Weeks Notice Letter: Fill & Download for Free

DISCLAIMER: THE FOLLOWING STORIES ARE TRUE. NO CREATIVE LIBERTIES WERE TAKEN AND ALL NON-FACTUAL RUMORS HAVE BEEN SPECIFIED AS SUCHHere are the three strangest mysteries the internet has ever produced.Cicada 3301This story is maybe the most tantalizing of all, as someone came so close to cracking the mystery that we almost found out the story behind it, but not quite.In 2013, a post from a user named 3301 on 4Chan circulated the internet. The post was an image that read;A renowned cryptographer and internet junkie, Joel Erikson, was intrigued by this puzzle and entered the mad hunt to decipher the message. Erikson was the only person to publicly decipher the entire puzzle.The image code contained a text message, which was readable by opening the image in a text editor. The code looked like this:Erikson knew this was a clue. A Tiberivus Caesar is a cipher method, simply known as the Caesar Cipher. Erikson put the code in quotes through a decoder and began trying it with different keys. The key “4” successfully output an Imgur link, which led to this image:However, Erikson knew this was a trick. The sentence “looks like you can’t guess how to get the message out” was out of place. He eventually, after reading the sentence several times forward and backward, got “guess” and “out” from reading both words before and after “how to get the message.” He figured out that the message was telling him to use OutGuess, a steganography tool, to decipher the image. The OutGuess tool outputs this message when the duck image is ran through it:Here is a book code. To find the book, and more information, go to http://www.reddit.com/r/a2e7j6ic78h0j/  1:20 2:3 3:5 4:20 5:5 The Reddit link led to a post named a2e7j6ic78h0j7eiejd0120 that contained these images:The strange image above is Mayan for the number 10, 2, 14, 7, 19, 6, 18, 12, 7, 8, 17, 0, 19.The next image:The “welcome” mat, when ran through OutGuess, outputs this message:-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1  - From here on out, we will cryptographically sign all messages with this key.  It is available on the mit keyservers. Key ID 7A35090F, as posted in a2e7j6ic78h0j.  Patience is a virtue.  Good luck.  3301 -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.11 (GNU/Linux)  iQIcBAEBAgAGBQJPBRz7AAoJEBgfAeV6NQkP1UIQALFcO8DyZkecTK5pAIcGez7k ewjGBoCfjfO2NlRROuQm5CteXiH3Te5G+5ebsdRmGWVcah8QzN4UjxpKcTQRPB9e /ehVI5BiBJq8GlOnaSRZpzsYobwKH6Jy6haAr3kPFK1lOXXyHSiNnQbydGw9BFRI fSr//DY86BUILE8sGJR6FA8Vzjiifcv6mmXkk3ICrT8z0qY7m/wFOYjgiSohvYpg x5biG6TBwxfmXQOaITdO5rO8+4mtLnP//qN7E9zjTYj4Z4gBhdf6hPSuOqjh1s+6 /C6IehRChpx8gwpdhIlNf1coz/ZiggPiqdj75Tyqg88lEr66fVVB2d7PGObSyYSp HJl8llrt8Gnk1UaZUS6/eCjnBniV/BLfZPVD2VFKH2Vvvty8sL+S8hCxsuLCjydh skpshcjMVV9xPIEYzwSEaqBq0ZMdNFEPxJzC0XISlWSfxROm85r3NYvbrx9lwVbP mUpLKFn8ZcMbf7UX18frgOtujmqqUvDQ2dQhmCUywPdtsKHFLc1xIqdrnRWUS3CD eejUzGYDB5lSflujTjLPgGvtlCBW5ap00cfIHUZPOzmJWoEzgFgdNc9iIkcUUlke e2WbYwCCuwSlLsdQRMA//PJN+a1h2ZMSzzMbZsr/YXQDUWvEaYI8MckmXEkZmDoA RL0xkbHEFVGBmoMPVzeC =fRcg -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- This is a very important message, as it shows how to discern real Cicaida images from fake ones using an encryption key.The next image:This image also contains an OutGuess message:-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1  The key has always been right in front of your eyes.  This isn't the quest for the Holy Grail. Stop making  it more difficult than it is.   Good luck.  3301 -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.11 (GNU/Linux)  iQIcBAEBAgAGBQJPCBl3AAoJEBgfAeV6NQkPo6EQAKghp7ZKYxmsYM96iNQu5GZV fbjUHsEL164ZLctGkgZx2H1HyYFEc6FGvcfzqs43vV/IzN4mK0SMy2qFPfjuG2JJ tv3x2QfHMM3M2+dwX30bUD12UorMZNrLo8HjTpanYD9hL8WglbSIBJhnLE5CPlUS BZRSx0yh1U+wbnlTQBxQI0xLkPIz+xCMBwSKl5BaCb006z43/HJt7NwynqWXJmVV KScmkpFC3ISEBcYKhHHWv1IPQnFqMdW4dExXdRqWuwCshXpGXwDoOXfKVp5NW7Ix 9kCyfC7XC4iWXymGgd+/h4ccFFVm+WWOczOq/zeME+0vJhJqvj+fN2MZtvckpZbc CMfLjn1z4w4d7mkbEpVjgVIU8/+KClNFPSf4asqjBKdrcCEMAl80vZorElG6OVIH aLV4XwqiSu0LEF1ESCqbxkEmqp7U7CHl2VW6qv0h0Gxy+/UT0W1NoLJTzLBFiOzy QIqqpgVg0dAFs74SlIf3oUTxt6IUpQX5+uo8kszMHTJQRP7K22/A3cc/VS/2Ydg4 o6OfN54Wcq+8IMZxEx+vxtmRJCUROVpHTTQ5unmyG9zQATxn8byD9Us070FAg6/v jGjo1VVUxn6HX9HKxdx4wYGMP5grmD8k4jQdF1Z7GtbcqzDsxP65XCaOYmray1Jy FG5OlgFyOflmjBXHsNad =SqLP -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- The Reddit link also contained this message:Ukbn Txltbz nal hh Uoxelmgox wdvg Akw; hvu ogl rsm ar sbv ix jwz mjotukj; mul nimo vaa prrf Qwkkb aak kau ww Ukpsf, ogq Kzpox vvl luf yh Qsrjfa, hvu Ktp hzs lbn ph Kipsy; ttv Sdmehpfjsf tad igr rcbkfgaplvj am uswrerwptk la hox cazkwn. Agk wx wm fhpwln ds ztov djoa mnwdl ers t wcjhxe au Crdjiy'l vsxhkv, talfw ktf nppe. Qnsdecqp Qcjhxrnmdz nal avwfx, ncuknq cg whxlqy, bf wxsqgax tufutc cbk cvfhgmwdz, ied mv fwqxvvf vhoo kpmn zauwlr, tur lc bafptm djst hl ltl The above text could be translated via a Viginere cipher, with a key translated by using a letter to number translator on the Mayan numbers.The cipher output a very very long passage from the book Mythology by Thomas Bulfinch.This passage was used in a Book Cipher translator, which output this message:Call us at us tele phone number two one four three nine oh nine six oh eight This phone number, when dialed, simply played the following message through a vocal scrambler:Very good. You have done well. There are three prime numbers associated with the original final.jpg image. 3301 is one of them. You will have to find the other two. Multiply all three of these numbers together and add a .com to find the next step. Good luck. Goodbye. The number 3301, when multiplied with the image dimensions which both happened to be prime, output this number: 509 x 503 x 3301 = 845145127. 845145127.com simply showed a cicada image and a countdown timer.The cicada led to no clues, simply outputting this message when OutGuessed:-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1  You have done well to come this far.  Patience is a virtue.  Check back at 17:00 on Monday, 9 January 2012 UTC.  3301 -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.11 (GNU/Linux)  iQIcBAEBAgAGBQJPCKDUAAoJEBgfAeV6NQkPf9kP/19tbTFEy+ol/vaSJ97A549+ E713DyFAuxJMh2AY2y5ksiqDRJdACBdvVNJqlaKHKTfihiYW75VHb+RuAbMhM2nN C78eh+xd6c4UCwpQ9vSU4i1Jzn6+T74pMKkhyssaHhQWfPs8K7eKQxOJzSjpDFCS FG7oHx6doPEk/xgLaJRCt/IJjNCZ9l2kYinmOm7c0QdRqJ+VbV7Px41tP1dITQIH /+JnETExUzWbE9fMf/eJl/zACF+gYii7d9ZdU8RHGi14jA2pRjc7SQArwqJOIyKQ IFrW7zuicCYYT/GDmVSyILM03VXkNyAMBhG90edm17sxliyS0pA06MeOCjhDGUIw QzBwsSZQJUsMJcXEUOpHPWrduP/zN5qHp/uUNNGj3vxLrnB+wcjhF8ZOiDF6zk7+ ZVkdjk8dAYQr62EsEpfxMT2dv5bJ0YBaQGZHyjTEYnkiukZiDfExQZM2/uqhYOj3 yK0J+kJNt7QvZQM2enMV7jbaLTfU3VZGqJ6TSPqsfeiuGyxtlGLgJvd6kmiZkBB8 Jj0Rgx/h9Tc4m9xnVQanaPqbGQN4vZF3kOp/jAN5YjsRfCDb7iGvuEcFh4oRgpaB 3D2/+Qo9i3+CdAq1LMeM4WgCcYj2K5mtL0QhpNoeJ/s0KzwnXA+mxBKoZ0S8dUX/ ZXCkbOLoMWCUfqBn8QkQ =zn1y -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- When the timer hit zero, the cicaida’s message changed. It now read:52.216802, 21.018334 48.85057059876962, 2.406892329454422 48.85030144151387,2.407538741827011 47.664196, -122.313301 47.637520, -122.346277 47.622993, -122.312576 37.5196666666667, 126.995 33.966808, -117.650488 29.909098706850486 -89.99312818050384 25.684702, -80.441289 21.584069, -158.104211 - -33.90281, 151.18421 36.0665472222222, -94.1726416666667 37.577070, 126.813122 Coordinates. These coordinates led to street lamps around the world that all had the following image and one of two possible QR codes:These QRs led to two possible images, both of cicadas. The images contained these two messages:-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1   A poem of fading death, named for a king Meant to be read only once and vanish Alas, it could not remain unseen.   1:5 152:24 the product of the first two primes 14:13 7:36 12:10 7:16 24:3 271:22 10:7 13:28 12:7 86:17 93:14 the product of the first two primes 16:7 96:4 19:13 47:2 71:22 75:9 77:4   You've shared too much to this point. We want the best,  not the followers. Thus, the first few there will receive the prize.   Good luck.   3301 -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.11 (GNU/Linux)   iQIcBAEBAgAGBQJPB/nmAAoJEBgfAeV6NQkPEnEQAKl5qtb3ZE5vs+c08KuzAi4a tQEE71fvb65KQcX+PP5nHKGoLd0sQrZJw1c4VpMEgg9V27LSFQQ+3jSSyan7aIIg SDqhmuAcliKwf5ELvHM3TQdyNb/OnL3R6UvavhfqdQwBXCDC9F0lwrPBu52MJqkA ns93Q3zxec7kTrwKE6Gs3TDzjlu39YklwqzYcUSEusVzD07OVzhIEimsOVY+mW/C X87vgXSlkQ69uN1XAZYp2ps8zl4LxoaBl5aVtIOA+T8ap439tTBToov19nOerusB 6VHS192m5NotfQLnuVT4EITfloTWYD6X7RfqspGt1ftb1q6Ub8Wt6qCIo6eqb9xm q2uVzbRWu05b0izAXkHuqkHWV3vwuSfK7cZQryYA7pUnakhlpCHo3sjIkh1FPfDc xRjWfnou7TevkmDqkfSxwHwP5IKo3r5KB87c7i0/tOPuQTqWRwCwcWOWMNOS7ivY KQkoEYNmqD2Yz3Esymjt46M3rAuazxk/gGYUmgHImgcu1zzK7Aq/IozXI7EFdNdu 3EoRJ/UL9Y0l0/PJOG5urdeeTyE0b8bwgfC2Nk/c8ebaTkFbOnzXdAvKHB03KEeU PtM6d6DngL/LnUPFhmSW7K0REMKv62h9KyP/sw5QHTNh7Pz+C63OO3BsFw+ZBdXL hGqP6XptyZBsKvz2TLoX =aXFt -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1   In twenty-nine volumes, knowledge was once contained. How many lines of the code remained when the Mabinogion paused? Go that far in from the beginning and find my first name.   1:29 6:46 the product of the first two primes 2:37 14:41 17:3 27:40 the first prime 2:33 1:1 7:45 17:29 21:31 12:17 the product of the first two primes 22:42 15:18 24:33 27:46 12:29 25:66 7:47   You've shared too much to this point. We want the best,  not the followers. Thus, the first few there will receive the prize.   Good luck.   3301 -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.11 (GNU/Linux)   iQIcBAEBAgAGBQJPB1luAAoJEBgfAeV6NQkP9oAP+gLu+FsRDf3aRcJtBkCOU2MX r/dagOTvCKWtuV+fedy0enWUZ+CbUjXOr98m9eq2z4iEGqKd3/MBXa+DM9f6YGUE jPum4wHtQDSJlZMazuYqJOVZGw5XmF25+9mRM6fe3H9RCiNDZpuXl3MzwdivYhcG B5hW14PcdHHteQf3eAUz+p+s06RDs+q1sNGa/rMQIx9QRe71EJwLMMkMfs81kfJC tCt21+8ud0Xup4tjUBwul7QCcH9bqKG7cnR1XWsDgdFP6a4x9Jl2/IUvp1cfeT7B YLS9W3lCM8thMemJr+ztQPZrpDlaLIitAT2L0B3f/k4co89v5X2I/toY8Z3Cdvoi hk0AdWzMy/XLDgkPnpEef/aFmnls53mqqe9xKAUQPMrI73hiJ+5UZWuJdzCpvt+F BjfQk15EJoUUW16K2+mBA1cSd+HJlnkslUTsjkq0E36XKChP+Cvbu/p6DLUMM2Xl +n3iospCkkHR9QDcHzE4Rxg9A435yHqqJ/sL2MXG/CY8X4ec6U0/+UCIF9spuv8Y 7w66D05pI2u9M/081L7Br0i0Mpdf9fDblO/6GksskccaPkMQ3MRtsL+p9o6Dnbir 6Z2wH2Kw1Bf0Gfx4VcpHBikoWJ5blCc6tfvT+qXjVOZjWAL7DvReavSEmW1/fubN C3RWcjeI4QET2oKmV2NK =LWeJ -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- This is where the hunt began to quiet down. People realized that going against Cicaida 3301’s wishes may endanger their very lives as this search was no longer internet-only. Cicaida had demonstrated their power, placing signs all around the world and the few hunters left were no longer public about it with the exception of Joel.The book passage was deciphered eventually by using codes from the second message, resulting in this seemingly random jumble of text:sq6wmgv2zcsrix6t.onionThis text was a dark web link accessible via TOR browser.The site displayed this:Congratulations!  Please create a new email address with a public, free web-based service. Once you've never used before, and enter it below. We recommend you do this while still using tor, for anonymity.  We will email you a number within the next few days (in the order in which you arrived at this page). Once you've recieved it, come back to this page and append a slash and then the number you recieved to this url. (For example, if you recieved "3894894230934209", then you would go to "[http:// http://sq6wmgv2zcsrix6t.onion/3894894230934209]")  3301 The trail essentially went cold here. There are some leaked rumors about a MIDI file leading to another puzzle, but nobody who completed it publicly announced anything of the sort.A month later, this message was displayed on the Reddit forum:The P.S led to another crazy hunt a year later. However, this hunt was not as public and the trail seemingly went cold early on. The realization that the Cicada organization was actually a powerful and intelligent syndicate and not some coder playing a prank had an effect on the hunters, who were very quiet about anything they did. To this day, nobody knows who Cicada 3301 is, why they devised such an elaborate hunt, or what happened to the people who cracked the final puzzle.Blank Room Soup.AVIWhile other unsolved internet mysteries like Cicaida 3301 are certainly ominous, Blank Room Soup is plain out creepy.A man named Reymond Persi, a theatrical visionary, created a series of characters that he called RayRay.These characters were envisioned to have mime-like movements and a very specific demeanor. Reymond spent weeks training professional actors to properly portray his characters for a show.When the RayRay project went on tour in 2008, two costumes randomly went missing after a show. Reymond looked everywhere for these costumes but could not find them, so he assumed they were stolen.Now here is where things get creepy. A week later, Reymond received an email from an anonymous address that simply stated: “from a fan.” Attached was a video file, named BlankRoomSoup.avi. The video depicted a shirtless man of Asian or Latino complexity with a censored face scarfing down soup in a white room with an oversized spoon.After around 30 seconds of the man eating, a figure enters the room, dressed in a RayRay costume.The figure, perfectly portraying the RayRay diction according to Reymond, silently enters the room and the man immediately starts sobbing. He continues to sob while scarfing down soup, and the RayRay kneels down and begins to stroke the man’s back lightly.After around a minute of this, a second RayRay enters the room and also begins to stroke the man’s back, who is still sobbing while messily eating soup.The video ends suddenly after a minute of this.Reymond posted this video to the internet, asking who did this and why. The eerie video and the story rapidly blew up, but nobody confessed, even anonymously.After a while, another email was sent to Reymond, this time completely blank apart from a video named 2.AVI. The video depicts the man eating soup again, this time alone. He stops eating and begins to gag suddenly, and as he does a RayRay silently enters the room.The man does not appear to notice him. The second RayRay enters the room silently after almost ten seconds, and they silently watch the man.After almost twenty seconds, they exchange glances. Suddenly, one character rushes across the room, arms raised. A scream rings out and the video cuts silent.And that was it. No confession, no explanation, nothing. To this day, nobody knows what happened to the man, the costumes, or the creators. The RayRay act was canceled and the videos faded into myth.Sad SatanIn 2015, a YouTuber named Obscure Horror Corner received an anonymous tip from a subscriber, only known as ZK. The YouTuber did a playthrough of the series, claiming the anonymous tip he received led him to a Dark Web forum with the game available for download.The game consists of a first-person camera traversing a black and white maze, being chased by strange creatures. There is no plot, story, or mechanics. Random ends in the maze contain easter eggs, strange images, and cutscenes that are not discernable.The game gained popularity and a subreddit where internet gurus discussed the game.Suddenly, on 4Chan, a user named ZK posted, claiming that Obscure Horror Corner did not play the “true” version of the game, which he included in a link.This version of the game included a deadly virus and random cutscenes that showed gore, torture, and child pornography. Many sections also contain ASCII characters on the wall that translate to the phrases “I see you,” “You can’t escape me,” “I can track you,” etc. Given that the true version of the game was riddled with advanced viruses, these threats are likely actually true.This game is riddled with easter eggs, containing child molester monologues in the soundtrack that are heavily stretched and processed in addition to the flashing video cutscenes depicting child abuse and murder.The sheer amount of secrets, easter eggs, and other content hidden behind this seemingly plain game are mind-boggling and it is still poorly understood. To this day ZK and the true origins of this game are unknown.These three mysteries are the most prominent in Internet history, although many many more exist, some of which involve child abuse, murder, and worse. While the internet contains lots of interesting things, you do not want to see everything it has to offer.Dream On,Jaiden

Index:A. QuoraB. RedditC. Youtube ChannelsD. Other websitesE. Blogs for MBA studentsF. Various interestsG. Short StoriesH. Wikipedia articlesA. Quora(Each link is a separate answer)Best questions on QuoraBest answers of 2015Best answers of 2014TechnologyMoviesEntrepreneurshipLiteratureBooksBook RecommendationsWritingComicsHinduismTravelCookingGoogleMarketingMilitaryHarry PotterB. RedditI. Have a question?AskReddit : The mother of all "ask" multi-reddits. Any question you have, shoot it to this 20 mn + community.AskScience : For questions pertaining to science. No bullshit tolerated. Answers generally contain authentic and credible sourcesAskScienceFiction : How can Superman fly at speed > c? Feel a disturbance in the force? Wanna become Batman? What about some Wizarding world's natural rules? A host of intriguing questions and equally incredible answers.AskAcademia : For academical pursuitsAskEngineers : For when you need stuff to get repaired. Or broken completely.AskHistorians : To take a look back in timeHomeworkHelp : When you are too lazy.ask_gender : For the socially awkwardtipofmytongue : Ever been confounded by something that you know but can't remember the name? May be a movie you saw when young? Or that song they played at the pub yesterday?what_is_this___ : Click a photograph. And the community will let you know what it isII. Wanna learn something?Explain Like I'm Five : A simple, layman explanation of even the most intriguing questions.Today I Learned (TIL) : A compendium of things/facts people stumble across on a daily basis.Life Pro Tips (LPT) : Stuff they don't teach you in school or collegeLifeHacks : Stuff they don't teach you in school or college. Part 2You Should Know (YSK) : Sort of like TIL but with a purpose. Stuff that you should know to lead a better life.HowTo : Learn how to do simple stuffDIY (Do It Yourself) : Learn how to build simple stuffUniversityofReddit : Probably an underrated sub. People actually take classes here. Sort of like Reddit Coursera.IWantToLearn : Wanna learn something? Ask. And someone will come along and teach you the same.III. Some really good, intense or offbeat stuff here:DepthHub : A collection of some of the best, in-depth conversations on Reddit.RedditThroughHistory : If Reddit existed way back, what kind of posts would the front page have.Futurology : The pseudo-counterpart to RedditThroughHistory. Discussions on upcoming technologies and the evolution and future of mankind.Foodforthought : Something to stimulate and excite your neurons. Things to ponder on.TrueReddit : Started off by some users when they saw that the quality of posts on reddit was declining. Almost all upvoted submissions are of wonderful quality.IAmA : The flagship community of reddit. Celebrities and unusual people come and field questions from the community. People like Obama, Bill Gates, Buzz Aldrin, Neil DeGrasse Tyson etc have done one.Here's the Google Calendar they use to track and notify users of upcoming AMAs:IAmA Scheduleblowit : Space for people to share stuff that is "mind-blowing" in a sentence of two.trees : for Marijuana lovers.UpliftingNews : Who doesn't need a dose of some good news in these times of distress. Witness people doing wonderful stuff, businessmen giving back to society, people reaching out to each other etc. A must-read for when you are feeling down.IV. Need some fun?Today I Fucked Up (TIFU) : People doing stupid shitShowerthoughts : People thinking stupid shit while showering.FanTheories : A place to speculate about stuff from books, movies, TV shows, anime etc. The reasoning and logical construction of some is brilliant.nottheonion : A collection of news that look like they belong to The Onion but are actually true.ExplainLikeImCalvin : The parodied version of Explain Like I'm Five. If you had a kid like Calvin, and he asked you a question, how would you tackle it.V. Can't sleep at night?All Things Horror: The umbrella sub.NoSleep : People posting original, long, detailed stories. Posted as "true" accounts and treated as the same.cryosleep: The sci-fi version of NoSleep.shortscarystories : The shorter version of NoSleep. Stories in less than 275 words.creepy : All things creepy - pics, stories, videos.creepypasta : A sub dedicated to the Creepypasta culture.Glitch_in_the_Matrix : Stories about stuff that you can't explain. Things that appear out of nowhere, or where they shouldn't be. Assuming out world is a matrix simulation, these phenomena are called glitches.LetsNotMeet : True accounts of people experiencing something terrifying - stalkers, strange noises etc.UnresolvedMysteries : self-explanatoryVI. Missed out on the news?worldnews : For all news except USnews: For all news (primarily US-centric)VII. For gamersgaming : The umbrella sub.A list of all gaming-related subreddits: Top Ten Video Game SubredditsVIII. For audiophilesI would recommend only two:/r/music : The mother reddit for all things music. Fridays are for in-depth discussions, Saturdays for fresh music.ListenToThis : For music recommendations.If you really want to get in-depth, a really comprehensive list of genre and interest based sub-reddits has been compiled by /r/music can be found here: musicsubreddits.IX. For comic loverscomics : For all web + print comics. Comics usually are strips posted by users or the artists themselves.comicbooks : Only for print. Interesting scenes, tid-bits, piece of history from the 2 major publication houses.manga : For all things manga.Webcomics : Only for webcomics.X. For the librocubicularistsbooks : The umbrella reddit. A wonderful sub with book-discussions, AMAs by popular authors, recommendations etc.A list of related sub-reddits here: relatedsubreddits - booksFor specific books and/or series.asoiaf : A Song of Ice and FireHunger GamesThe HobbitLord Of The RingsTheDarkTowerharrypotterThe Kingkiller ChronicleTheMortalInstrumentsXI. For the lovers of the visual mediummovies : For all stuff movies - trailers, discussions, articles, fan artstelevision : For all stuff TV.The top bar of the sub-reddit also lists specific sub-reddits for specific TV series sorted by genre.The Reddit Cinema Arts Feed : Feed curated using content from 26 movie related subreddits. Worth bookmarkingFor specific movies and TV seriesGame of ThronesTrueDetectiveTheWalkingDeadStar WarsArrested Developmenthow i met your motherBig Bang TheoryFamily GuyBreaking BadGothamHannibalHomelandHouse of CardsOrange is the New BlackDoctor WhoSupernaturalXII. For geeksTechnology : 5mn+ subscribers. A brilliant sub for all things tech.geek : Not a very social placeReddit Fantasy : For the fantasy genreMinecraft : duh!wowthissubexists : A sub-reddit discovery sub-reddit. People post about obscure subs that exist and might be of use to others.XIII. For the shutterbugsPhotography : The umbrella sub.I Took a Picture (ITAP) : People share personal clicks and others give feedback for appreciation and improvement.Photo Critique : Similar to ITAP.photomarket : For people to sell and buy photos.A list of related subreddits: metareddit - PhotographyXIV. For budding writerswriting : Discusses everything related to writing - techniques, advice, news etc. Has a weekly critique thread where people post their snippets for a good critique.worldbuilding : For people wanting to get into Fantasy writing. Focuses on developing the ability to conceptualize, create and develop fantasy worlds and back-stories before writing the actual thingScreenwriting : For budding screenwritersshutupandwrite : A self-help club where people push themselves and others to get thinking done and start writing.A list of all writing-related sub-reddits is compiled by the folks at WritingHub and is on their sidebar.XV. Reading/r/respectthreads - For anyone who loves comics, video games, anime, and manga (mostly).The people over at /r/respectthreads do exhaustive compilations (with proof) of the powers and feats of characters from different mediums. And I am serious when I say exhaustive.So, if you are new to comics (say) and want to how powerful or impressive a character is, head over there.E.g. Sentry respect thread, Dr. Strange respect thread, Green Lantern (Alan Scott) respect thread/r/tldr - A daily summary of the top posts on Reddit./r/hardscience - For the academically inclined, a collection of actual scientific papers, not pop-culture science./r/100yearsago - Catch up on history by reading what happened today, 100 years ago.XVI. Learning/r/learnuselesstalents - Things they don't teach you in school (or anywhere for that matter). Impress people by learning utterly useless stuff./r/UniversityofReddit - A group of learning enthusiasts who like to create and attend informal courses (the inspiration for my blog UoQ).XVII. Listening/r/treemusic - A never-ending playlist for when you are high.The sub-reddit player: radd.it!XVIII. Watching/r/mealtimevideos - Interesting videos for when you are eating. Not too short, not too long./r/EducativeVideos - Learn while you watch./r/ArtisanVideos - Watch the masters of various arts at work./r/fullmoviesonyoutube - Need I say more?/r/fullcartoonsonyoutube - Like above, but for cartoons.XIX. Related to Reddit/r/OutOfTheLoop - Do you ever feel left out on some hot or trending topic? Too afraid to ask people in case you come off as stupid? Worry not; get updated on anything you have been missing out on./r/wowthissubexists - A sort of meta sub to discover obscure subreddits on interesting, weird, and seemingly insignificant topics./r/subredditoftheday - Similar to WTSE, SROTD nominates one official sub-reddit each day. Kind of similar to the Quoran of the Day blog here on Quora./r/SubredditDrama - All the high-school type drama that goes on on Reddit, in one place. They have popcorn too.XX. Light reads/r/DogShowerThoughts - What is your dog thinking? Akin to the /r/showerthoughts sub (which has recently become full of inane and duplicate "thoughts"), but from a fresh perspective./r/explainlikeimcalvin - For parents with highly inquisitive kids./r/AnimalsBeingBros - To all bros on Quora. And all animals too./r/chemicalreactiongifs - Watch fascinating gifs of chemical reactions without risking burning down the lab./r/PerfectTiming - Every photographer's deepest desire is to click the perfectly-timed picture. Here, you can view everyone's lucky stroke.C. Youtube ChannelsHere's a list of 86 channels you should subscribe to, sorted according to interests.Index:Serious learning (including official college courses and other MOOCs)Science and mathematicsNatureSpaceHistoryTechnologyLiteratureReal newsVaried interests (Channels that create content spread over multiple topics)Niche interests (Arts, Finance, Philosophy, Travel, Food, Magic, Farming)Fun while learning (Videos that are informative as well as fun to watch)A. Serious learningA.1. College coursesYale Courses - The official channel of Yale offers full length lectures on various topics, by some of the world's leading and most-respected experts.The lectures are beautifully arranged and sorted as classes.To start, you can check out the series on Financial markets by Robert J. Shiller - a 2013 Nobel prize winner in Economics for his work on "empirical analysis of asset prices".MIT OpenCourseWare - Similar to Yale Courses, here's the official channel of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.GreshamCollege - A collection of full video lectures and some interesting shorts by Gresham College, uploaded so that everyone can learn for free.A.2. Other official coursesKhan Academy - The official channel of the first true online educator, Salman Khan, that started off as simple videos for his niece.(*Subject-wise assorted playlists*)A.3. Everything elseBIO - A collection of biographies of some of the most famous people from all spheres of life.(*Sorted playlists - Olympic medalists, Oscar winners, actors, politicians, athletes et al*)DOCUMENTARY TUBE - A collection of full-length documentaries.Big Think - showcasing content that is actually relevant, analyzing the same, and featuring some of the most well-known thinkers of our time - Bill Nye, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Stephen Fry.B. Science and MathematicsApplied Science - Focusing more on the practical application of science rather than the theoretical, Applied Science does some really quirky videos like building an LCD (Liquid Crystal Display) or the electron microscope image of a vinyl LP.Minute Physics - Explaining some basic concepts as well as some of the most FAQs related to science with the help of hand drawn animation, in videos of less than 4-5 mins. Perfect for the less patient ones.They also provide some definitive Quora-type answers. For example, this video that proves that running in the rain is better than walking if you can find a shelter before the rain stops. Else, both are the same.SciShow - Keeping you abreast of what is happening in Science, SciShow does a good job of combining news, theories, and random facts.Naked Science - Don't go by the name; it is a perfectly SFW channel. It is named so because it tries to unravel some of the mysteries and secrets of science.ASAP Science - Similar to Minute Physics in almost all respects. The only difference being that their horizon is broader and includes biology, philosophy, neurology and other fields.MinuteEarth - Part of the same family as MinutePhysics, MinuteEarth does a similar style of videos, but this time focusing on everything related to nature - biology, ecology, genetics etc.Sixty Symbols - A collection of random, fun videos about mostly Physics and Astronomy.StarTalk Radio - Neil deGrasse Tyson talks about everything science.Veritasium - A play on the word, Veritaserum (or the Truth Serum) from the Harry Potter series, Veritasium tries to bring the truth and dispel myths about science in the public.For example, the infamous myth that no person can stay in a perfect Anechoic chamber for more than 45 minutes, was disproved, when the creator Derek Muller stayed in one himself for more than an hour.NumberphileVideos about numbers - it's that simple.Reactions - The best Chemistry channel out there, bringing to you the chemical reactions behind some of the daily phenomenon you encounter, be it your morning coffee, or your dog sniffing another's butt.(*I especially love their Superhero series*)C. NatureAnimal PlanetBBC EarthNatGeoWildDiscoveryThe 4 biggest nature channels on TV offer some interesting content for nature lovers.This Place - "This place" is a veiled reference to the fact that we have only one planet. The channel tried to bring to notice some of the biggest issues with nature - viz-a-viz ecological preservation, and ties it to some of the basic theories of psychology and game theory.D. SpaceNASA - Stay updated on the latest events in Space exploration. And also on what is going behind the curtains with this playlist, updated weekly to offer a glimpse of life at NASA.(*This Week @NASA*)Scientific American Space Lab - Offering videos from the Space section of one of the most popular Science magazines.(Recommended: The *It Happened In Space* playlist.)VideoFromSpace - Space.com's Youtube channel. Get a glimpse of life in space, especially from their videos featuring astronaut, Chris Hadfield.(*Astronauts, Cosmonauts, and Taikonauts*)E. HistoryIt's History - (Already featured on the blog)With an aim to cover every major event in recent human history - from the Industrial Revolution, to the numerous wars fought, the channel is a perfect one-lecture crash course for each topic.The Great War - A brilliant channel where the host, Indiana Neidell, aka Indy, aims to cover the entire World War 1 in real-time, with a lag of 100 years.It is a very ambitious project that will take 4 years to complete (2014-18).'The Great War' shows you the history of the First World War in the four years from 1914 to 1918, exactly 100 years ago. Our host Indy takes you back week by week and shows you what was going on in the past. Learn more about the Allies and the Central Powers, emperors, Winston Churchill, Wilhelm II, soldiers, battles and of the life aside the battlefield. Subscribe to our channel to watch a new video every Monday & Thursday!Using a combination of an impressive narrative voice, actual pictures and footage from the war, maps, sketches, and an apt setting for discussing a 100-year old war, Indy manages to present one of the biggest events in human history in a lucid and engaging manner.(I highly recommend saving the official playlist that is updated regularly.*THIS WEEK 100 YEARS AGO - The Great War*)HISTORY - The official channel of the History (US TV network).Smithsonian - The official channel of the Smithsonian group of museums.F. TechnologyCodebabes - While the premise of the channel (women slowly taking off their clothes as the video tutorial progresses) is sexist and promotes the objectification of women (and is inspired from Naked News), the content however is really good, especially for beginners.Eli, the Computer Guy - For the ones who would love to get started with everything computers (Linux, basics of networking including DNS, TCP/IP, VoIP, basic Windows troubleshooting etc)LinusTechTips - Working for a Canadian software/hardware store as a product reviewer, Linus Sebastian soon started his own channel, which now has over 1.8 million subscribers.He reviews most of the incoming tech products, from gaming consoles, to unmanned drones.Also, check out his story on How I Became.G. LiteratureThe Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows - The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows is a website that creates new words; especially tailored to oddly-specific human emotions and experiences. Now they convert the same into beautiful videos.Just for starters,ambedon. a kind of melancholic trance in which you become completely absorbed in vivid sensory details—raindrops skittering down a window, tall trees leaning in the wind, clouds of cream swirling in your coffee—briefly soaking in the experience of being alive, an act that is done purely for its own sake.SpokenVerse - Some of the most important and influential poems of all time, narrated by creator Tom O'Bedlam.(*All of them wonderfully sorted by author*)wordsoftheworld -Ever wondered where a particular word originated? Not anymore.H. Real newsPulitzer Center - The official channel of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, the channel features stories from journalists around the world. Stories that need to be heard.Start with their featured stories collection.Test Tube News - News that actually matters, but is not TRP-worthy enough for channelsVICE -VICE specializes in exploring uncomfortable truths and going to places we don't belong. Herein you will find people talking frankly about their hatred and love for various things, general heresy, the only culture, travel and news documentaries you'll want to watch, tons of exclusive new stuff, and probably not a lot of cats.I. Across varied topicsTed Ed(uation) - The TED Ed channel focuses on disseminating knowledge across a wide variety of interest fields (superheroes, climate change, decoding the human mind, governments and politics, language, mathematics, writing etc.).(Check out their *curated playlists here.*)TEDx Talks - TED Talks are great. But there are a lot of underappreciated ones, that take place during those independently organized events (called TEDx) that go unnoticed.That is until now. The TEDx Talks channel brings you all such talks from all over the world.CrashCourse - Already featured on the blog twice (here and here), CrashCourse is a channel run by the Green brothers - John and Hank. John Green (author) is the reknowned author of multiple best-sellers including Looking for Alaska and The fault in our stars.It is the single best resource on Youtube for learning anything from World History, to US Politics, from Ecology to Astronomy.Start here with this fantastic series by Phil Plait, aka The Bad Astronomer.(Full playlist: *Astronomy - Crash Course*)In a Nutshell – Kurzgesagt - (Already featured on the blog)This isn't exactly a course, but more like a meta course, where you get an erratic Professor who rambles on about dark matter and energy one day and insists on debating the age old question of "are we alone" the next.The best part about Kurzgesagt's videos is that they are beautifully animated. Using both Adobe Illustrator and After Effects, they come up with some stunning visuals which obviously takes a lot of time and effort, one of the primary reasons they only upload 1 or 2 videos per month.Start right here with the first (of two) videos on the Fermi paradox.VSauce - A what-if (XKCD) style collection of videos that seek to answer some of the most common hypothetical questions asked by people.CGP Grey - Educational videos spanning politics, British history, economics and geography.(*Sorted playlists*)#Education - An auto-generated Youtube channel featuring educational content from all the educational channels.Tell me why - Why does stuff happen the way it does? Know through this series of animated shorts.J. Niche InterestsJ.1. ArtsBFI (British Film Institute) - The official Youtube channel of British Film Institute, who maintain the world's largest film archive.J.2. FinanceeHow Finance - Sort of like the ELI5 version of the most common questions people have wrt Finance. eHow Finance does short videos trying to explain the myriad, basic concepts of stock markets, trading, insurance, personal finance etc.J.3. Philosophy, spirituality, metaphysicsRichard Dawkins Foundation for Reason & Science - The official channel of the foundation of the same name by Mr Dawkings. They have videos, interview clips, debates etc of Dawkins and a bunch of his contemporaries on the subject of God, the Universe, human consciousness and so forth.QualiaSoup - Animated videos to help facilitate discussions regarding phislosophy, theism vs atheism, and the science of morality.Spirit Science - Focusing on the spiritual side of the human world.J.4. TraveltravelfilmarchiveThe Travel Film Archive is a collection of travelogues and educational and industrial films -- many of them in color - that show the world the way it was between 1900 and 1970. Our holdings include archives of the renowned travel filmmakers Burton Holmes, Andre de la Varre, and James A. FitzPatrick, as well as footage shot by many other intinerant cameramen.J.5. Culinary ArtsFood Wishes - From Allrecipes.com and FoodWishes.com, the channel features 100s of recipes to help you get started on cooking.(*All recipes sorted by cuisine and occasion*)J.6. MagicDisturb Reality - Learn a few basic magic tricks to amaze your friendsJ.7. Lifehacksexpertvillage - Learn some of the most basic life skills.J.8. FarmingHow Farms Work - Farming is a profession slowly losing its charm. But if you aspire to have one, and have no idea where to start, this channel is for you.K. Fun while learningWatchMojo.com - Uploading 4-6 videos every day, WM is one of the best channels on YT if you simply want to relax and also learn something at the same time.They have a top 10 list on almost every topic - but majorly focusing on movies, music, TV shows, books, and comics.list25 - Same as WM, but with 25 items per list, and a little Buzzfeed styled content.Vi Hart - Vi Hart is a scribbling, fast-talking, restless piece of soul. Her videos are fast-paced, quirky, and at the same time informative. Don't believe me? Check her making hexaflexagons.Mental Floss - Official channel of MentalFloss.com, the channel is perfect for a laid back evening.Smarter Everyday - 140 videos, covering a wide variety of topics, uncovering some of the obscure aspects of science, religion, tradition, nature etc. Learn something new everyday for the next 4 months.Stuff You Should Know - HowStuffWorks - Know the logic that will help you make better informed decisions.TheBackyardScientist - Learn stuff by doing.Hybrid LibrarianIt's Okay To Be SmartLife Noggin3 channels to help you satisfy your daily need of information trivia.D. Other websitesLiterature and readingLetters of Note : Collecting letters, postcards, and all things not found in books by some of the most influential people in the world.Archive.org : Providing free and open access to countless books, websites, songs, movies, and almost everything digital.Project Gutenberg : Thousands of free e-books.Brain Pickings : The best review/recommendation blog for your daily reading needs.Futility Closet : A collection of all oddities in literature and art.CliffsNotes : Helping you understand the plot, the conventions, the themes, the motifs, and character motivations from books.MOOCs: Helping you learn from the comfort of your roomKhan AcademyCourseraedXUdemyiversityUdacityFutureLearnMIT Open CourseWareOpen Learning at HarvardOpen Yale CoursesCMU - Open Learning InitiativeNPTELLearningDuolingo : A new languageCodeacademy : CodingChesscademy : Playing chessJustin Guitar : Playing the guitarLizard Point: GeographyTED : Great talks on various subjectsLifehacker : Tips and tricks for everyday lifeAddictiveTips : Tips and tricks for the techiesInstructables : Make it yourselfTop Documentary Films : Hundreds of free documentariesAlso, Documentary HavenMultiple StackExchange forums (depending on interest)The complete list can be found here: http://stackexchange.com/sites#Multiple subreddits (again, depending on interest)Sub-reddit starter packBooster packOthersSnopes.com : Debunking myths. One at a time.TV Tropes : Breaking down the conventions used in all forms of art.Atlas Obscura : Exploring the unknowns of the world.Listverse : Lists, lists, and more lists.Neatorama : The alternative 'front page of the internet' - curating the most interesting things from the web.The Needle Drop : Music reviewsThe Art Of Manliness : Helping you become the perfect "man".Blogs for MBA aspirants (in the domains of Finance, Marketing, Economics, Leadership, and Entrepreneurship)Deepak Mehta (दीपक मेहता)'s answer to Which are the must read sites and blogs for an MBA student specifically for, e.g., finance, marketing, startups, technology, et cetera?E. Blogs for MBA studentsI. FinanceProf. Jayanth R. Varma's Financial Markets Blog: Prof Jayant Verma is a Professor of Finance (mainly Financial markets) at IIMA. He is one of the most impressive teachers I have ever met. He was one of the first members of SEBI and is on the board of multiple big companies including Infosys and Axis Bank. His blog, which has been up since 2005, is a brilliant resource on understanding the nuances of the financial markets.Dealbook (NYT): Dealbook is the news aggregator section of NYTimes to keep you updated on the current state of affairs of the Fin industry.Mergers & Inquisitions: Everything you need to know about every aspect of the Financial world - from big investment banks to boutique firms, from Private Equity to Hedge Funds and AM/WM firms.Investment Banking Blog: The holy mecca for preparation of i-Banking interviews, the IB Blog offers everything from bootcamps and interview prep courses (paid) to free resources like basic interview questions, overview of the industry etc.Wall Street Oasis: Similar to #2 above, but with more functionality to read the best articles of the month/week/day etc.FT Alphaville: Another news aggregator that will make sure you do not have any time left in your day (courtesy it's exhaustive coverage of current affairs)II. EntrepreneurshipEntrepreneur: Your companion on the entrepreneurial journey. The site will keep you updated with the start-up world, help you work on various aspects of your professional self, and also provide the much needed pep-talk when you are feeling down/exhausted/defeated.AVC: The chronicles of Fred Wilson ( a Venture Capitalist for the past 30 years) with some incredible credentials to his name (including investments in Twitter, Tumble, Zynga, Foursuare etc). AVC is probably the most widely-read VC blog in the world.III. MarketingMad Over Marketing: MoM is a fun blog. They capture everything from brand wars on twitter, to collection of some of the best and most important marketing campaigns. The blog is a very easy read and will help you broaden your horizon when it comes to thinking of how you can ante up your marketing/advertising game.Duct Tape Marketing: Duct Tape Marketing focuses on small businesses and startups. They take into account that small businesses do not have the funds that large corporations do. So their marketing tactics need to be tailored to their financial capacity.aimClear: aimClear wants to be the single resource when it comes to your personal as well as company brand by using every possible tool in the marketer's kitty - from social media to SEO, from conclaves to data management using basic tools like Excel.Bufferapp social: Bufferapp is an exhaustive resource to help you manage, grow, and track your social media persona.HubSpot Blog: A collection of 3 secondary blogs - focusing on sales, marketing, and your agency. This trio will help you streamline your sales activity, boost your pre-sales capabilities, help you traverse the maze of sales-killer questions like, "This is too costly", and also help you manage your time and productivity in a better manner.Marketing Land: The Dealbook of marketing, ML is the one-stop solution for your marketing trends news requirement.Startup Marketing | Ryan Gum: Ryan Gum is a growth hacker who helps create marketing plans for startups and small businesses starting from creating your initial pitch, attracting your first customer, and an exhaustive list of Startup Marketing Resources.The SumAll Blog: The SumAll blog is like the child of Buzzfeed and Medium (and not in a negative sense). They post content which is useful and is also written in a fun manner. The articles are often crisp and under a 5-min read.IV. EconomicsFreakonomics: The uthors of the best-selling economics-infused-with-pop-culture book have more to say and share than the 2 books. The blog is usually a collection of podcasts that aim to explore the "hidden side of economics" and highlight outliers, which although rare, are extremely critical.Why Nations Fail: On the same line as Freakonomics, the blog by Daren Acemoglu is a follow-up on his book of the same name and explores similar obscure events that shaped the rise and fall of nations and civilizations.Economixcomix: The companion blog for the graphic novel of the same name by Michael Goodwin, Economixcomix explains the basic tenets of Economics in a simple way, along with illustrations to make understanding easier.The Grumpy Economist: The perennial pessimist, the one who finds faults in everything, the dad who bores his kid during dinner with his constant rants and criticisms, John Cochrane provides an unabashed, and hard-hitting critique that exposes the not-so-sunny side of the world economy.Investing and Economics Blog: The Curios Cat blogs is for us. The laymen. The dabblers. It focuses heaving on personal finance, economics, financial literacy, tax planning, credit management et al; stuff that affects the majority of the populace on a regular basis.The Upshot: The NYT economics companion to its financial section, Dealbook, The Upshot is all you need to read to be perfectly updated of what is happening, why it is happening, what would be the consequences, and what could have been done better.Economist's View: A collection of self-posts and the hottest posts from other economics blogs.The Money Illusion: TMI focuses on the money and capital markets and provides wonderful commentary on financial crises, international economics, foreign reserve dynamics, monetary and fiscal policies, labor markets etc.V. LeadershipGuy Kawasaki: Guy is one of the most well known figures in Silicon Valley, and among the first "tech evangelist".All Things Workplace: As the name suggests, this is a blog for managers, bosses, and professionals and aims to cover all aspects of workplace management including effective communication, employee engagement, conflict management, incorporating cultural diversity and differences, various facets of leadership, boosting creativity, and so on.Seth's Blog: Seth is a funny guy. The funniest of all in this list. Although he calls his blog a marketing blog, it's more generic in nature and oft has funny quips and clever observations interspersed with longform articles.Lean In: Everyone knows the book by Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook. The blog aims to continue the story and encourage and empower women to face challenges, voice their opinions, and grow themselves in the workplace.Switch & Shift: S&S aims at helping business transition from the traditional workplace model to the current, more information driven, globally-diverse-yet-connected workplace.Hot Momma's Project: Don't go by the sexist-sounding name, HMP is sort of a companion to LeanIn and strives to help women claim their rightful place in the corporate world.Culture University: In a globally inter-connected world, understanding, accepting, and imbibing cultural diversity is an important trait for organizations to sustain themselves and grow.Big Think: Having Bill Nye, TheScienceGuy, on board is a big achievement for Big Think which aims to be an idea hub, an "Youtube for ideas" as its founders put it.VI. OthersBob Sutton: Bob, a Professor of Management Science at Stanford, writes on everything including, but not limited to, workplace culture, book reviews, team management, employee management etc.Harvard Business Review: HBR is the most popular published management magazine that covers almost everything relevant to an MBA degree. If there has to be a starting point for an MBA student/aspirant, this is it.F. Various interestsDetailed posts to help you with the resources and recommendations to start learning new things. All posts first appeared on UoQGetting Started#1: Finance#2: Economics#3: Marketing#4: Philosophy#5: Game DevelopmentResources#1: 2 free courses on MS Excel (Basics, Macros)#2: For MBA aspirants#3: Best Youtube channels for learning#4: Everything on startups and entrepreneurship#5: The Android Classroom#6: A few more educational Youtube channels#7: Indian podcasts#8: 200+ Programming/Computer Science MOOCsInformal Courses#1: The Great War - Indiana Neidell#2: Crash Course - World History - John Green#3: Crash Course - Astronomy - Phil Plait (The Bad Astronomer)#4: In a nutshell - Kurzgesagt#5: The basics of animation - Ted-ed#6: Crash Course - Ecology - Hank Green#7: Managing your money - An introductory guide to Personal FinanceG. Short StoriesBelow is the list of 72 wonderful short stories that can be found online for free. (Click on the title to go to the story page.)So can you take a couple of days off from your busy schedule?Science fiction#1: All you zombies - Robert A. Heinlein (4.5 stars)Probably the most convoluted and complex of all time travel stories, All you zombies is a masterpiece that has been lauded for its originality and the sheer mind boggling complexity of its plot.#2: The last question - Isaac Asimov (5 stars)The best work of the best sci-fi writer that ever lived.The last question was asked for the first time, half in jest, on May 21, 2061, at a time when humanity first stepped into the light. The question came about as a result of a five dollar bet over highballsAsimov takes one simple, fundamental question and weaves a story around it - as story spanning billions of years, the vastness of the universe and the hyperspace. The narrative is captivating, enchanting and fast paced. There is a continued sense of awe throughout as the story nears completion. And then, in a single closing statement, Asimov pulls offs a stunner.*Since "The last question" is rated 5 stars, no other story will be.#3: A sound of thunder - Ray Bradbury (3.5 stars)2055. Time machines. Safaris to the past - humans going back millions of years to hunt exotic animals including dinosaurs. Every moment is carefully planned to avoid making even the slightest change to the future. Or is it?Butterfly effect!#4: They are made out of meat - Terry Bisson (3.5 stars)We are not alone. But we might never know that. And there's a reason why.#5: 2BR02B - Kurt Vonnegut (4 stars)The story of a utopia. Of mankind's most lusted after ambitions come true. And mankind's most dreaded horrors too. A painter, a father, a doctor, triplets, a woman with a strange job, drupelets and the Happy Hooligan.Vonnegut's dark "paradise" leaves much to be desired and pondered and answered.#6: The Nothing Equation - Tom Godwin (4 stars)The space ships were miracles of power and precision; the men who manned them, rich in endurance and courage. Every detail had been checked and double checked; every detail except—THE NOTHING EQUATION.An observation bubble at the edge of our galaxy. One man to oversee it surrounded by vast legions of nothingness. The first commits suicide, the second goes insane. Now there is a third.#7: I have no mouth, and I must scream - Harlan Ellison (4.5 stars)What begins off as another post-apocalyptic world story, where a sentient, all-powerful machine has annihilated humanity, gradually builds up to be a terrifying, what-if tale. 5 survivors of the end of humanity must endure against an immensely powerful and vengeful machine. And there's no way out. There is just the 5 of them and an eternity of pain and torture.#8: As long as you wish - John O'Keefe (3 stars)A coin with a paradoxical statement on both sides: THE STATEMENT ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THIS COIN IS FALSE.A Professor of Philosophy.A strange discovery.A hidden message.#9: No moving parts - Murray F. Yaco (3.5 stars)The story of a time far ahead in the future where everything works perfectly. Human intervention is no longer needed to maintain or fix things. But everything's changing now.That light will be flashing with more and more frequency in the months to come. But not just to signal trouble in space. If I were a superstitious man, I’d think that the age of the perfect machine is about to be superseded by the age of the perfect failure—mechanical failures that can’t be explained on any level.I really believe, childishly, that the mechanics and motions of the galaxy may turn themselves upside down just to snap man out of his apathy and give him some work to do.”#10: The Veldt - Ray Bradbury (3.5 stars)A wonderful story of a utopia. Of a happy family. Of a time when the human civilization has advanced so much that everything you want is done by machines at the slightest thought. A story that explores the question of "How far can you go mechanizing things before you are redundant?"#11: The nine billion names of God - Arthur C. Clarke (3 stars)Lamas at a monastery have taken up an ambitious project - to list down all the 9 billion names of God. And they believe that this is what humanity was made to do. And once the 9 billionth name is listed, our purpose would be fulfilled.But what happens after that? If we have no more use for God, what happens to us? Will everything end? Or is it just the religious fantasy of a bunch of devout fanatics?#12: There will come soft rains - Ray Bradbury (3 stars)A mechanized house. A pre-planned schedule. Machines running around frantically, executing every job. But where are the masters?Bradbury's story is more than what it seems - a bleak commentary on the horrors of nuclear wars and their aftermath.#13: The star - Arthur C Clarke (3.5 stars)AD MAIOREM DEI GLORIAM - For the greater glory of GodA scientific voyage to the remnants of a supernova discover one lonely planet encircling the white dwarf. They stumble upon the carefully and intentionally preserved remains of a civilization - advanced, intelligent and in full bloom of its youth - wiped away by the same sun that gave them life.The team makes some calculations to estimate the date of the supernova explosion (it would have been visible on earth) and come across a startling revelation.#14: Harrison Bergeron - Kurt Vonnegut (3.5 stars)THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren't only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else.A few years into the future, everyone is equal. Now there are only two ways to achieve that - either uplift and empower everyone to the same level, or drag down everyone else to a lowest common ground. It's not surprising what the human race chose.#15: I don't know, Timmy, being God is a big responsibility - Sam Hughes (3 stars)Tim and Diane (and their team) have successfully built the first quantum computer - a device with infinite processing power and storage capacity. Diane programs a simulation of the Big Bang and creates a model of our universe to study. As she approaches the current day, she makes a startling discovery.#16: The coming of the Ice - Green Peyton (4 stars)Is love something entirely of the flesh, something created by an ironic God merely to propagate His race? Or can there be love without emotion, love without passion—love between two cold intellects?A doctor in the 20th century, has finally solved the age-old problem of immortality. Our hero volunteers to be the first to undergo the procedure. However, immortality comes at a price - emotions. Every emotion, starting from love to hate, fear to rage, joy to sorrow, slowly deserts you, until you are nothing more than an empty shell, a walking automaton, devoid of the joy and beauty in everything.Is the price worth paying?#17: The cold equations - Tom Goodwin (3 stars)What will you do when the only option is to kill someone? (No, this is not a case study on morality) But truly, the only option is to kill. There is no margin for error, no probability, however infinitesimal, that there could be an alternate recourse.Fantasy#1: A very old man with enormous wings - Gabriel Garcia Marquez (3 stars)A normal family with a normal backyard. An unexpected visitor. Is it a bird? Is it a moth? Is it a fairy?#2: Snow, Glass, Apples - Neil Gaiman (3.5 stars)In a retelling of one of the most loved fairy tales of all times, Neil Gaiman provides a starkly different viewpoint on the events that transpire and the conditions that lead to them.#3: Nicholas was - Neil Gaiman (3 stars)A short story, short enough to be reproduced here in its entirety.Nicholas Was...older than sin, and his beard could grow no whiter. He wanted to die.The dwarfish natives of the Arctic caverns did not speak his language, but conversed in their own, twittering tongue, conducted incomprehensible rituals, when they were not actually working in the factories.Once every year they forced him, sobbing and protesting, into Endless Night. During the journey he would stand near every child in the world, leave one of the dwarves' invisible gifts by its bedside. The children slept, frozen into time.He envied Prometheus and Loki, Sisyphus and Judas. His punishment was harsher.Ho.Ho.Ho.Life and Philosophy#1: Signs and symbols - Vladimir Nabokov (3.5 stars)An old couple. A sickly child in the hospital. Referential mania. 3 calls from a wrong number.#2: Lorry Raja - Madhuri Vijay (4 stars)The story of a poor, wretched family, working in the iron mines, told through the eyes of the 2nd son, Lorry Raja is sure to stir up a lot of emotions in the reader. The plot is simple, the characters simpler still. And yet, the feeling it evokes isn't some thing that can be explained easily.#3: The necklace - Guy de Maupassant (4.5 stars)“Of all the words of mice and men, the saddest are, "It might have been.” ― Kurt VonnegutA simple couple. A simple life. A wife that yearns for a more exciting life. A party invitation. A borrowed necklace. A wonderful night. A life changed forever. "The necklace" is one of the best stories of love, support, yearnings, strength and regrets. The ending leaves one with an entangle of emotions, most significant of which is a sense of unfairness.#4: Silver Water - Amy Bloom (3 stars)Told from the first person perspective of Violet, Silver Water is a tale of her elder, mentally unstable sister Rose. The story weaves through a, though lightly comic at times, gritty and realistic narrative of having to deal with and adjusting with a family member suffering from acute Schizophrenia.#5: If you were a dinosaur, my love - Rachel Swirsky (3.5 stars)The first person narrative of a woman who wishes her fiancée was a dinosaur and then weaves a fictional world around it - a world of dinosaur operas and weddings. A tale that will leave you chuckling, pondering and going back to re-read the story.#6: The Egg - Andy Weir (4 stars)You were on your way home when you died. It was a card accident. Nothing particularly remarkable, but fatal nonetheless.So begins a tale that spans religion, belief, life, death, afterlife, and reincarnation. Taking a leaf out of Asimov's book, The Egg builds up to a wonderful climax. And delivers.#7: Three questions - Leo Tolstoy (4 stars)In this story, Tolstoy addresses 3 fundamental questions, which since then have been passed down as life lessons and parables.#8: And all the earth a grave - C.C. MacApp (3 stars)There's nothing wrong with dying—it just hasn't ever had the proper sales pitch!You can sell everything if only you know how to. Even death. A brilliant satire on the current media industry and the wave of consumerism that has engulfed the world.#9: The snows of Kilimanjaro - Ernest Hemingway (3.5 stars)A writer. A festering wound. A re-living of regrets, of opportunities passed up, of chances not taken. The slow approach of death, like the night, creeping and inevitable interspersed with a melange of memories, good and bad.#10: To build a fire - Jack London (4 stars)A man and a dog hiking through the snow covered trails of the Yukon in Canada on a day that they shouldn't be. It is "too cold to be travelling along" but the man persists. To defeat the cold, he would need to start a fire. A fire that would be the difference between life and death.#11: The curious case of Benjamin Buttons - F Scott Fitzgerald (4 stars)We have all seen the box office hit starring Brad Pitt in the titular role but there is an eerily, haunting quality to Fitzgerald's writing that makes the experience even more wonderful. The story of a man who starts off as a old man when born and slowly ages backward, turning into a middle aged man, a teenager, a kid, an infant and finally an embryo is fascinating. It is a concept that has always had people wonder and Scott does a great deal of justice to it.#12: The last leaf - O Henry (4 stars)A woman, dying of pneumonia pegs her life to the last leaves on an ivy vine. Bereft of all hope, she plans to take her final breath as the last leaf falls. But will it? Will she?A story about hope. About struggles and finding the strength inside. A story of finding something to live for. We have been told numerous times that appearances can be deceptive. Nothing reinforces the notion more than this masterpiece by O' Henry.#13: An occurrence at Owl Creek bridge - Ambrose Bierce (3.5 stars)The scene opens with a condemned man being hanged on the bridge. Like everyone else on a death sentence, his whole life flashes in front of him. His only wish is to somehow escape the hanging, fall into the river and swim away to safety and his family. That is when the rope snaps.#14: The hunger artist - Franz Kafka (3.5 stars)The story of a man with an unusual occupation - a hunger artist. Someone who fasts for days on end to amuse the world and its spectators. The story is a clever satire on the world where the talented yet trivialized people spend their entire lives in search for a fragment of glory, a single word of appreciation, a small part of the acknowledgment they truly deserve.#15: The one who walks away from Omelas - Ursula K LeGuin (3.5 stars)A city that is the perfect description of a middle-age utopia with its beautiful people, its skilled artists, its bright festivals, its everlasting intellectual orgy of joy. A terrible secret revealed. A compromise that had to be struck. A price that had to be paid.#16: The School - Donald Barthelme (3 stars)30 orange trees planet by 30 kids of a class all dead. Soon followed by the snakes. And the herbs. And the fishes. Death creeps nearer each day. But everything is not as dreaded as you think. There is still hope somewhere out there. Or is it?#17: The yellow wallpaper - Charlotte Perkins Gilman (4 stars)A husband and wife move to a mansion temporarily, something that is grand but suspiciously cheap. The wife believes she is sick and has an eerie feeling about their new home. The husband, however, doesn't. And then there's the room and it's yellow, shabby wallpaper. There is something definitely wrong with it.#18: Hills like white elephants - Ernest Hemingway (4 stars)A couple waiting for a train on a railway station have some beer and a rather intriguing conversation which leaves the reader puzzled and pondering.#19: Flowers for Algernon - Daniel Keyes (4.5 stars)“I don’t know what’s worse: to not know what you are and be happy, or to become what you’ve always wanted to be, and feel alone.”Rarely does a book stir up so many emotions in the reader. Flowers for Algernon is one such. The story is about simple and kind man, Charlie Gordon, with a below average IQ of 65, who undergoes an experimental procedure to triple his intelligence. Told in a narrative, progress report style (Charlie was required to compile a daily diary to monitor his progress), the prose develops in tandem with Charlie's intelligence - starting off as the scribbling of a kid, laced with spelling, grammar, and punctuation errors, and evolving into the publication-worthy musings over Plato's allegory of the cave.Flowers for Algernon is a commentary on human condition, on our schadenfreud-ian tendencies, on the treatment meted out to the mentally challenged, and one man's journey of finding something he never had, and then living through the horror of losing it all over again.#20: Shooting an elephant - George Orwell (3 stars)If you are the conqueror, the master, the dictator, are you really in control? Or are you just a face, just a puppet being manipulated by millions of invisible strings? The strings of the will of the people you oppress?#21: Clean well-lighted place - Ernest Hemingway (4 stars)There is something simple and yet enthralling about Hemingway's words. There's a beauty in those plain sentences. You don't need to exert any efforts. You don't need to read the story. The story reads you. It hooks itself to you and then starts to devour you, but in a pleasant way. And, in a short time, you are completely engulfed. You are now the story.#22: Bullet in the brain - Tobias Wolff (3 stars)A bullet to the brain is surely one of the quickest ways to die. Or is it? To the shot, does the last few milliseconds feel like an eternity?#23: The bet - Anton Chekhov (3.5 stars)A somber gathering of gentlemen soon turns into a passionate discussion about the morality of the death sentence. The ones who advocated it said it was more merciful than life imprisonment - cleaner and quicker. The ones against brought God into the midst of things and stated that the State does not have the right to take someone's life when it itself cannot create life.A young banker agrees with the latter and boldly claims that he would take life imprisonment over death. The host, a rich and pompous banker, bets 2 million in exchange for the young guy living in solitary confinement for 15 years.This was on Nov 14, 1870. Today is Nov 14, 1885.#24: The dream of a ridiculous man - Fyodor Dostoevsky (4 stars)Dreams, as we all know, are very queer things: some parts are presented with appalling vividness, with details worked up with the elaborate finish of jewellery, while others one gallops through, as it were, without noticing them at all, as, for instance, through space and time.Yes they are. In a dream, you can live an eternity but wake up none the older for it. In a dream, you can achieve everything you have ever wanted, every aspired for, ever lusted after, but wake up none the richer for it.Our hero had had such a dream. And he was ridiculed for it. Mocked. Derided. Pronounced senile. Yes, you can call him a madman. But aren't we all?#25: The Happy Prince - Oscar Wilde (4.5 stars)It's astounding, the power of words. How they can sway us, infuriate us, flame our desires, preserve our hopes.This short story by the master is a perfect testament of the power of words in the hands of the wordsmith. A story that was part of the school curriculum, at least in India, and one I revisited after years.In a few thousand words, it encompasses a love story, a tale of sorrow, and a satire on human condition. In a few thousand words, it stirs up emotions of love, joy, sorrow, pain and contempt. In a few thousand words, it is as much the cold winds of the winter, as it is the warmth of the sun on a spring afternoon.#26: Happiness - Guy de Maupassant (3.5 stars)Happiness is relative. And a lot more simpler than it is made out to be.#27: The Sugargun Fairy - Kuzhali Manikavel (3 stars)"Because everyone must keep a box of things they don't understand and can't throw away"A story that is as simple as the daily ramblings of a teenager, and yet brooding and sinister at the same time. One about the fleeting passage of time, and yet the inevitable existence and decay of things.#28: A little cloud - James Joyce (3.5 stars)One of the most wonderful feelings in the world is catching up with an old friend. We might not have a time machine (yet), but an evening of smoky conversations and reminiscence with old pals is good enough. There's anticipation, carefree laughter, a hint of nostalgic fondness, and just the tiniest sliver of jealousy. Especially if the other friend has a life worth being envious of.#29: Across the bridge - Graham Greene (3 stars)Life's a curious case. In the end, does money matter? Or influence? Can one final act of kindness undo (at least in part) a life brimming with sin, theft, lies, and debauchery? What is the source of happiness? Of contentment?In this fast-paced story about a millionaire fraudster evading the law in a quiet, shabby town of Mexico, Graham Greene hopes to find the answer. At least to some of the questions.Horror/Thriller#1: The lottery - Shirley Jackson (4 stars)A village. 300 people. A charged morning. A lottery. A winner. A twist.#2: A face in the dark - Ruskin Bond (3.5 stars)From Mr. Bond, comes another story set in the backdrop of the hills and valleys of Shimla. The story of a boarding school and its brave headmaster. A story that brings out all of your primal fears. A story with the basic elements of horror - the dark of the night, the eeriness of the howling winds, a strange sighting and a twist ending.#3: In the penal colony - Franz Kafka (4 stars)In a fast-paced story that slowly reveals, in the true sense of an actual horror movie, its various twists and turns and its arsenal of fear, Kafka manages to scare the reader and at the same time fill them with a certain amount of sympathy for the devil and bewilderment at the actual happenings in the story.A traveler is invited to be the witness to a sentencing - a seemingly, outdated custom that tortures the guilty for hours before killing them. He must pass a judgement on it. What would it be?#4: Man From the South - Roald Dahl (4 stars)"A fine evening," he said. "They are all evenings fine here in Jamaica."In this brilliantly crafted tale of a bet between an old man and a young one, things suddenly take a turn for the grim. The pacing of the story is fantastic and keeps you hooked till the end. And the ending - another twist in the devil's tale.#5: The tell-tale heart - Edgar Allan Poe (4 stars)From the master of mystery, comes a tale worthy of his praise. The first person confession of a madman who murdered an old man and then describes it to the reader in vivid detail to prove his sanity. The story is eerie - you have the constant feeling of being watched because of the 'unreliable narrative' and the fact that the lunatic addresses the audience directly.#6: A good man is hard to find - Flannery O'Connor (3 stars)A normal family. Mother, father, kids, grandmother. A routine family vacation. A little detour to find something exciting. An accident and a deadly encounter.#7: The face on the wall - E. V. Lucas (3.5 stars)A group of people discussing the supernatural. An outsider with a real narrative. Three extraordinary things about the story.#8: The open window - Hector Hugh Munro (Saki) (3 stars)A man with a nervous condition visits an old lady on the behest of his sister to calm his nerves. While waiting for her, he engages in conversation with her niece and tale goes grim.#9: The most dangerous game - Richard Connell (4 stars)A celebrated hunter and a published author is thrown overboard a ship on a dark night. With every ounce of energy in his body, he manages to swim to safety and arrives on an island, uninhabited by humans except for a game hunter and his looming man-servant.Discussion over dinner soon converges to the one common topic - hunting. And how, for someone who has hunted all his life, most game is boring and no longer a thrill. That is when the hunter reveals a chilling truth - the discovery of an entirely new game that promises to break the monotony of the 'cunning hunter vs the dumb prey' routine.#10: Where are you going, where have you been? - Joyce Carol Oates (4.5 stars)A story that leaves you perplexed and befuddled. One where you are not sure what the story really was about?Over the years, many people have attempted many interpretations of Oates' masterpiece, but every alternative eventually leaves out something. This could be a story told from a delusional victim's standpoint about the advances of her predator. Or it could be an allegorical tale about the corruption of young people by satanic cults. Or it could be on the broader theme of giving in to sins.I don't know. Let me, if you do.Comedy#1: The secret life of Walter Mitty - James Thurber (3 stars)Made into a motion picture starring Ben Stiller, The secret life of Walter Mitty is a comical narrative of a man who's blurred the lines between reality day-dreaming. Weaving through multiple episodes of real life and fantasy, it is a wonderfully paced story that will leave you chuckling at the end.#2: Cookies - Douglas Adams (3.5 stars)A train journey. 2 strangers. And a packet of cookies.#3: The nose - Nikolai Gogol (3.5 stars)A barber wakes up one day and finds a nose in his roll. Another gentleman wakes up and finds his nose gone.However absurd, or improbable, this may seem, it does happen. (Or does it?). Gogol again displays a knack for weaving stories out of the pure bizarre and sprinkle it with his signature flavor of comedy.Romance#1: About love - Anton Chekhov (4 stars)What is love? Is it rational? Can it be defined scientifically or diagnosed medically? Why do people fall in love? Why, sometimes, do they fall for someone who is their exact opposite? What is it about love that leaves even the strongest of people completely hapless?Is it fine to love someone who is already with another person? Is it fine to profess your love to them knowing well that it could disrupt their perfectly peaceful existence?All these and a multitude of other questions are answered in this beautifully crafted tale by the master himself.#2: A girl I knew - JD Salinger (4 stars)I saw a girl standing on it, completely submerged in the pool of autumn twilight. She wasn't doing a thing that I could see, except standing there leaning on the balcony railing, holding the universe together. The way the profile of her face and body refracted in the soupy twilight made me feel a little drunk.A story that is not as much about love as it is about losing it. The story of aman who flunks college and is sent to Europe to master his trade, is advised against socializing much and falling in love, but who inadvertently manages to do just the opposite. A classic love story of romance, of the first jitters of love, of moving away, of writing letters. A wonderful love piece with a few splotches of some grime here and there.#3: Selkie stories are for losers - Sofia Samatar (3.5 stars)A weird tale of love and loss. With just a pinch of folklore and fantasy. While you are jumping from one narrative to another, you feel like being shaken intensely without being allowed the time to understand what exactly is going on. But once the dust settles, you can see the whole picture.#4: The eyes have it - Ruskin Bond (4 stars)A blind man on a train journey meets a female companion. During their 3 hour conversation, he doesn't let her know that he lacks sight. And then her station arrives and she leaves. (Oh the simplicity of it!)#5: The water that falls on you from nowhere - John Chu (3.5 stars)In the near future water falls from the sky whenever someone lies (either a mist or a torrential flood depending on the intensity of the lie). This makes life difficult for Matt as he maneuvers the marriage question with his lover and how best to “come out” to his traditional Chinese parents.The story of Matt and Gus, a same-sex couple who truly love each other, but do not know it yet is one that upholds the roots of traditional story-telling. There is no embellishments, no forced sub-plots. Everything leads to the next thing in a way that is simple, yet beautiful. The premise of the story is new and straightforward, but the narrative, due to the way it is seamlessly weaved together, lingers with you like the misty air on a December evening.#6: The silence here owns everything - Kirsten Clodfelter (2.5 stars)The perfect companion piece to the previous story by John Chu. It's a story of two girls - Natalie and Kendra. Friends on the surface. Lovers and probable soulmates deep beneath.Throughout the narrative, you can pick up subtle hints that Nat is in love with Kendra, but somehow, every opportunity where she could express it eludes her. The story ends abruptly, as if a teenage girl one day, simply forgot to take out her diary and pen her memoirs. It leaves you with a certain sense of absence, and yet you can feel that it's the ending you really wanted.#7: On seeing the 100% perfect girl one beautiful April morning - Haruki Murakami (3 stars)What do you do when you chance upon your 100% perfect girl? What do you say? Haruki Murakami comes up with the perfect story for such a rare happenstance.#8: A rose for Miss Emily - William Faulkner (4.5 stars)Faces are treacherous things. Behind the serene expressions that people carry lie complex machinations that no human technology or intuition can completely comprehend.And so is love. Love drives us to do great things. It goads us to reach out, extend our arms, and push ourselves to achieve the impossible. But it also pushes us over the cliff once in a while - over the boundaries of sanity, of happiness, of self-preservation.Crime#1: Lamb to the slaughter - Roald Dahl (3 stars)A perfectly happy couple. An expecting mother. A confession. A leg of lamb. And an intricately covered up murder.H. 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You arrive at lecture and sit perched on the edge of your seat, notebook open to a clean page and freshly-sharpened pencil in hand. You follow every word the professor says. Well, maybe you zone out a few times in the middle, but who doesn't? Besides, you're copying everything down and can review it later.That weekend, you diligently read the textbook. Maybe you skip a few parts since it's a busy week, but you definitely study the chapter summary and read all the examples. You do the homework problems, even starting three days early. When you're stuck, you go to office hours and ask the TA for help until they show you how to do it.Before the exam, you study your notes and the published homework solutions. You try the practice exam, and it seems the pieces are finally falling into place. You can solve most of the problems and remember most of the formulas and derivations! At last you take the final, referencing the single allowed sheet of notes you prepared at length the night before. You get almost every question right, or at least partial credit, and take home a well-deserved A.Three months later, you can hardly remember what the class was all about. What's going on? Why did you forget so much? Are you the only one? Should you have memorized more and worked even harder?The answer is no. A student who memorizes the entire physics curriculum is no more a physicist than one who memorizes the dictionary is a writer. Studying physics is about building skills, specifically the skills of modeling novel situations and solving difficult problems. The results in your textbook are just the raw material. You're a builder. Don't spend all your time collecting more materials. Collect a few, then build things. Here's how.The Cathedral and the StonesWhile delivering his famous set of freshman lectures on physics, Richard Feynman held a few special review sessions. In the first of these, he discussed the problem of trying to memorize all the physics you've learned:It will not do to memorize the formulas, and to say to yourself, "I know all the formulas; all I gotta do is figure out how to put 'em in the problem!"Now, you may succeed with this for a while, and the more you work on memorizing the formulas, the longer you'll go on with this method - but it doesn't work in the end.You might say, "I'm not gonna believe him, because I've always been successful: that's the way I've always done it; I'm always gonna do it that way."You are not always going to do it that way: you're going to flunk - not this year, not next year, but eventually, when you get your job, or something - you're going to lose along the line somewhere, because physics is an enormously extended thing: there are millions of formulas! It's impossible to remember all the formulas - it's impossible!And the great thing that you're ignoring, the powerful machine that you're not using, is this: suppose Figure 1 - 19 is a map of all the physics formulas, all the relations in physics. (It should have more than two dimensions, but let's suppose it's like that.)Now, suppose that something happened to your mind, that somehow all the material in some region was erased, and there was a little spot of missing goo in there. The relations of nature are so nice that it is possible, by logic, to "triangulate" from what is known to what's in the hole. (See Fig. 1-20.)And you can re-create the things that you've forgotten perpetually - if you don't forget too much, and if you know enough. In other words, there comes a time - which you haven't quite got to, yet - where you'll know so many things that as you forget them, you can reconstruct them from the pieces that you can still remember. It is therefore of first-rate importance that you know how to "triangulate" - that is, to know how to figure something out from what you already know. It is absolutely necessary. You might say, "Ah, I don't care; I'm a good memorizer! In fact, I took a course in memory!"That still doesn't work! Because the real utility of physicists - both to discover new laws of nature, and to develop new things in industry, and so on - is not to talk about what's already known, but to do something new - and so they triangulate out from the known things: they make a "triangulation" that no one has ever made before. (See Fig. 1-21.)In order to learn how to do that, you've got to forget the memorizing of formulas, and to try to learn to understand the interrelationships of nature. That's very much more difficult at the beginning, but it's the only successful way.Feynman's advice is a common theme in learning. Beginners want to memorize the details, while experts want to communicate a gestalt.Foreign language students talk about how many words they've memorized, but teachers see this as the most trivial component of fluency. Novice musicians try to get the notes and rhythms right, while experts want to find their own interpretation of the piece's aesthetic. Math students want to memorize theorems while mathematicians seek a way of thinking instead. History students see lists of dates and facts while professors see personality, context, and narrative. In each case, the beginner is too overwhelmed by details to see the whole. They look at a cathedral and see a pile of 100,000 stones.One particularly clear description of the difference between the experts' and beginners' minds comes from George Miller's 1956 study "The magical number seven, plus or minus two." Miller presented chess boards to both master-level chess players and to novices. He found that the masters could memorize an entire board in just five seconds, whereas the novices were hopeless, getting just a few pieces. However, this was only true when the participants were memorizing positions from real chess games. When Miller instead scattered the pieces at random, he found the masters' advantage disappeared. They, like the novices, could only remember a small portion of what they'd seen.The reason is that master-level chess players have "chunked" chess information. They no longer have to remember where each pawn is; they can instead remember where the weak point in the structure lies. Once they know that, the rest is inevitable and easily reconstructed.I played some chess in high school, never making it to a high level. At a tournament, I met a master who told me about how every square on the chess board was meaningful to him. Whereas, when writing down my move, I would have to count the rows and columns to figure out where I had put my knight ("A-B-C, 1-2-3-4, knight to C4") he would know instantaneously because the target square felt like C4, with all the attendant chess knowledge about control of the center or protection of the king that a knight on C4 entails.To see this same principle working in yourself right now, memorize the following. You have two seconds:首先放花生酱，然后果冻Easy, right? Well, it would be if you were literate in Chinese. Then you’d know it’s the important maxim, “first the peanut butter, then the jelly”.You can remember the equivalent English phrase no problem, but probably don't remember the Chinese characters at all (unless you know Chinese, of course). This is because you automatically process English to an extreme level. Your brain transforms the various loops and lines and spaces displayed on your screen into letters, then words, then a familiar sandwich-related maxim, all without any effort. It's only this highest-level abstraction that you remember. Using it, you could reproduce the detail of the phrase "first the peanut butter, then the jelly" fairly accurately, but you would likely forget something like whether I capitalized the first letter or whether the font had serifs.Remembering an equally-long list of randomly-chosen English words would be harder, a random list of letters harder still, and the seemingly-random characters of Chinese almost impossible without great effort. At each step, we lose more and more ability to abstract the raw data with our installed cognitive firmware, and this makes it harder and harder to extract meaning.That is why you have such a hard time memorizing equations and derivations from your physics classes. They aren't yet meaningful to you. They don't fit into a grand framework you've constructed. So after you turn in the final, they all start slipping away.Don't worry. Those details will become more memorable with time. In tutoring beginning students, I used to be surprised at how bad their memories were. We would work a problem in basic physics over the course of 20 minutes. The next time we met, I'd ask them about it as review. Personally, I could remember what the problem was, what the answer was, how to solve it, and even details such as the minor mistakes the student made along the way and the similar problems to which we'd compared it last week. Often, I found that the student remembered none of this - not even what the problem was asking! What had happened was, while I had been thinking about how this problem fit into their understanding of physics and wondering what their mistakes told me about which concepts they were still shaky on, they had been stressed out by what the sine of thirty degrees is and the difference between "centrifugal" and "centripetal".Imagine an athlete trying to play soccer, but just yesterday they learned about things like "running" and "kicking". They'd be so distracted by making sure they moved their legs in the right order that they'd have no concept of making a feint, much less things like how the movement pattern of their midfielder was opening a hole in the opponent's defense. The result is that the player does poorly and the coach gets frustrated.Much of a technical education works this way. You are trying to understand continuum mechanics when Newton's Laws are still not cemented in your mind, or quantum mechanics when you still haven't grasped linear algebra. Inevitably, you'll need to learn subjects more than once - the first time to grapple with the details, the second to see through to what's going on beyond.Once you start to see the big picture, you'll find the details become meaningful and you'll manipulate and remember them more easily. Randall Knight's Five Easy Lessons describes research on expert vs. novice problem solvers. Both groups were given the same physics problems and asked to narrate their thoughts aloud in stream-of-consciousness while they solved them (or failed to do so). Knight cites the following summary from Reif and Heller (1982)Observations by Larkin and Reif and ourselves indicate that experts rapidly redescribe the problems presented to them, often use qualitative arguments to plan solutions before elaborating them in greater mathematical detail, and make many decisions by first exploring their consequences. Furthermore, the underlying knowledge of such experts appears to be tightly structured in hierarchical fashion.By contrast, novice students commonly encounter difficulties because they fail to describe problems adequately. They usually do little prior planning or qualitative description. Instead of proceeding by successive refinements, they try to assemble solutions by stringing together miscellaneous mathematical formulas from their repertoire. Furthermore, their underlying knowledge consists largely of a loosely connected collection of such formulas.Experts see the cathedral first, then the stones. Novices grab desperately at every stone in sight and hope one of them is worth at least partial credit.In another experiment, subjects were given a bunch of physics problems and asked to invent categories for the problems, then put the problems in whatever category they belonged. Knight writes:Experts sort the problems into relatively few categories, such as "Problems that can be solved by using Newton's second law" or "Problems that can be solved using conservation of energy." Novices, on the other hand, make a much larger number of categories, such as "inclined plane problems" and "pulley problems" and "collision problems." That is, novices see primarily surface features of a problem, not the underlying physical principles.The "Aha!" FeelingIt is clear that your job as a student is to slowly build up the mental structures that experts have. As you do, details will get easier. Eventually, many details will become effortless. But how do you get there?In the Mathoverflow question I linked about memorizing theorems, Timothy Gowers wroteAs far as possible, you should turn yourself into the kind of person who does not have to remember the theorem in question. To get to that stage, the best way I know is simply to attempt to prove the theorem yourself. If you've tried sufficiently hard at that and got stuck, then have a quick look at the proof -- just enough to find out what the point is that you are missing. That should give you an Aha! feeling that will make the step far easier to remember in the future than if you had just passively read it.Feynman approached the same questionThe problem of how to deduce new things from old, and how to solve problems, is really very difficult to teach, and I don't really know how to do it. I don't know how to tell you something that will transform you from a person who can't analyze new situations or solve problems, to a person who can. In the case of the mathematics, I can transform you from somebody who can't differentiate to somebody who can, by giving you all the rules. But in the case of the physics, I can't transform you from somebody who can't to somebody who can, so I don't know what to do.Because I intuitively understand what's going on physically, I find it difficult to communicate: I can only do it by showing you examples. Therefore, the rest of this lecture, as well as the next one, will consist of doing a whole lot of little examples - of applications, of phenomena in the physical world or in the industrial world, of applications of physics in different places - to show you how what you already know will permit you to understand or to analyze what's going on. Only from examples will you be able to catch on.This sounds horribly inefficient to me. Feynman and Gowers both reached the highest level of achievement in their domains, and both are renowned as superb communicators. Despite this, neither has any better advice than "do it a lot and eventually expertise will just sort of happen." Mathematicians and physicists talk about the qualities of "mathematical maturity" and "physical insight". They're essential to moving past the most basic level, but it seems that no one knows quite where they come from.Circular ReasoningThere are certainly attempts to be more systematic than Feynman or Gowers, but before we get to that, let's take a case study. I recall that as a college freshman, I knew that the formula for the acceleration of a ball orbiting in a circle was [math]a = v^2/r[/math]. I wanted to know why, so I drew a picture:I imagined a small ball starting on the right side of the circle, heading upwards where the blue velocity vector [math]v_1[/math] is drawn. The ball moves around the circle, goes counter-clockwise over the top and then heads downwards on the left hand side, where the red velocity [math]v_2[/math] is. The ball's velocity changed, which means it accelerated. The acceleration is[math]a = \frac{\Delta v}{\Delta t}[/math][math]\Delta v[/math] is clearly [math]2v[/math], and [math]\Delta t[/math] is the time it takes to go half way around the circle, which is [math]\frac{\text{distance}}{\text{speed}} = \frac{\pi r}{v}[/math]. Hence, the acceleration is[math]a = \frac{2v}{\pi r/v} = \frac{2 v^2}{\pi r} \approx 0.64 \frac{v^2}{r}[/math]This isn't quite right. The answer is supposed to be [math]v^2/r[/math]. Somehow there is an extra factor of [math]2/\pi[/math] floating around.If you already understand calculus, this is a silly and obvious mistake. But for me it took quite some time - weeks, I think - until I understood that I had found the average acceleration, but the formula I was trying to derive was the instantaneous acceleration.The way I broke out of this mental rut was to think about the case where the ball has gone one quarter of the way around, like this:Then the same approach gives[math] a = \frac{\Delta v}{\Delta t} = \frac{2\sqrt{2}v^2}{\pi r} \approx 0.90 \frac{v^2}{r}[/math],which is closer to the right value. If you try it when the ball goes 1/8 the way around, you get[math]a = \frac{4 \sqrt{2 [/math][math]-[/math][math] \sqrt{2}}v^2}{\pi r} \approx 0.97 \frac{v^2}{r}[/math]and you're getting the idea that what you have to do is take the limit as the ball goes an infinitesimal fraction of the way around. (By the way, if I had been clever, maybe I'd have discovered Viète's formula this way, or something like it. I only recognized this now because I remembered encountering Viete's formula. So memory certainly has its place in allowing you to make connections. It's just not as central as beginners typically believe.)How do you do that "infinitesimal fraction of the way around" thing? Well, if the ball travels an angle [math]\theta[/math] around the circle, we can draw the before and after velocities asand[math] \Delta v = [/math][math]2[/math][math] \sin (\theta/2) v[/math]which in the limit [math]\theta \to 0[/math] becomes[math] \Delta v = \theta v[/math]and[math] a = \frac{\Delta v}{\Delta t} = \frac{\theta v}{\theta r/v} = \frac{v^2}{r}[/math]But all of this took a long time to come together in my mind, assembling gradually, but in discrete chunks with each small epiphany. As I walk through it now, I can see there are many concepts involved, and in fact if you're a beginning student it's likely that the argument isn't clear because I skipped some steps.The main idea in that argument is calculus - we're looking at an infinitesimal displacement of the ball. To understand the entire argument, though, we also need to do a fair amount of geometry, develop the idea of sliding velocity vectors around in space so they originate at the same point, introduce the concept of an arbitrary angle of rotation [math]\theta[/math], find the time it takes to rotate by that angle for a given [math]r[/math] and [math]v[/math], use the small-angle approximation of the sine function, and maybe a couple other things I'm not seeing.That's a lot of mental exercise. It's no wonder that working all this out for yourself is both harder and more effective than reading it in the book. Just reading it, you'll skip over or fail to appreciate how much goes into the derivation. The next time you try to understand something, you want those previously-mastered ideas about geometry and calculus already there in your mind, ready to be called up. They won't be if you let a book do all the work.Today, I can solve this problem in other ways. For example, I could write down the rectangular coordinates and differentiate, describe the motion in the complex plane as [math]r e^{i\omega t}[/math] and differentiate that, or transform to a rotating reference frame and note the centrifugal force on the stationary ball and conclude it must be accelerating in an inertial frame. A cute one is to write down the position and velocity vectors by intuition, and notice that going from position to velocity you rotate 90 degrees and multiply the length by [math]v/r[/math]. To go from velocity to acceleration is mathematically identical, so rotating another 90 degrees and multiply by [math]v/r[/math] again we obtain the answer.I can argue from dimensional analysis that the only way to get something with units of acceleration is [math]v^2/r[/math], or heuristically point out that if you increase the velocity, the velocity vectors get bigger, but we also go from one to the next in less time, so the acceleration ought to scale with [math]v^2[/math], etc.I also see aspects of the problem that I didn't back then, such as that this isn't really a physics problem. There are no physical laws involved. It would become a physics problem if we included that the ball is circling due to gravitational forces and used Newton's gravitational law, for example, but as it stands this problem is just a little math.So yes, I can easily memorize this result and provide a derivation for it. I can do that for most of the undergrad physics curriculum, including the pendulum and Doppler formulas you mentioned, and I think I could ace, or at least beat the class average, on the final in any undergraduate physics course at my university without extra preparation. But I can do that because I built up a general understanding of physics, not because I remember huge lists of equations and techniques.How to Chunk ItI can do these things now because of years' of accumulated experience. Somehow, my mind built chunks for thinking about elementary physics the same way chess players do for chess. I've taught classes, worked advanced problems, listened to people, discussed with people, tutored, written about physics on the internet, etc. It's a hodgepodge of activities and approaches, and there's no way for me to tease from my own experience what was most important to the learning process. Fortunately, people from various fields have made contributions to understanding how we create the cognitive machinery of expertise. Here is a quick hit list.George Pólya's How to Solve It examines the problem-solving process as a series of stages, and suggests the student ask themselves specific questions like, "Is it clear that there enough information to solve the problem?"Scott H Young, Cal Newport, and many others give specific advice on study skills: how to take notes, how to diagram out the connections between ideas, how to test your knowledge, how to fit what you're learning into the larger scheme of things, etc.When you do need to memorize things, spaced repetition software like Anki takes an algorithmic, research-backed approach to helping you remember facts with the minimum of time and effort.K. Anders Ericsson has tried to find the key factors that make some forms of practice better than others - things like getting feedback as you go and having clear goals. He refined these into the concept of Deliberate Practice. He also believes there is no shortcut. Even if you practice effectively, it usually takes around 10,000 hours of hard work to reach the highest levels in complex fields like physics or music.Chunking and assigning meaning are your mind's ways of dealing with the information overload of the minutiae that inevitably pop up in any field. Another approach, though, is to try to expand your mind's ability to handle those minutiae. If you can push your "magical number" from seven to ten, you'll be able to remember and understand more of your physics work because it takes a bit longer to fill your cognitive buffer. Dual N-Back exercises are the most popular method of working on this. Nootropic drugs may also provide benefits to some people. Low-hanging fruit first, though. If you aren't sleeping 8-9 hours a day, getting a few hours of exercise a week, and eating healthy food for most meals, you're probably giving up some of your mind's potential power already. (There is individual variation, though.)Howard Gardner is one champion of the idea of multiple intelligences, or different learning types. When working on electric fields, for example, Gardner might advise you to study Maxwell's equations, draw pictures of vector fields and intuit their curls, get up and use your body, pointing your arms around to indicate electric field vectors, write or speak about what you're studying, learn with a friend or tutor, or maybe even create musical mnemonics to help you study, depending on where your personal strengths lie. Certainly, all students should build facility with drawing sketches, plotting functions, manipulating equations, visualizing dynamics, and writing and speaking about the material.Psychologist Carol Dweck's research studies the effect of your attitude towards learning on how much you learn, finding, for example, that children praised for their hard work are likely to press on further and learn more when given tough problems, whereas children praised for their intelligence are more likely to give up.Productivity guru David Allen helps people organize their lives and defeat procrastination with specific techniques, such as dividing complicated tasks into small, specific "next actions" and deciding when to do them, then organizing them in a planner system.Mihály Csíkszentmihályi believes that people operate best in a state of "flow", where they are so focused on the task they find it enjoyable and engrossing to the point they're innately motivated to continue. He emphasizes, for example, that the task needs to be the right level of difficulty - not too hard and not too easy - to find the flow state. (Some people think this state doesn't jibe with deliberate practice; others contend it's possible to achieve both simultaneously.)Taken together, this yields enough practical advice to chew on for months or years. To summarize, when you are learning something new:Try to figure it out for yourselfIf you get stuck, take a peek at your textbook to get the main ideaTeach the idea to someone elseOnce you've learned something, repeat the entire reasoning behind it for yourself, working through each detailAsk yourself Pólya's questions when you're stuckUse Young and Newport's techniques to map out the ideas of your class and relate them to your prior knowledgeMake Anki decks and review them a few minutes a day to retain what you've learnedMake sure your study sessions include all the principles of deliberate practice, especially feedback, challenge, and attentionBuild an image of yourself as someone motivated by learning and proud of having worked hard and effectively rather than as someone proud of being smart or renowned.Find a organizational system that lets you handle all the details of life smoothly and efficiently.Search for the flow state, notice when you enter it, and put yourself in position to find flow more and more often.Work on different subjects, reviewing both advanced and basic material. They will eventually all form together in your mind, and you're likely to have to take at least two passes at any subject before you understand it well.Take care of your physical health.This list does not include reading every page of the textbook or solving every problem at the end of the chapter. Those things aren't necessarily bad, but they can easily become rote. Building the material up for yourself while dipping into reference materials for hints is likely to be more effective and more engaging, once you learn to do it. It is a slow, difficult process. It can be frustrating, sitting there wracking your brain and feeling incredibly stupid for not understanding something you know you're supposed to have down. And strangely, once you have it figured out, it will probably seem completely obvious! That's your reward. Once the thing is obvious, you've chunked it, and you can move on. (Though you still need to review with spaced repetition.) This is the opposite of the usual pattern of sitting in lectures and feeling you understand everything quite clearly, only to find it all evaporated the next day, or acing a final only to find your knowledge is all gone the next month.That, I believe, summarizes the practical knowledge and advice about the learning process. Memorizing equations and derivations is difficult and ineffective because they are just the details. You can only handle a few details before your mind gets swamped. To cope, train yourself to the point where you process equations and physical reasoning automatically. This will free your conscious effort up to take in the big picture and see what the subject is all about.It Just Gets In The Way, You SeeSomehow, I've developed a "this is calculus" instinct, so that if I see the problem about acceleration in circular motion, or any other problem about rates of change, I know that it's talking about a limit of some kind. Where does this instinct exist in my brain? What form does it take? How does it get called up at the right time?George Lakoff believes that almost everything we understand is via metaphor. Any sort of abstract concept is understood by linking it to concrete concepts we've previously understood. For example, in Where Mathematics Comes From, Lakoff and coauthor Rafael Nuñez argue that we think of the mathematical concept of a "set" as a sort of box or container with things stacked in it. We reason about sets using our intuition about boxes, then later go back and support our conclusions with the technical details. Learning to reason about sets, then, is learning to think about the box metaphor and translate it back and forth into the formal language of axioms and theorems. This seems to fit with the introspective reports of many mathematicians, who say they build intuitive or visual models of their mathematics when finding results, then add in the deltas and epsilons at the end.This may be why we so often see beginning students asking things like, "but what is the electron, really?" If they were told it is just a tiny little ball, that would work, because it's a very easy metaphor. But instead, they're told it's not a ball, not a particle, not a wave, not spinning even though it has spin, etc. In fact, they're told to dismiss all prior concepts entirely! This is something Lakoff believes is simply impossible. No wonder students are bobbing in an ocean of confused thought bubbles, with nothing but mixed metaphors to grasp at until the last straw evaporates, across the board.Linguists like Steven Pinker believe that the language we use tells us how our mind works. Physicists certainly do have a specialized lexicon, and the ability to use it correctly correlates pretty well to general physics intuition, in my experience. In his review of Pinker's The Stuff of Thought, Douglas Hofstadter summarizes:Pinker shows, for example, how subtle features of English verbs reveal hidden operations of the human mind. Consider such contrasting sentences as "The farmer loaded hay into the wagon" and "The farmer loaded the wagon with hay." In this pair, the verb "load" has two different kinds of objects: the stuff that gets moved and the place it goes. Also, in the first sentence, the destination is the object of one preposition; in the second, the stuff is the object of another. Pinker sees these "alternations" as constituting a "microclass" of verbs acting this way, such as "spray" ("spray water on the roses" versus "spray the roses with water"). Where does this observation lead him? To the idea that we sometimes frame events in terms of motion in physical space (moving hay; moving water) and sometimes in terms of motion in state-space (wagon becoming full; roses becoming wet).Moreover, there are verbs that refuse such alternations: for instance, "pour." We can say "I poured water into the glass" but not "I poured the glass with water." What accounts for this curious difference between "load" and "pour"? Pinker claims that pouring merely lets a liquid move under gravity's influence, whereas loading is motion determined by the human agent. "Pour" and "load" thus belong to different microclasses, and these microclasses reveal how we construe events. "[W]e have discovered a new layer of concepts that the mind uses to organize mundane experience: concepts about substance, space, time, and force," Pinker writes. " . . . [S]ome philosophers consider [these concepts] to be the very scaffolding that organizes mental life. . . . But we've stumbled upon these great categories of cognition . . . by trying to make sense of a small phenomenon in language acquisition."If correct, then in order to think about physics the way an expert does, we should learn to speak the way experts do. If we try to solve physics problems using the words "load" and "pour", we may be carrying around a bunch of distracting anthropocentric baggage. If we don't recognize that, we'll get stuck, saying the problem "doesn't make sense", when really it's our linguistically-instilled expectations that are wrong. To combat this, it may be just as helpful to gain facility with the language of physics as with its equations.Five Easy Lessons provides a clear example of such difficulties: the case study of "force". As I type this, my laptop is sitting on a desk which exerts an upward force on it. Few beginning students believe this is really a force, even after they've been browbeaten into drawing arrows for the "normal force" on exam diagrams.The problem is in the way we use "force":"The robber forced the door open.""Your apology sounded forced.""...the force of the explosion...""...the force of righteousness...""I'm being forced to take physics even though I'll never use it."Literally or figuratively, we think of "force" as implying not only motion, but intent or purpose, and also control. Force is for people pushing on things, or maybe for cars and projectiles. These things are using energy and will run down if left alone. But the desk under my laptop? It's just sitting there, totally passive. How could it be "exerting a force" when it doesn't even get tired? Needing some sort of rationalization for why the laptop doesn't fall, beginners say that it's not that the desk exerts a force on the laptop, the desk just provides something for the laptop to sit on. Or if something falls on the desk, the desk didn't exert a force to stop it. It just got in the way is all. Why doesn't the professor understand this obvious difference? A desk exerting a force? Come on...Five Easy Lessons describes how students only overcome this difficulty after seeing a classroom demonstration where, using a laser pointer and a mirror laid on the desk top, the professor demonstrates how when a heavy cinder block is laid on the desk, the surface responds by bending out of its natural shape, exerting force on the cinder block like a compressed spring would.You may need to find many such visualizations before you can reconcile your colloquial use of words with their use in physics. But this might also be dangerous, because although finding a way to make physics obey your idea about what a word means works decently in this case, in other instances it's your expectations for the word that ought to change. (Relativity, with words like "contraction", "slowing down", etc. is a good example.)Mythologist Joseph Campbell believes that we understand the world primarily through story. Perhaps we understand derivations, experimental evidence, and the logic behind physical conclusions as a sort of story, and it's in building this story that our cognitive chunks are formed.Mind The Neural Gap JunctionsYou are the pattern of neural activity in your brain. When a part of you changes, building a new memory, installing a new habit, or constructing a tool to approach a class of problems, that change must be reflected somewhere in your brain.Lesswrong user kalla724 describes this process in "Attention control is critical for changing/increasing/altering motivation"First thing to keep in mind is the plasticity of cortical maps. In essence, particular functional areas of our brain can expand or shrink based on how often (and how intensely) they are used. A small amount of this growth is physical, as new axons grow, expanding the white matter; most of it happens by repurposing any less-used circuitry in the vicinity of the active area. For example, our sense of sight is processed by our visual cortex, which turns signals from our eyes into lines, shapes, colors and movement. In blind people, however, this part of the brain becomes invaded by other senses, and begins to process sensations like touch and hearing, such that they become significantly more sensitive than in sighted people. Similarly, in deaf people, auditory cortex (part of the brain that processes sounds) becomes adapted to process visual information and gather language clues by sight.But, they caution, these neural changes occur primarily to those parts of our minds to which we pay conscious attention:A man is sitting in his living room, in front of a chessboard. Classical music plays in the background. The man is focused, thinking about the next move, about his chess strategy, and about the future possibilities of the game. His neural networks are optimizing, making him a better chess player.A man is sitting in his living room, in front of a chessboard. Classical music plays in the background. The man is focused, thinking about the music he hears, listening to the chords and anticipating the sounds still to come. His neural networks are optimizing, making him better at understanding music and hearing subtleties within a melody.A man is sitting in his living room, in front of a chessboard. Classical music plays in the background. The man is focused, gritting his teeth as another flash of pain comes from his bad back. His neural networks are optimizing, making the pain more intense, easier to feel, harder to ignore.You need to pay attention not just to doing physics, but to the right parts of doing physics - the parts most related to intuition.James Nearing gave his advice on how to do this in Mathematical Tools for PhysicistsHow do you learn intuition?When you've finished a problem and your answer agrees with the back of the book or with your friends or even a teacher, you're not done. The way do get an intuitive understanding of the mathematics and of the physics is to analyze your solution thoroughly. Does it make sense? There are almost always several parameters that enter the problem, so what happens to your solution when you push these parameters to their limits? In a mechanics problem, what if one mass is much larger than another? Does your solution do the right thing? In electromagnetism, if you make a couple of parameters equal to each other does it reduce everything to a simple, special case? When you're doing a surface integral should the answer be positive or negative and does your answer agree?When you address these questions to every problem you ever solve, you do several things. First, you'll find your own mistakes before someone else does. Second, you acquire an intuition about how the equations ought to behave and how the world that they describe ought to behave. Third, It makes all your later efforts easier because you will then have some clue about why the equations work the way they do. It reifies the algebra.Does it take extra time? Of course. It will however be some of the most valuable extra time you can spend.Is it only the students in my classes, or is it a widespread phenomenon that no one is willing to sketch a graph? (\Pulling teeth" is the cliche that comes to mind.) Maybe you've never been taught that there are a few basic methods that work, so look at section 1.8. And keep referring to it. This is one of those basic tools that is far more important than you've ever been told. It is astounding how many problems become simpler after you've sketched a graph. Also, until you've sketched some graphsof functions you really don't know how they behave.(To see the advice on graphs, along with a detailed step-by-step example, see his book, free online)Brown Big SpidersOne of the difficulties with chunks is that they're mostly subconscious. We may ultimately know of their existence, as did the chess master who told me he knew how each square of the chess board felt, but their precise nature and the process of their creation are almost immune to introspection. The study methods I've talked about above are empirically useful in creating chunks, so we have guidelines for how to make new chunks in general, but we usually don't know which ones we are creating.Lesswrong user Yvain comments on the essay Being a teacherI used to teach English as a second language. It was a mind trip.I remember one of my students saying something like "I saw a brown big spider". I responded "No, it should be 'big brown spider'". He asked why. Not only did I not know the rule involved, I had never even imagined that anyone would ever say it the other way until that moment.Such experiences were pretty much daily occurrences.In other words, the chunkiest cognitive process we have - language - develops largely without our awareness. (In retelling this story, I've met a surprising number of people who actually did know about adjective order in English, but most of them either learned English as a second language or had studied it in psychology or linguistics course.)This makes it incredibly difficult for physics teachers or textbook writers to communicate with beginners. It's inevitable that beginners will say that a certain lecturer or book just doesn't explain it clearly enough, or needs to give more examples. Meanwhile, the lecturer has no idea why what they said wasn't already perfectly clear and thinks the example was completely explicit. Neither party can articulate the problem, the student because they can't see the incorrect assumption they're making, the professor because they don't realize they've already made such an assumption.For example, once I was proctoring a test in a physics class for biology majors. A question on the test described a certain situation with light going through a prism and asked, "What is the sign of the phase shift?" A student came up to ask for clarification, and it wasn't until they'd asked their question three times that I finally got it. They thought they were supposed to find the "sign" as in a signpost, or marker. There would be some sort of observable behavior that would indicate that a phase shift had occurred, and that was the "sign of the phase shift." Until then, I was only able to think of "sign" as meaning positive or negative - did the wave get advanced or retarded?If you want to learn a language with all those rules you don't even know about, you need to immerse yourself. Endless drills and exercises from a book won't be enough, as millions of Americans a decade out of high school straining to remember, "Dondé esta el baño?" can attest. You need to read, speak, see, and hear that language all around you before it takes.To learn physics, then, read, speak, and hear it all around you. Attend colloquia. Read papers. Solve problems. Read books. Talk to professors and TA's, and expose yourself to all the patterns of thought that are the native language of the field.As you learn, you will build the right chunks to think about physics without realizing what they are. But there's a flip side to this problem, which is that when you're not doing physics, you can build the wrong chunks. They can get in the way, and again you don't realize it.In Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, Betty Edwards discusses an exercise she gave her art students:One day, on impulse, I asked the students to copy a Picasso drawing upside down. That small experiment, more than anything else I had tried, showed that something very different is going on during the act of drawing. To my surprise, and to the students' surprise, the finished drawings were so extremely well done that I asked the class, "How come you can draw upside down when you can't draw right-side up?" The students responded, "Upside down, we didn't know what we were drawing."When we see a recognizable image, unconscious chunking immediately gets to work, interpreting, imparting meaning, and inevitably distorting. Learning to draw, according to Edwards, involves circumventing harmful chunks as much as building helpful ones.So it is with physics. The ideas about force, animation, and intent discussed in the laptop-and-desk example seem to illustrate just this problem. Five Easy Lessons lists many of the known misconceptions that students have somehow taught themselves in each topic of introductory physics - for example that electric current gets used up as it goes around a circuit. But I think it's likely that there are many more such obstructive thought patterns that we don't yet know exist. These might be more general notions about such things as cause and effect, what nature "wants" to accomplish, etc.I Feel DumbEducators are perpetually frustrated by what seems like an outrageous pattern. They explain something clearly. The students all claim to understand perfectly, and can even solve quantitative problems. Still, when you ask the students to answer basic conceptual questions, they get it all wrong. How is this possible?In this YouTube video, Veritasium explores what happens when you explain something clearly:Amazingly, the clearer the explanation, the less students learn. Humans have a huge array of cognitive biases. In general, these various biases work so that we'll keep believing whatever it was we believed to begin with, unless there's a really good reason not to. Someone giving a clear, authoritative physics lecture does not register in your mind as a good reason to check your beliefs, so you listen happily and rave about what a great lecture it was, all while maintaining your wrong ideas.However, with the right stimulus you can get your brain to throw out the old, wrong ideas. Entering such a state is a prerequisite to true learning, and fortunately we can detect it in ourselves. We call it confusion.Confusion is a message from your emotional mind (the part that tells your analytical mind what decisions to start justifying). It's saying, "Hey, something about our beliefs is very wrong, and this is actually important. Pay attention and figure it out."A great lecturer, instead of being clear, will confuse students by asking them to predict ahead of time what a demonstration will show, then do it, and the opposite actually occurs. Or they will ask students to solve questions that sound straightforward, but in fact the students can't figure out. Only after confusion sets in will the teacher reveal the trick.You want to defeat your biases, toss out your wrong beliefs, and learn physics to the Feynman level - the level where you create the knowledge as you go along. Even many specialists never fully get there, instead rising to increasingly-sophisticated levels of rehashing the same memorized arguments in a way that can carry them quite far and trick most people. The only way to avoid this is to spend many, many hours thoroughly confused.Have you ever lost an argument, only to think of the perfect retort two days later when stopped at a traffic light? This shows how your mind will continue working on hard problems in the background. It eventually comes up with a great answer, but only if you first prime it with what to chew on. This works for physics problems just as well as for clever comebacks, once you find good problems to grapple with. I conjecture that engaging this subconscious system requires a strong emotional connection to the problem, such as the frustration or embarrassment of being dumbstruck in an argument or the confusion of being stumped by a hard problem.Confusion is essential, but often also unpleasant. When you repeatedly feel frustrated or upset by your confusion, your mind unconsciously learns to shy away from hard thinking. You develop an ugh field.This could happen for different reasons. A common one arises in people who judge themselves by their intellect. Confusion for such people is a harsh reminder of just how limited they are; it's a challenge to their very identity. Whether for this reason or some other, it's common for students and academics to fall into patterns of procrastination and impostor syndrome when navigating the maze of confusion that come with their chosen path.I don't have the answer for this. I have heard many people tell their stories, but I have yet to figure out my own. Sometimes confusion feels awful, and my story in physics is a jerky, convoluted one because of how I've dealt with that. But once in a while a problem is so good that none of that matters. When I find one of these problems, it hijacks my mind like Cordyceps in a bullet ant, jerking me back to a fresh piece of scratch paper again and again, sometimes for days. If you reach this state over and over, you'll know Feynman meant by, "What I cannot create I do not understand"Get confused. Solve problems. Repeat. The universe is waiting for you.ReferencesIn order of appearance in this answerFeynman's Tips on Physics: Richard P. Feynman, Michael A. Gottlieb, Ralph Leighton: 9780465027972: Amazon.com: Bookssoft question - Memorizing theorems - MathOverflowThe Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two (wikipedia)The Magical Number Seven (original paper)Google Translate (Chinese phrase)Knight, Randall. Five Easy Lessons pp 37Reif and Heller, 1982Viète's formulaHow To Solve It: A New Aspect of Mathematical Method (Amazon)How To Solve It (summary)How to Solve It (Wikipedia)Learn Faster with the Feynman Technique (Scott Young. His page is start to get spammy.)Study Hacks " About (Cal Newport)Anki - powerful, intelligent flashcardsSpaced repetition (review by Gwern)K. Anders Ericsson (Wikipedia)The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert PerformanceDual N-Back FAQ (gwern)Food Rules An Eater`s Manual (Amazon, how to eat)Core Performance Essentials (Amazon, exercise) Exercise is an interesting case because not everyone responds very well. For the majority of people it's worth the time.Howard Gardner (wikipedia)The Unschooled Mind: How Children Think And How Schools Should Teach: Howard E. Gardner (Amazon)The Perils and Promises of Praise (article by Dweck)Mindset, Dweck's book.Flow (psychology) (Wikipedia)Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi: 9780061339202: Amazon.com: BooksDavid Allen, Getting Things Done® and GTD®Online to-do list and task management (One possible GTD software)How to Setup Remember The Milk for GTDGeorge Lakoff (professional site)George Lakoff (Wikipedia)Where Mathematics Come From: How The Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics Into Being: George Lakoff, Rafael Nuñez: 9780465037711: Amazon.com: BooksLoaded sentences (Hofstadter reviews Pinker)The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature: Steven Pinker: 9780143114246: Amazon.com: BooksThe Power of Myth: Joseph Campbell, Bill Moyers: 9780385418867: Amazon.com: BooksAttention control is critical for changing/increasing/altering motivationMathematical Tools for Physics (Nearing)Being a teacher - Less WrongDrawing on the Right Side of the Brain: The Definitive, 4th Edition: Betty Edwards: 9781585429202: Amazon.com: BooksVeritasium (channel)List of cognitive biases (wikipedia)Dunning–Kruger effect (wikipedia)Ugh fields - Less WrongUseful Quora AnswersSomeone anonymous's answer to What is it like to understand advanced mathematics? Does it feel analogous to having mastery of another language like in programming or linguistics?Satvik Beri's answer to How do math geniuses understand extremely hard math concepts so quickly?Qiaochu Yuan's answer to Why is it almost impossible to learn a mathematical concept on Wikipedia? They are very difficult to follow, especially if one doesn't have a solid background in the subject.Christopher VanLang's answer to What should I do if my PhD advisor and lab colleagues think I'm stupid?What did Richard Feynman mean when he said, "What I cannot create, I do not understand"?Debo Olaosebikan's answer to What are some words, phrases, or expressions that physicists frequently use in ordinary conversation?Paul King's answer to How does the arbitrary become meaningful? How does the human mind convert things like art into emotion and experience?What are some English language rules that native speakers don't know, but still follow?User's answer to What's an efficient way to overcome procrastination?Further ReadingI feel a little sleazy writing this answer because when I mention, for example, Carol Dweck doing research on the psychology of mindsets or K. Anders Ericsson studying deliberate practice, in fact there are thousands of people working in those fields. The ones I've mentioned are simply the most public figures or those I've come across by chance. I haven't even read the original research in most of these cases, relying on summaries instead.The answer is also preliminary and incomplete. There's lots of research left to be done, and I'm not an expert in what's out there. Still, here is a guide to some further resources that have informed this answer.For an overview of the psychology of learning, I like Monisha Pasupathi's audio course How We Learn from The Teaching Company. It covers many clever experiments designed to help you build a model of what happens in your mind as you learn.Bret Victor explores software solutions to visualizing the connection between physical world, mathematical representation, and mental models. Check outThe Ladder of AbstractionExplorable ExplanationsI think it's helpful to build an innate impression of your mind as not perceiving the world directly, but as concocting its own, tailored interpretation from sense data. All your consciousness ever gets to experience is the highly-censored version. The books of Oliver Sacks are great for making this clear by illustrating what happens with people for whom some of the processing machinery breaks down.The LessWrong Sequences were, for me, a powerful introduction to the quirks of human thought, preliminary steps towards how to work best with the firmware we've got, and what it means to seek truth.Selected BibliographyThese are some physics books to which have helped me so far. I'm not choosing them for clear exposition or specialty knowledge in a certain subject, but for how I think they helped me understand the way to think about physics generally.Blandford and Thorne, Applications of Classical PhysicsEpstein, Thinking PhysicsFeynman, Lectures on Physics------------ The Character of Physical Law------------ QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter------------ Tips on PhysicsGeroch, General Relativity from A to BLevi, The Mathematical MechanicLewin, Walter "Classical Mechanics", "Electricity and Magnetism" (video lectures with demonstrations on MIT OpenCourseWare)Mahajan, Street-Fighting MathematicsMorin, Introduction to Classical MechanicsNearing, Mathematical Tools for PhysicsPurcell, Electricity and Magnetism----------, Back of the Envelope ProblemsSchey, Div, Grad, Curl, and All ThatThomas and Raine, Physics to a DegreeThompson, Thinking Like a PhysicistWeisskopf, "The Search for Simplicity" (articles in Am. J. Physics)ImagesFeynman's Tips on Physics, Feynman, Gottlieb, LeightonArchitectural detail- cut stone wallFile:NotreDameI.jpg