for them then my handwriting (even as my handwriting was and is easy to read).

Nina Wittich, 2018-10-06

Understood. The process of writing them down makes the difference.

Volker Weber, 2018-10-06

I think that, too.

Nina Wittich, 2018-10-06

Btw... Do you think there is a difference between writing on paper and writing on a display?

Nina Wittich, 2018-10-06

Writing on paper is easier and less distracting. However, I write a lot on Surface and like the fact that I can flip Surface Pen to erase.

Volker Weber, 2018-10-06

Unlguailbch!

See: "https://www.heise.de/tp/features/Unlguailbch-3431355.html"

Martin Funk, 2018-10-07

Handwritten notes are king to learn or remember stuff.

At our university had been a course you had to attend first: How to learn! Silly title for us heroes of an Abitur we just had gotten, but therefore mandatory

They had a simple principle:
#1 you have to make notes during each lecture
#2 before the end of a semester or with the final lecture you had to condense the stuff on A5 sized and light colured cardboxes - about 12 max. or 24 pages
#3 They called each page a picture (to remember)
#4 A picture to remember needs colour, and a brain loves colors in pictures too as part of a structure like lists. Green for acronyms, blue for definitions
#5 colors and lists will make each page unique + remarkable
#6 each lecture got his own coloured cardbox like taxes light blue, law light green to have an easier access to the knowledge in that 1 week of learning between final lectures and first examin

A lecture week meant 2 lectures a day from 9 to 5 and in some cases even on saturday for the "VIP Profs" which meant, they lead a company or had been the finance minister of an arabic oil state.

Before this mandatory lecture about how a brain works and what it preferrs I had made an Abitur and thought what they wanna tell me in this 4 hours session.

Afterwards I always thought why they didn't teach me that in school and how much better I would have performed in my matura / Abitur with an even lesser effort.


13 years of missed opportunities but no question: if Germany needs for each of its 16 countries its own school minister they have simply too much to do to stay in sync or fight each other where a "how to learn" lecture is far too basic to take care for. 4 tiny hours in a 12 or 13 year long schooling cycle was not possible.

But I'm pretty sure that it would be pretty easy to increase the overall efficiency of these ministers by simply erasing them and mots all of their staff too. Nothing would happen cause there will be still a federal minister in Berlin. The part of how many teachers in math are needed in bavaria and how much lessons these teachers missed to give - the common key figures in political debates - can be delivered from that federal minister and his department for stats. The local minister of finance has the financial governance less budget less teacher more missed lectures...

The real shame is that they still do not make the big points for all kids across the republic. School education has been better in the south for so many decades - and I'm from the north who had encountered the different level of education at day 1 of applying and studying.

Anyway: I still prefer handwritten notes and sketches to really understand something (new) while using digital notes heavily on my Samsung Note for daily "don't forget lists" and "ad hoc stuff" ... In many cases I take pictures of my paper notes, I most likely use cards out of cardbox from DIN A5 , A6, A7 so that they stay in shape longer and in some cases I save all the steps of evolution to have a documentary for the records.

John Goerken, 2018-10-07

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I explain difficult concepts in simple ways. For free, and for money. Clue procurement and bullshit detection.

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