Pictured: Probably not saving money

Monetary issues

• 1 Kindle costs $139 dollars plus shipping. Lets round this to 140 for simplicity’s sake.
• Kindle books cost around 10 dollars (Assuming you buy them from amazon), plus you can virtually any classic for free
• Your average paperback book goes for around 15 to 20 dollars, your average hardcover going for around 25 – 30 dollars

So it follows that if you only buy paperbacks that each purchase saves around 5 dollars.
Simple math would tell you that in order for the Kindle to break even you would have to read 28 books. It doesn’t seem like much, but this gets a bit complicated when you factor in that the cost of 28 paperback books (or a kindle with 28 books) is $420. However, if you read that many books it may be profitable for you to get a hold of a kindle.

You can, however get a huge number of classics for free. This is easily accomplished due to the fact that the kindle actually supports .txt files! And thanks to the existence of Project Gutenberg, Classics in .txt format are not difficult to come by.
Take, for example, Stoker’s Dracula. Because Dracula’s copyright has expired, Gutenberg can distribute a digitized version of it. Upon searching their website, I found that they not only had a .txt version, but a kindle ebook as well!
However certain books are not available in Gutenberg’s website. As an alternative, their branch located in Australia has many books that their US branch does not (e.g. Animal Farm, The Great Gatsby, 1984, etc.)

There’s no real way to get around the fact that the Kindle is pretty useless unless you read quite a bit. However, it can be useful and convenient for those who read a great deal.

I was introduced to Anki through All Japanese All The Time, which anyone interested in foreign language should check out. In his blog, Kazhumoto uses a number of ideas circulating in the language community. A key concept he details is the reaching of 10,000 sentences in spaced repetition. This, coupled with the spending of 10,000 hours of “doing stuff” in the target language should provide a reasonable depth in the language.

This is where manga comes in.

Manga, for those who do not know, is the Japanese form of comic books, which has a reasonably large following around the world. It goes hand in hand with anime, light novels, and visual novel games, and there is a sizable part of the world who consume translated forms of these.

It is not uncommon for fans of these mediums to take it upon themselves to translate manga, often scanning and replacing the Japanese text with their own, ergo “scanlations.”

While usually in English, there exists a sizable community for translations into other languages, for example Spanish. One of my favorite places to find manga in Spanish is animextremist (which, as a warning, is completely in Spanish.)

In addition to be a lot of fun to read, these translated comic books are an absolute gold mine for sentences to place in an SRS. If you know enough of a language to read basic phrases, its an incredibly great way to learn. Its like having a textbook that teaches you common speech and phrases, is fun to read, and learns at a pace optimal for you.

My personal strategy for using manga to learn languages is to simply read until I come across a phrase I am unfamiliar with. When I find one, I write it in a notebook, along with a translation (I like doing this in Cornell format so that I can use them as quick flashcards in case my laptop battery dies or my hard drive corrupts.) When I reach the end of a chapter (usually around 16 or so pages), I enter the phrases into Anki and learn from there.

If you can find a group that translates manga into another language, it can be an easy and amusing way to inch closer to fluency, and aside that a fun way to spend a few minutes.

I developed this academic study plan over the course of three months in 2010, intending it to be used for myself and a friend. I developed this program by combining what I knew about learning foreign languages, productivity, and time management. Using this system, I raised my grade-point average from 4.1 to 4.3 in just a few months.

The way that this system works is by having multiple units which co-exist optimally, acting like a sort of butterfly net or mosquito net for information. If there is a small hole in the net, the net does not unravel due to the connections between the units. Hence, M-net.

The main ideas behind this system is as follows.

• Balancing understanding with memorization
• Using updated and more efficient tools and methods than is the current standard
• Using an efficient system that “auto-optimizes” for each individual
• Retaining academic knowledge in the long-term for exams, instead of re-learning it
• Organization and forward planning
• Using a system that naturally progress to a tool to review for midterms or finals
• Using a system that allows much more free time than one based on learning by rote

Ideally, this system takes around 25 minutes per day, although oftentimes the system takes up even less time than that.

The first and most effective unit in this system is a spaced repetition flashcard system. I can’t say I have much experience on which is best, but I’ve used anki for quite a long time.

Anki is a flashcard program which puts paper flashcards to shame. Instead of using a traditional learn-by-rote flashcard system to commit to short term memory for tests, it spaces each card out in order to commit the majority of the information to long term memory. This is incredibly invaluable.

The best part about this is that it spaces out the information in the most optimal way for you, the user, to learn. It doesn’t simply space everything until the end of time, assuming you will remember in a perfect manner. It lets you rank your success on each card, reviewing more difficult material before the easier material. This ensures that you will not waste any time learning.

Using this for school is relatively simple. You’ll want to enter your notes in as questions (which I will elaborate on further), enter your homework questions and enter your test questions into the subject deck. It can get a bit tedious to enter in everything, but even just a few a week becomes an incredible amount upon midterms and finals. Try thinking of 1000 questions on a given topic in a few days before the test, and then try thinking of 10 questions a day.

Most students should be familiar with the feeling of the day before a big test. Most students spend the days before a test essentially re-learning everything they need. This is an enormous waste of time. Using this system removes that phase altogether, thus turning your time spent studying actually studying instead of relearning.

Anki, however, requires a few minutes each day. Many people simply don’t have the drive to do something every single day. This is the single greatest roadblock in terms of studying. It is important to form a habit of reviewing these cards each day. Once a habit is formed, it greatly reduces the stress of pre-test cramming and makes studying almost eerily addicting.

The next object in this system is the use of mindmaps. Mindmaps are an extremely valuable tool for presenting a large amount of information in a visual format. These are excellent for summing up a chapter to study for a test, or taking general notes during “review days”. They are also very useful for taking notes using a teacher who doesn’t teach in a linear order (i.e. the teacher everyone had in high-school that nobody could understand.)



Its important that these not be taken formally. The purpose of mindmaps is that they create visual connections, causing the one who takes them to see the general shape of the object. Doodling is not only allowed, but beneficial, so long as you can create visual connections between pictures and ideas.

In addition to mindmaps and flashcards, another important unit in this system is Cornell note-taking. Generally, you divide the page into four sections – The header, the cue column, the notes and the summary. The idea is that you create a sort of flashcards in your notes, which make them easy to place into Anki. At the end of each class, you write about a paragraph summarizing the notes. This system is more difficult to explain than to use, and to learn how it is simply best to look at an example or two.

Finally, the last step is to create a summary sheet. In order to do this, you take the summaries from all of the Cornell notes and place them into one document, shrinking the font size and abbreviating until everything can fit on one page. Its is helpful to keep explanations to the maximum and examples to the minimum. This helps to read the entire course at a quick glance, as well as review the course quickly before finals or midterms.

So in summary, the system is entirely connected in order to commit as much as possible to memory and to simplify the study process. Spaced Repetition is an effective way to memorize the necessary information, Cornell Notes simplify the process of turning notes into flashcards, The summary sheet is made easier by the summary section of the Cornell system, and mindmaps present everything in a unit in a powerful and visually impacting way. The system is better at keeping your mind focused than that last cup of coffee.

These are the results of a lifestyle experiment. I tried to learn a new skill each week for forty weeks. Most people, when they learn a skill, try to perfect it far beyond everyone else, becoming among the best in their certain area. While that’s not in any way a bad thing, I wanted to know what it was like to generalize a lot of skills, learning enough to be more skilled than the average person, but not nearly an expert, in a large amount of skills. Thus, I started an experiment. Learn 40 skills in 40 weeks, for each skill not becoming an expert, and only learning in free moments in the course of a week.

This plan makes use of many of the Principles of Practical Education

• Learning a skill quickly requires the learning of the essential parts (Principle 1)
• Learning a skill in a limited timeframe makes it difficult to become bored. (Principle 2)
• Learning a skill instead of advancing another.  (principle 3)
• I doubt I can learn all 40, but trying to maximize the amount gained uses principle 4
• I don’t intend to take lessons on any of this, so it’s mostly self-taught (Principle 5)
• Keep yourself open to possibilities (Principle 6)
• I will be learning primarily alone or in a small group if the need arises (principle 7)
• Concentration is a must (Principle 8 )

The last two principles deal with others who would like to learn skills such as I did. Most lecture-style classes teach in that “Expertise” mindset. This isn’t a bad thing, however it is not effective with general learning of a large amount of skills, such as what I’ve done below. I’m sure I did not learn each skill in the most effective way, but I learned them. If I could go back, I’m sure I could’ve learned in a more effective way. This is why Practical Education is a Community effort.

Week 1 – Speed Reading

This was very easy. Almost Depressingly so. I was expecting a very high-effort high-reward thing that would be very difficult to reproduce by others. I did this in around 30 minutes and raised my reading speed from 462 Wpm to 924 WPM. Thanks to Tim Ferris for the Method I used. Success

Week 2 – Photoshop

This was also surprisingly easy, but much more difficult than Speed Reading. Assorted youtube tutorials taught me to extract objects, Whiten teeth, change hair, eye or skin color, and add or lose weight. Not a whole lot, but pretty good for a week. Success

Week 3 – Art

I really tried, but the farthest I ended up getting is copydrawing. Sure, its better than tracing, but it’s not drawing, so I’m saying this one is a failure

Week 4 – Astronomy

Refreshed my knowledge of the constellations. I also read “Pale Blue Dot”. Moderate Success.

Week 5 – Philosophy

I got a book on this and tried to read it, but it really wasn’t as interesting as I thought it would be. Read about the life of Descartes. Didn’t get much further than that. Mild failure.

Week 6 – Magic Tricks

Learned a few basic Magic tricks. Nothing spectacular. Success.

Week 7 – Medical Diagnosis

Learned the top ten most common diseases and their symptoms and somewhere around 25 mental disorders. Success.

Week 8 – C++ programming

I didn’t seem to have enough time to start this, but I am taking a class on Visual Basic, so this goes On Hold.

Week 9 – Investing

Read through part of “The Intelligent Investor”. Moderate Success

Week 10 – Paper Airplanes & Origami

Learned to make a few very interesting paper Airplane and Origami designs. Most of the planes worked rather well.

Jet fighter, Stunt Plane, Reeve’s Floater, Some random plane, Classic Glider (Not the classic dart), Backwards plane, Boxoid, Paper Boomerang

Definite Success

Week 10 Summary -

10 Weeks into starting this journey, I have had 7 Successes, two failures and put one skill on hold. The skill I’ve gotten the best in at this point is Photoshop. Surprisingly, Speed Reading isn’t as useful as I thought it’d be, but nevertheless I’ve used it in quite a few situations.

At this rate at the end of the 40 weeks I’ll have aquired 30 skills. Not bad, but I want to see if I can get even more than that overall.

I’m sure I’ll end up writing posts about a few of these as well, considering they’re ease and entertainment value.

Week 11 – Music Remixing

I was really looking forward to this week, but my hard drive that I got a copy of FL studio on crashed and I lost it. I did, however, make a few mashups using Audacity. One came out nicely, the other came out decently. It wasn’t what I was going for, and I hope to revisit this someday, but it would qualify as a Relative Success.

Week 12 – Spreadsheets and Excel

I really thought this was going to be much more difficult than it turned out to be. I got the hang of the =SUM, =AVERAGE, =MAX, =MIN, and =IF functions, as well as the general layout, graphing, etc. Success.

Week 13 – Law

Researched the requirements and process for proving someone liable or guilty for a number of civil and criminal offenses. Success.

Week 14 – Cooking

I simply cannot cook. Failure

Week 15 – Photography

Learned about the rule of thirds, ISO settings and Macro Mode. Working on a photography project at the moment. Success

Week 16 – First Aid

Learned how to properly treat Bleeding, Choking, Shock and Broken Bones. Success

Week 17 – Sushi and Bento Crafting

Happy new year. I didn’t have a whole lot of time to do this, given the festivities, but I did extensive research into the recipe/preparation and if given the ingredients I’m almost 100% certain I could do this successfully Moderate success

Week 18 – Trebuchets

I learned how they worked, but I couldn’t get a hold of a kit to make one. I was disappointed, I was looking forward to this. Moderate Failure

Week 19 – Survival

Learned how to make a fire, how to make a shelter, how to make a signal fire, survival fishing, and so on. Success

Week 20 – Romhacking

Learned about and how to use Lunar Magic, which is a Super Mario World level editor. Success

Week 20 Summary

Very successful period of 10 weeks, with 8 successes and only two failures. So far, I’ve learned 15 skills, failed 4 skills, and put one on hold. Currently, at the rate I am going, I will have learned 33 out of 40 skills. While I am learning a lot every day, I am also having a lot of fun learning all of these new skills.

Week 21 – Game Mapping and Level Design

I made a few levels in Lunar Magic, which were not very good but were interesting to make and play through. Success

Week 22 – Martial Arts

Read through a book on Akido, which was very interesting! It was something that seemed very useful to know. The concept of the “fence” was especially interesting. Success

Week 23 – Juggling

I can now juggle two balls in one hand. I can now be considered “average”.  Success

Week 24 – Neuro Linguistic Programming

Learned how to “Cure a phobia”. It had an air of psuedoscience about it, but it might come in handy one day. Relative Success.

Week 25 – Robotics

Absolute failure. I couldn’t get a hold of a kit, and I seriously doubt Lego MINDSTORMS counts as robotics. Failure.

Week 26 – Public Speaking

I couldn’t make heads or tails of this. Absolute Failure

Week 27 – Cup Stacking

Got the basic cycle down to about 25 seconds. Its a really terrible speed, but I learned how it works, and as such this one is a Moderate Success

Week 28 – Fighting Game Strategy

Did a bit of reading into the competitive scene of Super Smash Brothers. The relative lack of depth in Brawl meant that I was able to get pretty good at it relatively quickly, learning skills like Mortar Sliding as Snake. Melee, however, was a completely different game.  The amount of depth and skill required for it was surprising, and it took a far longer period of time to learn than Brawl did. I did, however, manage to learn some of the crucial skills such as wavedashing and L-canceling, in addition to character-specific skills and approaches. I learned the approaches and strategies of Peach, the basics and chaingrabs of Sheik, certain strategies of Ganondorf, and basic Marth combos such as the Ken combo. Not competitive level by a longshot, but enough at least to beat most people in a friendly match. Success

Week 29 – Electronics and Modding

As a long time lurker of the Benheck forums, I was looking forward to this week almost more than any other. Sadly, a financial issue meant I was not able to get a hold of any components, systems, batteries, or controllers. Mod-wise, I have experience with homebrew and software modifications, however that was not my goal for this week, and thus this is a Failure.

Week 30 – First Person Shooter General Strategy

I showed no improvement in anything. It was a rather silly goal, but a Failure nonetheless

Week 30 Summary

I just managed to pass this week, with six successes and four failures. At this point, I’ve learned 21 skills, failed 8, and put one on hold. I’m learning more every day and have already passed a 50% success rate.

Week 31 – Bar Tricks

Learned a variety of pen tricks as well as a small amount of cutlery magic. Thanks again to Tim Ferris. Success.

Week 32 – American Sign Language Alphabet

I now have the ability to fingerspell. Success

Week 33 – Knot tying

Learned how to tie a Bowline and a Trucker’s Hitch. Success

Week 34 – Lock Picking and Other Assorted Espionage Skills

Learned how to create a padlock shim out of a soda can. Hardly “Espionage”, and not at all effecient, but plausible. Moderate Success

Week 35 – NATO alphabet

Learned A-Z of the NATO alphabet. Success

Week 36 – MUGEN Development

Learned to import stages, characters and menus. It seemed a lot more complicated than it had to be. Success

Week 37 – Linux Development

Considering I wrote the list 37 weeks ago, I don’t really remember what I was supposed to DO for this week.  Java Compilers? Failure

Week 38 – Discerning Lies and Bias

Learned about Microexpressions, Distancing Language, and (My personal favorite from this week) “Eye movement”. Success.

Week 39 – Fung Shui

I had always thought that this was an interior design concept started in china (as in Reds go South, Blues go North, etc.)

It turns out its more like a spiritual concept. Who knew? Success.

Apparently there's more to it than this.

Week 40 – Computer Science (Networking, Hexidecimal, etc)

I didn’t forsee that the programming class I enrolled in was, in fact, a “Computer Science with Visual Basic” course. However, I learned what I wanted to learn, so I’d define this as a Success.

Final Summary and Results

After 40 weeks with admittedly very little effort invested in this experiment, I’ve become acquainted with 30 skills, failed 9 and placed one on hold due to other circumstances. Depending on how you view the “held” skill, my success rate was a comfortable 75% – 77%, very characteristic of the first principle of Practical Education.

Simply the action of wanting to learn skills or facts seemed to have manifested itself in a simple enough way, and as a result of this project I’ve gained valuable skills that I will no doubt continue to utilize.

I attended no private classes, spent no money, and hired no teacher. I simply went out and found information. It should not be difficult for others to replicate this experiment with similar results, as the goal is not mastery but familiarization with basics. If anything this was a jumping off point for mastering a wide number of the skills I am now familiar with.

And as such, overall, the 40 skills in 40 weeks experiment was a surefire Success

I like writing. But what’s really great about writing is making the setting. Sure, it sounds completely boring when you say it like they teach you in school. Setting – its like a word with no life, no influence, no creativity. Its one letter away from “sitting”, a form of idleness. I do not believe that this word does any justice to what it describes. I personally find all writing completely and utterly inferior in comparison to this phase, simply because of the amount of life involved, for lack of a better word.

What happens when you make a “setting”?

You can imagine entire worlds, worlds where anything can happen, where people do anything you want them to. You can breathe life into a character, you can give them friends, enemies. You can take life away. You can create friendship, companionship, loyalty. You can discover love. Don’t believe in love? You can invent it. It is the ultimate form of suspension of disbelief. Its like dreaming, only with full forced control. You can carve mountains, build cities, invent incredible machinery. You can discover that which no one else has found before. You can weave intricate character personalities. Give them talent. Give them likes, dislikes, favorite foods, inside jokes. Give them flaws. Give them imperfections that are so incredibly detailed that they will never be known by anyone else but themselves and you.

With a pen. With a notebook. With a laptop. With the margins on your history notes. You can feel power unlike anything else in the world. You can escape to a world that you have full control over. You can create your ideal world. You can create an imperfect world, but one that can capture the hearts and minds of yourself and others. You can recreate memories. You can pull at heartstrings. You can make the strongest cry, you can make the coldest blush, and you can give the ones in the most pain a way to smile.

This is what writing is. Writing is not a persuasive essay. Writing is not your college application. Writing is not a three-pronged thesis. Writing is the creation of a world.

And this world belongs to you.

Wish upon a shooting star

Wish upon a certain time

Make a thousand paper cranes

Whisk away an eyelash

Undress a daisy

Burn a letter

Say a prayer

Cast a Spell

Believe in Love

Be naïve, if just for a moment

Make a wish. Make a hundred.

Ubuntu is the most popular distribution of Linux, boasting amazing support, around 8 million users and a mostly GUI interface. I installed it on a discarded and dying windows 2000 laptop and absolutely loved it. It ran fast on old hardware, had a lot of customizability (Which was a must considering that default theme), and was easily the best way for me to learn how to use Linux.

Despite its positives, there were a few negative sides to it. First of all, boot time was very slow. That combined with my slow-moving laptop made boot time almost painfully slow. It made up for this in actual running speed, but it was annoying nonetheless. Also, Wireless divices with windows drivers need to be set up with NDISwrapper, which is a huge pain, especially if you don’t have the original driver CD.

Overall, Ubuntu is a very strong Linux distribution thats great for beginners and veterans alike. I wholeheartedly reccommend it.  9/10.

Let me illustrate my point. Ask a group of students to do 2 + 2 / 2. Some students will get an answer of 2. Others will get an answer of 3. Which is correct? If we only used calculators, no one would know, since both came from inputting the same string of numbers on the keypad. The correct answer is 3, because of the order of operations.

However, if you understand the workings of mathematics, you’ll be able to tell if the answer is feasible. You may not even need to use a calculator at all.

By the end of this article, you will be able to multiply and divide large numbers in your head. No one will question your intelligence. What will they think when you’ll be able to estimate square roots, even cube roots, in your head, while they cannot even do that with  a pencil and paper?

When someone is considered good at math, they’re usually perceived as “smarter” or “more intelligent”. This is not necessarily the case. These students may have a better problem-solving approach to mathematics: an understanding. The easier a method is, the more likely the problem will be solved correctly. The methods I am going to teach you are known as the “Vedic Mathematics”, a system based on the sixteen “Sutras”, or principles. It is what I consider the easiest method to learn mental calculation.

Without further ado, I present to you: How to Master Speed Mathematics and Never Need a Calculator.

Multiplication

For the sake of practicality, I’m going to assume that you already know your times tables. So we’ll start with something rather promising. We’ll start off with multiplications in the 90′s.

Take this problem: 92 X 97

Can you solve this problem mentally? Probably not. In fact, I doubt most people can. But you’ll be able to.

How do most people go about solving this?

That’s what most people are taught to do. This is very difficult to do mentally, however. Too many processes going on at one time. There is an easier, faster method that can easily be done mentally. That is the circles method.

From 92 X 97, you find a number both are near. In this case, 100 is a good case. 97 is 3 below 100 and 92 is 8 below 100. You write that like this.

From here, you subtract diagonally.

92 – 3 = 89.

97 – 8 = 89.

Both of these numbers will have the same answer, so choose whichever one is easier to do mentally. You take your running total of 89 and multiply it by the reference number, which in this case is 100. Your running total is now 8900.

Now you take the two circled numbers, 3 and 8, and multiply them together, to get 24. You then add this to your running total to get 8924. Do this on a calculator. It is the correct answer, and you’ve done very little work.

This method will work in nearly every senario of two relatively numbers in the same group. Take 45 X 49. It also works if you use a reference number of 50.

There is, however, an improvement. Say we want to multiply 103 by 105. You could use 110 and do as we did before, but you could also use 100 and do the problem even faster. The only difference is that you add diaganolly, instead of subtract. Set up the problem as you normally would, but in the circles place the difference to 100.

You do the problem as you normally would, and you simply add diagonally instead of subtract. There is no other difference.

However, when one number is above the reference number and one is below, we run into a small variation. Say you want to multiply 149 by 98. You would set it up as normal, choosing either to add or subtract diagonally…

However when you multiply 49 by 2, you’re really multiplying 49 by negative 2. So what you need to do is instead of adding the product of the numbers to your running total, you subtract it.

The answer is correct.

Direct Multiplication

While the previous method had the distinction of being very easy, it has a very serious flaw: If the two numbers have no immediate reference number, it is difficult to do. There are a few ways around that, but one of the most effective is this method: Direct Multiplication. Take 36 x 72. No immediate reference number leaps to mind, which poses a problem. Set the problem up as shown.

The first step is to multiply the tens digits, 7 and 3, and multiply them by 100 (Essentially, you’re multiplying 70 by 30. Its simplified into [7 x 10] x [3 x 10])

Then multiply crossways, as shown in the diagram, add them together, and multiply that by ten. (This works similarly to the last example). Add that to the previous total.

Finally, you multiply the ones digits together. After adding that to the running total, you’ll have the correct answer. A good thing about this method is that each step gives you a more accurate answer. If you need a rough estimate, than you just need to do the first step. A more refined estimate? The second step, and so on and so forth until you have the correct answer.

Multiplication:  Odds and Ends

Another problem you may have may come from multiplying larger numbers by smaller numbers. This is actually quite simple and easy to understand. Take 43 X 6. The easiest way to do this is to just rewrite 43.

Solve this and add all the numbers together.

and you have the correct answer.

Addition

This is one of the most simple concepts, so I won’t dwell on this too much. The basic idea behind it is you use easier numbers in your calculations. Its easier to add 100 and take away 3 than it is to add 97. conundrums

Your rule of thumb is that if the number’s one digit is 5 or lower, you add the tens then add the ones. If the number is 6-9, you add an extra ten and subtract the difference.

Subtraction

This uses the same exact concept as addition. If you can master one, chances are you’ll master the other.

Squaring Numbers

Squaring numbers usually requires simply multiplying the number using the circles method. There are, however, a few tricks you can use to get certain answers faster.

If a number ends in 5, the number becomes easier to deal with. Say you have 35^2. You remove the five, add one to the remaining digit, and multiply those. place a 25 in front of the answer and you’re good to go.

If a number ends in 1, subtract one and square the answer. Add the original number to the result after you subtracted 1 and add the numbers together.

If a number ends in 9, you take a similar path. You add one and square the number, then add the two numbers, but subtract the result instead of add it.

Short Division

You can skip this area if you are relatively comfortable with short division.

What you must do is to draw a reference number nearby the far side of the equation. This number is usually 10. Then you draw circles below the divisor. Find a number that adds to the divisor to get the reference number. Then you add the number to the first digit to get the first part of your answer. Make another circle and Multiply the numbers in the circles. subtract the number from the second digit. This should give you the remainder. Add zeroes to the end of the dividend if you want a more detailed answer.

Long Division

Division by non-prime numbers is easy. You simply divide by factors. Find two relatively small numbers that multiply to get the number. Set up the equation like this.

Divide the number by the first number and then divide the second number and the quotient.

And you get your answer.

However, if you end up with a remainder, you’re better off setting up the equation a different way.

Estimate and Divide by factors. Multiply and continue normally, and Repeat estimation until you get your desired answer

Obviously, you could get a more exact answer by adding zeroes after the decimal point, but for many situations you won’t really need to.

Estimating Square Roots

Estimating square roots is a process broken down into six simple steps. We will use both 3145 and 70 as examples.

1: Pair the digits into groups of two

2: Find the two numbers that the answer is between, and choose the lower number. If you’re number is a perfect square, place that number. If there are more pairs, add a zero for every pair remaining.

3: Divide the number by the guess and subtract the number

4: Split the result

5: add result to original guess

6: Round a little bit down

Estimating Cube Roots

If you manage to learn this, no one will question your intelligence. The first step is to memorize the cube roots of the numbers 1-10.

Then you divide the digits of your problem into pairs of 3.

Like with square roots, find the two numbers and choose the lower number. Repeat this until you run out of pairs.

Then you divide the number by the estimate twice

Next you subtract the estimate from the result.

divide that by 3…

…and add it to your original estimate. You can round down here for more accurate results.

So there you have it! You can now do large calculations in your head, mentally, and have accurate ways of doing equations faster than you ever thought possible. There is a very simple way to check nearly any answer, but it is fairly lengthy, so I’ll hold off from posting unless I get a demand for such a thing. For more information, do a google search on Vedic Mathematics, or read a book on the subject. All my information was gotten by reading a book called “Speed Mathematics”. Good luck!

Most people who know how to play chess don’t know more than how to move the peices. Knowing this, you can learn to play better than 99% of people with about an hour or two’s worth of practice.

A little background about me. I’ve been playing competitive chess for about 4 years, learning to play just about 9 years ago. I’m registered with the United States Chess Federation, with a Player Rating of 1186, which puts me in around the top 0.0001% of chess players. I can beat nearly anyone who doesn’t play in a competitive environment.

Playing great chess doesn’t take much more than knowing a few basic principles. (I write this without using chess notation for ease of reading, but it’s probably better if you learn it.)

1. Developing your pieces.

When you move a piece, think ahead. In the first few moves of the game, move pieces where they will be most active. A piece that can move to six squares is much more powerful than one that can only move 4.

A solid opening with Good Development

2. Aim for the Center

If you can take control of the center, you have access to nearly the entire board. This is another thing you should do at the start of a chess game.

Who's Winning?

3. Learn very basic opening theory.

Its good to know the first few moves to play. Learn the first four or so moves to an opening. Don’t go over that. Memorizing opening moves isn’t something you’ll want to do.

The Ruy Lopez, one of the most popular openings.

4. Put an intense focus on tactics.

Tactics are sequences of moves that result in gaining of material. If your opponent has one less knight, he’s at a big disadvantage. Oftentimes at club level and below, chess is all about overpowering your opponent tactically. Consider buying a program like “Chess Tactics for beginners”. Don’t be put off by the kiddie cover and lowly name, this is a great program.

Not required, but reccommended.

5. BLUNDERCHECK

If you’re going to lose a queen, move it out of the way. If your opponent is threatening mate or win of material, prevent it. Take time to look at all your opponent’s threats, moves, and any hanging pieces either by either player. All the strategy in the world is useless if you’re hanging peices, and you won’t need to pay attention to pawn structure if your opponent overlooked mate.

Moving the Kingside Knight was a Blunder

That alone should be enough to improve your chess above average. Those are some very sound tips that won’t make you a competative player, but you can use to beat your friends.

Cheers.