Beware of the Train

• I can't safely modify, or even understand, this code, because it has no tests.
• I can't test it without modifying it.

1. Make a first ascent in the Greater Ranges. Same plan as last year: we've found some 4000m mountains in Kyrgyzstan with no recorded ascents, we've applied for financial assistance from the Mount Everest Foundation (who exist to fund this sort of thing), I've booked the time off, I'm learning Russian via a combination of night classes and Duolingo (befriend me here!), and I'm training in earnest. Speaking of which:
2. Get my body mass below 70kg, from a starting point of 81.2kg on New Year's Day. I want to retain a few kilos of body fat, because food is heavy and burning fat on a route is way better than burning muscle, but every extra gram of body mass will have to be carried 2000m up a mountain, at altitude, as fast as possible. If you've never done hard physical work at altitude while overweight, let me share a secret with you: it is Not Fun. I'm tracking my weight using the Libra app for Android, which implements Hacker's Diet-style smoothing on your noisy daily weigh-in data; calorie intake via MyFitnessPal; and calorie expenditure via a FitBit exercise-tracking band, because MyFitnessPal's calorie-per-hour estimates for most forms of exercise are laughably high. FitBit can sync calories-burned to MFP, which I currently have set up; Libra doesn't sync to either of them, which is annoying, but I really want the trend rather than the raw weight data. FitBit also have a native food-tracking system, so I may ditch MFP at some point.
3. Show up for work in a timely fashion. This is something I struggle with horribly at the moment. I almost always arrived in time for our morning standup meeting at my last job, but now I'm working remotely as part of a distributed team, and we don't have any equivalent for that. I've just signed up for Beeminder and created a "Do Less" goal with units of "minutes late to work", and a fairly generous weekly target; we'll see how that goes.
4. Actually do some work while I'm there. Not sure how to make this SMART or how to achieve it. The Pomodoro technique is... moderately effective, if I actually start doing it (which is much easier if I show up not-too-late in the morning). RescueTime integrates with Beeminder, so I could set myself a goal for "spend more time looking at an IDE, terminal or job-related websites" (or one for "spend less time looking at blogs and social media"). By the way, a pet peeve: if you're reading about the Pomodoro Technique and thinking "sounds interesting, but 25 minutes isn't enough" then you are not the kind of person who needs it. 25 minutes is a major challenge for some of us.
5. Read an average of one book a week. You can follow my progress on this one at Goodreads.

Yep, since about 2000. My symptoms are mostly low-grade diarrhoea, flatulence, bloating and fatigue, but occasionally I get abdominal pain, or rumbling noises in my abdomen (for which I recently learned the delightful technical medical term “borborygmi”).

Sounds annoying, but not life-changingly awful.

That’s about right. Also embarrassing, and frequently unpleasant for anyone downwind of me.

And you’re on a new diet for your IBS?

Yep, the "low-FODMAP" diet.

Never heard of it. What’s the teal deer?

I have to cut out gluten, dairy, pulses, onions and garlic.

Huh?

And some other things like mushrooms, most fruit, cauliflower, pistachios, cashews and artichokes. And I’m meant to limit my intake of butternut squash, but not other squashes. There are a whole bunch of rules.

You said you have to cut out onions and garlic - how about leek?

Yep. And shallots. And the white parts of spring onions, but the green parts are OK.

And you’re not allowed dairy?

Yep - no milk, cream or ice cream for me. But I’m allowed hard cheese. And Brie and Camembert.

OK, I call shenanigans. You’re making this up.

I’m really, really not. I was told to follow this diet by my doctor.

Oh, your “doctor”, eh? Are they a doctor of crystal Reiki homeopathy? Because this is some “astral quantum chakra”-level enterobollocks.

No, he’s a medical doctor, in a perfectly ordinary NHS surgery. Though he did tell me that he didn’t know much about FODMAPs before handing me a printout and sending me on my way.

OK, supposing - just supposing - you’re not making this up, what the hell are FODMAPs?

Fermentable Oligosaccharides, Disaccharides, Monosaccharides And Polyols.

Say what?

Short-chain carbohydrates which are poorly absorbed by the small intestine, but which make the bacteria in my large intestine go OM NOM NOM DELICIOUS CARBS, causing my enteric nervous system to go “Oh dear! I appear to be full of nasty fermentation products. Better get rid of them quickly!”, and in turn causing me to go “Bloody hell, tummy, I’ve already been six times today and I have a meeting in five minutes, do we really have to do this right n- OK, I guess we do. Dammit, I’d just washed those trousers.”

But gluten is a protein.

Well spotted. The problem is actually with wheat, which has high levels of fructans (one of the two classes of oligosaccharides under the FODMAP label; the other class is galacto-oligosaccarides, which are common in pulses). However, supermarkets and restaurants have “gluten-free” labelling, not “low-fructan” labelling.

Is there any evidence for the FODMAP theory?

Yes! There are peer-reviewed publications demonstrating both the mechanism described above and the benefits of a low-FODMAP diet for patients with IBS.

Is this a revolutionary new treatment, discovered by a mom, that doctors hate?

As previously mentioned, I was told to follow it by my doctor, and AIUI the mechanism described above was already the established one for lactose intolerance (lactose being the disaccharide in the acronym). The FODMAP concept appears to have been devised by Dr Sue Shepherd, a dietician and academic. I don’t know if she has any children.

Is it helping?

It seems to be, yes! I’ve been on the diet for about a month now, and my symptoms are definitely reduced - my bad days now are about as bad as my average days before, and my good days are almost normal. And lapses from the diet seem to be followed by a couple of bad days.

And you think that this may be connected to your utter failure at vegetarianism a few years ago?

Possibly. When I cut out animal protein from my diet, I started eating a lot more pulse-based dishes to compensate, and most of those also contained onion and/or garlic. When I restored meat to my diet, my intake of pulses and alliums went down. That could explain some of the horrible fatigue, lethargy and brain-fog I experienced for those two years, and the dramatic improvement I experienced when I started eating meat again. This theory predicts that my symptoms will be triggered by either fructans or galacto-oligosaccharides, and I'll find that out soonish.

When I saw you last you said you could/couldn’t eat Foodstuff X, but now you’ve changed your mind! What gives?

It’s possible that I was wrong the first time - this is a complicated diet with a lot of rules, I don't always remember them all, and it’s not always obvious what chemicals are in a given food. For instance, lots of surprising foods contain onion powder, which is a major no-no. Or it’s possible that I’ve moved onto a different phase of the diet - in the first two months I’m meant to eliminate all FODMAPs as far as possible, and then over the next few months I’m meant to slowly re-introduce the different FODMAP classes one at a time to see which ones actually cause me problems. Anyway, I realise that this diet makes me a major pain to feed, so thank you for making the effort!

Over the seven years or so I've been using Git, there have been a number of moments where I've felt like I've really levelled up in my understanding or usage of Git. Here, in the hope of accelerating other people's learning curves, are as many as I can remember. I'd like to thank Joe Halliwell for introducing me to Git and helping me over the initial hurdles, and Aaron Crane for many helpful and enlightening discussions over the years - especially the ones in which he cleared up some of my many misunderstandings.

Learning to use a history viewer

Even if all you're doing is commit/push/pull, you're manipulating the history graph. Don't try to imagine it in your mind - get the computer to show it to you! That way you can see the effect your actions have, tightening your feedback loop and improving your learning rate. It's also a lot easier to debug problems when you can see what's going on. I started out using gitk --all to view history; now I mostly use git lg, which is an alias for log --graph --pretty=format:'%Cred%h%Creset -%C(yellow)%d%Creset %s %Cgreen(%cr)%Creset' --abbrev-commit --date=relative, but the effect is much the same.

The really important lessons to internalise at this stage are

• Git maintains your history as a graph of snapshots (you'll hear people using the term DAG, for "directed acyclic graph").
• Branches and tags are just pointers into this graph.

If you understand that, then congratulations! You now understand 90% of what's important about Git. Just keep that core model in mind, and it should be possible to reason about the rest.

Relatedly: you'll probably want to graduate to the command-line eventually, but don't be ashamed to use a graphical client for any remotely unfamiliar task.

Understanding hash-based identifiers

You know those weird c56ab7f identifiers Git uses for commits? Those are actually serving a very important role. Mark Jason Dominus has written a great explanation, and I also suggest having a poke around in the .git/objects directory of one of your repos. MJD talks about "blobs" and "trees" which are also identified with hashes, but you don't actually have to think about them much in day-to-day Git usage: commits are the most important objects.

Learning to use git rebase

This shouldn't really qualify as a GLUE - my very first experience with Git was using the git-svn plugin, which forces you to rebase at all times. However, even if you're not interoperating with SVN, you should give rebase a go. What does it do, you ask? Well, the clue's in the name: it takes the sequence of commits you specify, and moves them onto a new base: hence "re-base". See also the MJD talk above, which explains rebasing in more detail.

Note to GUI authors: the obvious UI for this is selecting a load of commits and dragging-and-dropping them to somewhere else in the history graph. Sadly, I don't know of any GUIs that actually do this. Edit: MJD agrees, and is seeking collaborators for work on such a GUI.

Rebasing occasionally gets stuck when it encounters a conflict. The thing to realise here is that the error messages are really good. Keep calm, read the instructions, then follow them, and everything should turn out OK (but if it doesn't, feel free to skip to the next-but-two GLUE).

Giving up on git mergetool

git mergetool allows you to open a graphical diff/merge tool of your choice for handling conflicts. Don't use it. Git's internal merge has complete knowledge of your code's history, which enables it to do a better job of resolving conflicts than any external merge tool I'm aware of. If you use a third-party tool, expect to waste a lot of time manually resolving "conflicts" that the computer could have handled itself; the internal merge algorithm will handle these just fine, and present you with only the tricky cases.

Learning to use git rebase --interactive

I thought this was going to be hard and scary, but it's actually really easy and pleasant to use, I promise! The name is terrible - while git rebase --interactive can do a normal rebase as part of its intended work, this is usually a bad idea. What it's actually for is rewriting history. Have you made two commits that should really be squashed into one? Git rebase --interactive! Want to re-order some commits? Git rebase --interactive! Delete some entirely? Git rebase --interactive! Split them apart into smaller commits? Git rebase --interactive! The interface to this is extremely friendly by Git CLI standards: specify the commit before the first one you want to rewrite, and Git will open an editor window with a list of the commits-to-rewrite. Follow the instructions. If that's not clear enough, read this post.

This should also be represented in a GUI by dragging-and-dropping, but I don't know of any clients that do this.

Learning about git reflog

Git stores a list of every commit you've had checked out. Look at the output of git reflog after a few actions: this allows you to see what's happened, and is thus valuable for learning. More usefully, it also allows you to undo any history rewriting. Here's the thing: Git doesn't actually rewrite history. It writes new history, and hides the old version (which is eventually garbage-collected after a month). But you can still get the old version back if you have a way to refer to it, and that's what git reflog gives you. Knowing that you can easily undo any mistakes allows you to be a lot bolder in your experiments.

Here's a thing I only recently learned: Git also keeps per-branch reflogs, which can be accessed using git reflog $branchname. This saves you some log-grovelling. Sadly, these only contain local changes: history-rewritings done by other people won't show up.

Reading the code of git-rebase--interactive

Interactive rebase is implemented as a shell script, which on my system lives at /usr/lib/git-core/git-rebase--interactive. It's pretty horrible code, but it's eye-opening to see how the various transformations are implemented at the low-level "plumbing" layer.

I actually did this as part of a (failed) project to implement the Darcs merge algorithm on top of Git. I still think this would be a good idea, if anyone wants to have a go. See also this related project, which AFAICT has some of the same advantages and better asymptotic complexity than the Darcs merge algorithm.

Learning how the recursive merge algorithm works

You don't actually need to know this, but it's IMHO pretty elegant. Here's a good description.

Learning what HEAD actually means

I learned this from reading two great blog posts by Federico Mena Quintero: part 1, part 2. Those posts also cleared up a lot of my confusion about how remotes and remote-tracking branches work.

Learning to read refspec notation

The manual is pretty good here. Once you know how refspec notation works, you'll notice it's used all over and a lot of things will click into place.

Learning what git reset actually does

I'd been using git reset in stereotyped ways since the beginning: for instance, I knew that git reset --hard HEAD meant "throw away all uncommitted changes in my working directory" and git reset --hard [commit hash obtained from reflog] meant "throw away a broken attempt at history-rewriting". But it turns out that this is not the core of reset. Again, MJD has written a great explanation, but here's the tl;dr:

1. It points the HEAD ref (aka the current branch - remember, branches are just pointers) at a new 'target' commit, if you specified one.
2. Then it copies the tree of the HEAD commit to the index, unless you said --soft.
3. Finally, it copies the contents of the index to the working tree, if you said --hard.

Once you understand this, git reset becomes part of your toolkit, something you can apply to new problems. Is a branch pointing to the wrong commit? There's a command that does exactly what you need, and it's git reset. Here's yet another MJD post, in which he explains a nonobvious usage for git reset which makes perfect sense in light of the above. Here's another one: suppose someone has rewritten history in a remote branch. If you do git pull you'll create a merge commit between your idea of the current commit and upstream's idea; if you later git push it you'll have created a messy history and people will be annoyed with you. No problem! git fetch upstream $branch; git checkout $branch; git reset --hard upstream/$branch.

git add -p and friends

Late Entry! The git add -p command, which interactively adds changes to the index (the -p is short for --patch), wasn't much of a surprise to me because I was used to darcs record; however, it seems to be a surprise to many people, so (at Joe Halliwell's suggestion) it deserves a mention here. And only tonight Aaron informed me of the existence of its cousins git reset -p, git commit -p and git checkout -p, which are totally going in my toolkit.

Whew!

I hope that helped someone! Now, over to those more expert than me - what should be my next enlightenment experience?

• David Meier, The Theory of Relational Databases, 1983 (PDFs). As the name suggests, this looks heavy on the relational algebra and light on implementation.
• C. J. Date, An Introduction to Database Systems (Amazon link to paper book), 2003. Apparently this "contains a lot about internals. The writing style is quite verbose though."
• Abiteboul, Hull and Vianu, Foundations of Databases (PDFs). This appears to cover SQL and relational algebra in the first half of the book, and Datalog in the second. Which sounds very interesting, but not quite what I was looking for.
• Stratis Viglas, Advanced Databases (PDF). Slides from a 2015 undergraduate course given at the University of Edinburgh. Covers topics like on-disk layout, external sorting, query optimization, transaction processing, B+-trees and hash joins - the stuff I was after, in other words.
• Raghu Ramakrishnan and Johannes Gehrke, Database Management Systems, 2002 (Amazon link, though the first Google hit is a presumably-illegal PDF of the full text!) The course textbook for Viglas' course, this appears to cover relational algebra, practical SQL programming, the DB implementation stuff in the course, and quite a lot more.
• Julia Evans (aka b0rk) wrote a nice sequence of blog posts in which she delves into SQLite internals; I should re-read these.
• The SQLite documentation looks pretty good, and includes some information about internals.

This summer Andy and I headed back out to the Alps; this time we went to the Chamonix valley, home of Mont Blanc and widely acknowledged as the death-sport capital of the world. We were unlucky with conditions - we arrived right after a week of rain, which meant all the high slopes were loaded and avalanchey, and then we lost several more days to bad weather mid-trip - and we generally had a less successful time than last year. In the end, we bagged one 3700m summit, did an easy (but very enjoyable) rock/scrambling route on the Aiguilles Rouges, went hiking a few times and retreated off two more mountaineering routes. Nonetheless, I feel like I learned a lot; here's my belated attempt to set some lessons-learned down in writing.

Double-check your packing

Andy and I had both moved house shortly before the trip, and in the post-move chaos a few things got left behind. You don't want to spend the first day of your holiday dropping 70EUR on a new pair of softshell trousers, or discovering on the first route that you left the new bottle of suncream at home and brought the nearly-empty one from last year instead. Similarly, I couldn't find my less-tight pair of rock shoes before departure; my tight bouldering shoes got really painful after three hours on the Arête des Crochues.

Fitness

I don't know what exactly changed, but fitness was a much bigger problem for me this year. Age, weight gain, my asthma getting worse, longer routes, reduced workout frequency, all of the above? Whatever it was, I often found myself struggling to get enough air (which in turn meant I couldn't drink, which in turn meant I couldn't eat). I've since beefed up my base exercise schedule, and will try to do more sport-specific workouts (hillwalking, trail running, climbing) in time for next year's trip. If I need motivation, I flash back to how dreadful I felt on Pointe Isabelle.

Research

We knew in general terms that we needed to do more research, but didn't know how to operationalise that, which meant we couldn't research effectively. Having lists of routes you want to do is good, but what you really need is if-then planning: IF conditions are X, Y and Z, what routes will be in good nick? IF we're at the Foobar hut, what is there to climb in the area? What are the mixed routes, the ice routes, the snow routes? Which routes face in which directions, and from which directions are the approach routes threatened by avalanche? This is the kind of knowledge that lets you move quickly to handle a change in conditions without losing another day to book-scouring.

Compare as many guidebooks as you can

We screwed up on the Arête de Table du Roc because we got to the top of the ridge and found ourselves confronted with an unexpected brèche. We then wasted a long time arguing about where we were before finally deciding to make a long and rather unpleasant abseil down our route of ascent. As it turned out, the route down from the summit proper would have been much easier and less threatened by rockfall. We'd been unable to work out from the Alpine Club guidebook which bit was the summit, but when we got back to the campsite we discovered that it was completely obvious from the topo in Gaston Rébuffat's 100 Finest Routes. Rébuffat's book is a bit large to carry up the mountain with you, but if we'd read the description more carefully in advance we might not have had that problem.

Ropework

After another season doing classic winter routes in Scotland, particularly the Liathach and Aonach Eagach traverses, my Alpine ropework was a lot more fluid. I'm seconding last year's recommendation that Scottish-style winter climbing is great training for Alpinism.

The Aiguilles Rouges are great

We did the Arête des Crochues in the Aiguilles Rouges (the sub-3000m massif on the other side of the Chamonix valley from the Mont Blanc massif) near the end of our trip, and had a great time: it reminded me a lot of the Skye Cuillin. In retrospect, we should have done this right at the beginning: it would have been a good way to start acclimatising and get our fast-and-light heads on.

The French-language guidebook we had for the Aiguilles Rouges was funny to our British eyes: it gave a topo so detailed it would have its author thrown out of the SMC, apologised for the lack of pitons on the route, and suggested that we might find it amusing to find the route by following rock polish and crampon scratches. Heaven forfend! Who ever heard of such a thing?

Take a non-climbing guidebook

There's a huge amount to do in and around the Chamonix valley when the weather's too bad for climbing. Hilary Sharp's book Chamonix Mountain Adventures was an excellent investment, taking us on some great (albeit damp) hikes. The dinosaur-tracks hike was particularly good. The Alpine Museum, by contrast, was rather disappointing.

To péage or not to péage?

Most of the French autoroute network consists of toll roads ("péages"). If you're driving all the way across France, the tolls mount up fast. As an experiment, we tried avoiding toll roads on the way back. This added about four hours to our journey, but meant we actually saw some of the beautiful French countryside instead of the unchanging embankments that surround the autoroutes. The free Routes Nationales, like their British A-road counterparts, vary a lot in quality: in northern France they're usually wide, fast, straight and pretty, but in the mountains they're usually narrow, full of hairpin bends, and rather frightening. I'd suggest driving on N-roads between Calais and Dijon, and using the autoroutes for getting between Dijon and Chamonix.

There's lots of climbing in Bulgaria

A group of Bulgarians in our campsite kept giving us the hard sell on the merits of Bulgarian rock and winter climbing. To be fair, it does look good, and it's a much cheaper country to travel in than France. So, Bulgaria is now on our list of possible climbing destinations.

Take a pair of approach shoes

I took a pair of fell-running shoes last year and didn't really use them, so this time I left them behind. This was a huge mistake: they'd have been incredibly useful for hiking and the walk-in/out from the Aiguilles Rouges route. I've never owned a pair of purpose-designed approach shoes, but I'm sure a pair of those would have been even better.

Leave plenty of time for hut walk-ins

Mostly because of our lack of effective research, we often found ourselves deciding on a hut with only just enough time to walk in to it, leading to a rushed walk-in and an arrival in the middle of supper. This is a Bad Thing: you want to arrive early so you can ask the hut guardian about recent ascents and conditions, and so you can scope out the start of the route. We lost a lot of time stumbling around in the dark at the start of our attempt on Pointe Isabelle, and this might have made the difference between success and failure.

The other mistake we made on that route was not leaving enough time for the walk-out: given the conditions we probably made the right decision to go down when we did anyway, but it didn't help our decisionmaking that we had to be back on the other side of the Mer de Glace by a certain time in order to not miss the last train.

Eating on routes

We still haven't found an eating-on-routes system we're really happy with. This time we experimented with having a chalk-bag full of snacks each and grabbing a quick bite every so often; I think this helped. We also discovered Nakd bars, which are great, and which can be cheaply and easily duplicated at home :-) I'm wondering if Soylent would be good for mountaineering: put some in your hydration bladder, sip constantly without the need to stop or get anything out of your sack. I'm also considering Plumpy'Nut, or some home-made approximation, and Mike Prior-Jones introduced me to BiFi Rangers and Carazza mini-pizza-sandwich things, which are tasty, shelf-stable and savoury - sometimes you don't want something too sweet. I've since used these with success on the An Teallach ridge in Scotland.

[More photos here!]

I have been learning Russian for the last twelve days. Here's a video of me trying to speak it - feedback very welcome!

I'm doing this mainly because I'm planning a mountaineering trip to Kyrgyzstan next summer. I've travelled in countries where I don't speak the language before, and it's horrible and difficult and isolating. In particular not being able to read the local script (as was the case for me in Thailand, Laos and Cambodia) makes so many practical things harder. Why Russian and not Kyrgyz? Well, friends who've been to Kyrgyzstan tell me that while almost nobody in Kyrgyzstan speaks English, many people there speak at least a little Russian, and I rate my chances of learning Russian to a useful level as much higher than my chances of learning Kyrgyz - Russian is an Indo-European language, it's related to Czech, which I've studied a little, and finding language-learning resources from where I am is going to be much easier. Benny the Irish Polyglot can learn Hungarian in Colombia, but I think I'll make life a bit easier on myself, at least this time :-)

Two resources have been both helpful and inspiring to me: the Coursera course Learning How to Learn, and the aforementioned Benny's website, Fluent In Three Months. I discovered Benny through an interview the LHTL instructors did with him. The other thing that's been helping with motivation is having a Big Hairy Audacious Goal: next to "do a first ascent in the Greater Ranges", "learn enough Russian to get by" seems like (and is!) a mere stepping-stone. The BHAG is helping with the physical training too, but there my thoughts are more like "Does it hurt now? Good. It's going to hurt a lot more at 5000m, so you'd better get on with it".

Historically, I have sucked at learning languages: given how many years I spent studying French at school, it's embarrassing how much I was having to struggle with basic everyday interactions in French on my recent trips to France, and the less said about my Czech or Japanese the better. In Kyrgyzstan I won't have the option of falling back to English, so it's time to HTFU and overcome my inadequacies. My meta-strategy can be summed up as "do all the stuff that you were too lazy, proud, or suspicious to try in previous language-learning efforts": a lot of the techniques covered in LHTL were things I'd heard about but never tried for language-learning.

In more detail, these are the techniques I plan to use:

• Actually talking to native speakers. Benny's big on this one, arguing that if you want to speak a language then that's what you have to practice. I plan to use italki.com, a website that lets you find native speakers for Skype chats, but if any Russian-speaking readers of this blog would be willing to put up with my attempts, I'd love to speak to you!
• Recall: the act of recalling information strengthens the neural connections that encode it. LTHL recommends immediately turning your head away from the book and trying to recall it when you first encounter a new fact; in general, you should try and test yourself constantly on any information you're trying to remember. I didn't do this much at school, reasoning that if you don't know something, what do you gain by trying to remember it - surely it's better to expose yourself to the information over and over. A plausible hypothesis, but apparently Science contradicts it.
• Spaced repetition. The brain needs time to lay down long-term memories, so it's better to spread X hours of practice over a few weeks than to cram it all into X/24 days. This combines nicely with recall - create flashcards, and test yourself on them over days, increasing the period on things you know better. I've been using the smartphone app Anki to learn the 1000 most common Russian words, though unfortunately the deck I found is Russian-to-English, and point 1 suggests I should be concentrating on English-to-Russian, or (better), unnamed-concepts-to-Russian so I don't have to go via English to find the Russian word. I've also made physical flashcards with some basic Russian phrases - hello, goodbye, I am from Scotland, has that mountain been climbed before, that kind of thing. I've never made flashcards before, and I'm not entirely sure why not - laziness?
• Eating my frogs first, or in other words, doing hard things first thing. My morning routine is now wake up, open the curtains (which I can do without getting out of bed), sit up (this helps the grogginess to drain from my head), pick up my phone and start doing Anki cards. I then usually follow this up with another short Anki session at lunchtime and more when I have a few minutes spare.
• Mnemonics: instead of simply repeating vocabulary words over and over, I'm trying to invent mnemonics, and preferably vivid images that stick in the mind better. For instance, the Russian for "start" is "начало", pronounced "nachalo"; "на" means "on", so I imagine a line of sprinters poised at the start line, with a cellist on a platform about to sound the note that will start the race. My favourite mnemonic so far is one that wormwood_pearl invented: the Russian word "понимать", pronounced "ponimat'", means "understand", so I imagine a picky customer going into the automated pony-wash and asking for a particularly complex horse-laundering procedure, which the assistant understands perfectly. I've generally been having trouble coming up with good mnemonics, though. Partly this is lack of practice, and partly it's because many of the words I've tried to learn so far have been function words like and, because, what, then, which, and so on: it's hard to construct vivid images about such things. My mnemonic for "because" is particularly stretched: the word I'm trying to remember is "потому", "patamu", which has a Tam and a Moo in it, and Moo is the sound cows make, and there's a line from a Half-Man Half-Biscuit song "did you ever wonder how they get triangles from a cow? You need buttermilk and cheese and an equilateral chainsaw", and the mathematical symbol for "because" is three dots arranged in a triangle, so I imagine a bonnetted Scotsman called Tam carving a "because" sign out of a cow with a triangular chainsaw. Which is completely stupid, but actually appears to be working. In writing this, it occurs to me that I could help myself to invent mnemonics by taking advantage of the focused and diffuse modes of thinking. When I'm doing flashcards, I'm focused, but creativity requires the diffuse mode to make connections between apparently disparate concepts (preferably after a period of focus). Next time I encounter a word for which I can't think of a mnemonic, I'll write it down so my brain can continue to work on it subconsiously.
• Chunks and chunk transfer. An essential part of the learning process is the construction of mental chunks - ideas which "hang together", and which can then be recalled as a single unit (like, say, "compiler", or "grammatical gender", or "integration by parts"). Once you have acquired a chunk in one context, you can more easily transfer this knowledge to acquire chunks in new contexts. Here's a description of how I learned to contact juggle by applying a chunk from skiing - I was later able to apply that chunk to rock climbing, where it's called "deadpointing". I had a great Twitter conversation about how deadpointing applies to all sorts of other physical disciplines - fascinating stuff. Anyway, chunk transfer Is My Friend when it comes to language-learning too. I've been able to apply some chunks from Czech (my favourite so far was when I realised that the черно in чернослив (damson, from Google Translate) meant "black" and was cognate with Czech černá, so the слив must mean something like "plum" and was therefore cognate with "slivovice", the name of a potent moonshine distilled throughout Central Europe. I've also, to my delight, been able to transfer a lot of chunks from Nadsat, the teenage slang used in the novel A Clockwork Orange.
• Not caring about making mistakes. My difficulties with languages are symptomatic of a deeper problem - I've always found enough subjects easy that I could do well in school simply by relying on the things that I could do without difficulty. This, I think, created a fixed mindset - my identity became bound up with "being clever", so I subconsiously avoided situations that would make me look or feel stupid. Tackling hard problems was allowed, but only within the range of subjects that I was good at. My difficulties with the programming language Haskell probably come under this heading too (thing I ought to be good at, but which made me feel stupid), and juggling got a lot less fun (and I started improving a lot less) once I started thinking "I've been juggling X years, I should be better at this by now" rather than "I'm no good at physical hand/eye coordination, I'm allowed to be bad at this". But languages don't come easy to me, so I have to cultivate a growth mindset - more straightforwardly, I need to internalise the idea that sucking at something is an essential step on the way to being good at that thing.
• Sleep. Sleep physically shrinks neurons, allowing waste products to be removed. It also plays a key role in the consolidation of long-term memories. So getting a full night's sleep as often as possible is very important to successful learning. [Checks time. Oops.]
• Exercise: as well as being great for general mental health, exercise is apparently nigh-essential for effective learning. Fortunately, I need to get a lot fitter anyway :-)

We've recently moved house, to a refitted Victorian tenement flat in Leith. We're renting it from a lovely couple from Continental Europe, and this I suspect is the reason for one of the few things that annoy me about the place: that every sink in the flat is fitted with mixer taps. Ordinarily this is merely a mild irritant, but occasionally (as happened this morning), they drive me into a towering rage. Let me explain...

I'd taken out the contents of the food recycling bin, but a foul-smelling brown gunge still coated the insides of the bin itself. I was therefore filling the bin with a mix of bleach and hot water, the latter from the bathroom sink. The sink was too small to fit the bin in, so I was filling a pint cup with hot water from the sink and tipping it into the bin. Fortunately it's quite a small bin. My attention lapsed for a moment, though, and the water overflowed, mildly but painfully scalding my left hand. No problem: I could keep filling the hot water with my right hand, while holding my left hand under the cold tap for as long as it took to cool down. Except, oh, wait, mixer taps. Dammit. So I had to turn off the hot tap, put down the cup, turn on the cold tap, and wait uselessly for however long it took for my hand to stop hurting.

Except I had forgotten about the other problem with mixer taps: hysteresis. When you turn off the hot water in a mixer tap system, you see, you don't reset the tap to a safe state: a slug of hot water remains in the pipe, lying in wait for the unwary. And so when I put my sore hand under the tap and turned on the cold water, I was instead treated to a high-pressure dose of painfully hot water onto the already painful area.

And then a few minutes later, while mentally composing this blog post and muttering curses against the inventors of mixer taps and their descendents, yea, unto the seventh generation, the same thing happened to me again.

In conclusion: fuck mixer taps. Fuck them right in their stupid single non-parallelisable pain-causing water outlets.

This post is dedicated to elmyra, who labours under the misapprehension that mixer taps are not only a superior technology, but so obviously a superior technology that the only possible reason they have not been universally adopted can be ignorance of their existence.

We've just moved house, which means that we're waiting for a new broadband connection to be set up. While we're waiting for reliable Internet we've been making our own entertainment, and by "entertainment" I of course mean "beer". It's our first attempt at homebrewing, so we decided to walk before we tried running and bought a beginner's homebrew kit. Which made me think, as one does, of Ninkasi, the Sumerian goddess of beer and brewing, who every day used to brew beer for the rest of the Sumerian pantheon. Beer was one of the crucial enabling technologies for the early urban civilisations in Egypt and Mesopotamia: as well as being fun to consume, it allows you to live in close proximity to other humans without dying of cholera from contaminated drinking water. Beer brewing tech has moved on a bit since Ninkasi's day, but the essentials of the process remain the same: germinate grains to turn the starches into sugars, soak in water to extract the sugars, drain off the resultant liquid (the "wort"), mix with flavourings, ferment in a large vat, drink, enjoy. And since today is National Poetry Day (with a theme of "water", no less), I thought it might be fun to update the Hymn to Ninkasi. Dating from around 1800BC, it's one of the oldest known recipes for beer. Here's an academic translation, and here's a discussion, and a looser but more poetic translation.

Given birth by the flowing water, tenderly cared for by Ninhursaja! Ninkasi, given birth by the flowing water, tenderly cared for by Ninhursaja!

Having founded your town upon wax, she completed its great walls for you. Ninkasi, having founded your town upon wax, she completed its great walls for you.

Your father is Enki, the lord Nudimmud, and your mother is Ninti, the queen of the abzu. Ninkasi, your father is Enki, the lord Nudimmud, and your mother is Ninti, the queen of the abzu.

It is you who watches the included instructional DVD, and is soothed by the presenter's reassuring Australian accent and self-deprecating humour. Ninkasi, it is you who watches the included instructional DVD, and is soothed by the presenter's reassuring Australian accent and self-deprecating humour.

It is you who puts a cupful of bleach in the plastic bucket, and fills it up with hot water. Ninkasi, it is you who puts a cupful of bleach in the plastic bucket, and fills it up with hot water.

It is you who leaves the bucket to sterilise for half an hour, and then rinses it down carefully in the shower. Ninkasi, it is you who leaves the bucket to sterilise for half an hour, and then rinses it down carefully in the shower.

It is you who carries the bucket through to the kitchen, and places it on the counter. Ninkasi, it is you who carries the bucket through to the kitchen, and places it on the counter.

It is you who peels the backing from the thermometer strip, and sticks it to the outside of the bucket. Ninkasi, it is you who peels the backing from the thermometer strip, and sticks it to the outside of the bucket.

It is you who upends the wort can into a saucepan of hot water so that it may flow more easily. Ninkasi, it is you who upends the wort can into a saucepan of hot water so that it may flow more easily.

It is you who opens the can of hopped wort, and guards it even from the noble cats. Ninkasi, it is you who opens the can of hopped wort, and guards it even from the noble cats.

It is you who dissolves the wort in two litres of boiling water, then adds the 1kg packet of fermentable and non-fermentable sugars and stirs vigorously. Ninkasi, it is you who dissolves the wort in two litres of boiling water, then adds the 1kg packet of fermentable and non-fermentable sugars and stirs vigorously.

It is you who wonders what the hell the non-fermentable sugars are there for anyway, and tries to tell your girlfriend about that Holsten Pils advert with Dennis Leary, and remembers that she's too young to remember it. Ninkasi, it is you who wonders what the hell the non-fermentable sugars are there for anyway, and tries to tell your girlfriend about that Holsten Pils advert with Dennis Leary, and remembers that she's too young to remember it.

It is you who tops up the bucket to twenty litres with cold water, stirs and checks the temperature. Ninkasi, it is you who tops up the bucket to twenty litres with cold water, stirs and checks the temperature.

It is you who adds another couple of litres of cold water to ensure the temperature is within the range 21C-27C. Ninkasi, it is you who adds another couple of litres of cold water to ensure the temperature is within the range 21C-27C.

It is you who takes the packet of yeast, tries to tear it open, realises there is no slit in the packet, and looks frantically for a pair of scissors. Ninkasi, it is you who takes the packet of yeast, tries to tear it open, realises there is no slit in the packet, and looks frantically for a pair of scissors.

It is you who cuts open the packet of yeast with a Swiss Army knife and pours it into the bucket. Ninkasi, it is you who cuts open the packet of yeast with a Swiss Army knife and pours it into the bucket.

It is you who curses when your girlfriend reminds you that you were meant to sprinkle the yeast evenly over the surface of the liquid. Ninkasi, it is you who curses when your girlfriend reminds you that you were meant to sprinkle the yeast evenly over the surface of the liquid.

It is you who accepts all the blame if this whole thing goes wrong. Ninkasi, it is you who accepts all the blame if this whole thing goes wrong.

It is you who slots the stupidly-named Krausen Kollar onto the bucket, and then fits the lid. Ninkasi, it is you who slots the stupidly-named Krausen Kollar onto the bucket, and then fits the lid.

It is you who wonders why this system doesn't use an airlock, Googles to find out, and emerges no wiser. Ninkasi, it is you who wonders why this system doesn't use an airlock, Googles to find out, and emerges no wiser.

It is you who hopes that you won't end up with partially-fermented beer all over your new kitchen floor. Ninkasi, it is you who hopes that you won't end up with partially-fermented beer all over your new kitchen floor.

It is you who half-fills the hydrometer tube with the diluted wort and drops in the weighted bulb, to determine the beer's original gravity. Ninkasi, it is you who half-fills the hydrometer tube with the diluted wort and drops in the weighted bulb, to determine the beer's original gravity.

It is you who attempts to read the specific gravity at the meniscus, but can't actually see the meniscus because beer is fizzy. Ninkasi, it is you who attempts to read the specific gravity at the meniscus, but can't actually see the meniscus because beer is fizzy.

It is you who decides that accuracy to +/- 0.001 is probably good enough, and writes down your best guess in the Brewer's Log. Ninkasi, it is you who decides that accuracy to +/- 0.001 is probably good enough, and writes down your best guess in the Brewer's Log.

[It is you who has only proceeded up to this point so far, and is copying the remaining steps out of the instruction booklet. Ninkasi, it is you who has only proceeded up to this point so far, and is copying the remaining steps out of the instruction booklet.]

It is you who waits for four days, periodically checking that the temperature is within the range 21-27C, and then draws off another tubeful of liquid and measures the specific gravity with the hydrometer. Ninkasi, it is you who waits for four days, periodically checking that the temperature is within the range 21-27C, and then draws off another tubeful of liquid and measures the specific gravity with the hydrometer.

It is you who checks the specific gravity daily until it has remained the same for 24 hours. Ninkasi, it is you who checks the specific gravity daily until it has remained the same for 24 hours.

It is you who nervously taste-tests the beer, hoping that it has avoided infection or other problems. Ninkasi, it is you who nervously taste-tests the beer, hoping that it has avoided infection or other problems.

It is you who sterilises the supplied heavy PET bottles, ready to receive the beer. Ninkasi, it is you who sterilises the supplied heavy PET bottles, ready to receive the beer.

It is you who fits the bottling valve to the tube, and opens the tap. Ninkasi, it is you who fits the bottling valve to the tube, and opens the tap.

It is you who fills the bottles with the beer. Ninkasi, it is you who fills the bottles with the beer.

It is you who puts one sugar tablet into each 500mL bottle so that the beer may undergo a second fermentation, then caps them and inverts each one several times. Ninkasi, it is you who puts one sugar tablet into each 500mL bottle so that the beer may undergo a second fermentation, then caps them and inverts each one several times.

It is you who wonders what was going on in that bit in 1984 where the old guy complained that half a litre of beer wasn't enough, seriously, you can barely tell the difference between half a litre and a pint. Ninkasi, it is you who wonders what was going on in that bit in 1984 where the old guy complained that half a litre of beer wasn't enough, seriously, you can barely tell the difference between half a litre and a pint.

It is you who stores the bottles upright at a temperature above 18C (in Scotland, in October) for two weeks while the beer undergoes carbonation. Ninkasi, it is you who stores the bottles upright at a temperature above 18C (in Scotland, in October) for two weeks while the beer undergoes carbonation.

It is you who invites your friends round to try the finished beer; it is like the onrush of the Tigris and the Euphrates. Ninkasi, it is you who invites your friends round to try the finished beer; it is like the onrush of the Tigris and the Euphrates.

Cheers!