Monday, May 01, 2017

Easy memory aides

Certain memory aides are so ... well.. memorable that they stick in your mind exactly the way they should. Here are three that I've heard of:


  • Keeping track of the Baltic states: I think I heard this from +Fernando Pereira - They are alphabetical in order from north to south. So it's Estonia, Latvia and then Lithuania. 
  • Converting between miles and kilometers: This is a particularly geek-friendly mnemonic - If the value in miles is (close to) a Fibonacci number, the value in kilometers is (close to) the next Fibonacci number. This works because the golden ratio is very close to the miles-to-km conversion factor.
  • Keeping track of type-I/type-II errors: I heard this one on twitter the other day, and it goes like this. In the story of the boy who cried wolf, the errors appear in order. 
Things I need memory aides for:
  • Bernstein vs McDiarmid vs Azuma, or different Chernoff bounds in general. 
  • Jensen's inequality, so I don't have to constantly draw the picture of the convex function to derive it.
  • Submodularity vs supermodularity: I know you add the diagonals and compare them, but which way is which???
Others? 

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