2011-05-01, 06:55 PM
Today I was drafting the 'cheat sheet' which we are allowed to use on our Econ and Gov finals this week when I started to think how best to store the information. We are allowed a single, standard piece of paper. Anything which we can hand write is allowed. Double sided.
This got me thinking about how to configure the information. Writing it out small in plain English would take a lot of time and waste a lot of space with the minor things holding English together "The", "a", etc. Words are often times rather long, and abbreviations could become confusing. I was thinking is there a way to compress the physical space the information takes up, without compromising readability (when you know how to 'decode' it)
The first idea that I can think of is to write out a draft without regards for space, and then transform popular words and phrases into some form of code. Numbers or various symbols (eg Greek Letters), perhaps. A Legend could fit nicely into the corner. But that requires a lot of hard memorization and isn't very adaptable or elegant.
For this specific example, spending half the time of setting something like this up on actually studying would be better, but this is more about the concept than the application.
Southperry has at least some background in cryptography - which may be relevant - and is generally good at abstraction. What do you guys thing?
tl;dr Goal:
Transform written information(notes, graphs, etc) to take up less physical space in an elegant manor that is fairly easy to read, when you know how.
This got me thinking about how to configure the information. Writing it out small in plain English would take a lot of time and waste a lot of space with the minor things holding English together "The", "a", etc. Words are often times rather long, and abbreviations could become confusing. I was thinking is there a way to compress the physical space the information takes up, without compromising readability (when you know how to 'decode' it)
The first idea that I can think of is to write out a draft without regards for space, and then transform popular words and phrases into some form of code. Numbers or various symbols (eg Greek Letters), perhaps. A Legend could fit nicely into the corner. But that requires a lot of hard memorization and isn't very adaptable or elegant.
For this specific example, spending half the time of setting something like this up on actually studying would be better, but this is more about the concept than the application.
Southperry has at least some background in cryptography - which may be relevant - and is generally good at abstraction. What do you guys thing?
tl;dr Goal:
Transform written information(notes, graphs, etc) to take up less physical space in an elegant manor that is fairly easy to read, when you know how.