fanlain

Which logo do you like?

If you haven't done Part I first, go to hukuma and find it there. (I'd provide a direct link but that would spoil the order of the exercise.) The rest is ( behind the cut )

Finally, the leader of the workshop explained that after having people suggest which ball will win and discussing the reasons for it (but before seeing the demonstration), very few students in his physics class change their mind, something on the order of 5%. In our workshop, I think only one person switched. So you guys are quite open-minded, actually!

I went through this interesting exercise in this teaching workshop this morning. I liked it so much, I wanted to invite you to play along at home. It's actually in two parts, so here's part I.

Suppose you have two tracks that look like this:

Track A:   \o
            \
             \_________________________________________________

Track B:   \o
            \
             \______                             ______________
                    \                           /
                     \_________________________/

You release two balls from the top of the two tracks at the same moment and they roll along. The question is which ball will get to the end first. Your exercise is to: a) decide on your answer, b) write your reasoning in the comments, c) read other comments and possibly update the answer. Poll #729674
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

Your original answer:

Your answer after reading comments:

I changed my mind after reading the comments:

I expect some of you may have seen this exercise before; feel free to answer and leave your reasoning in the comments, but don't state that you've seen it before, otherwise people will trust your answers too much. :)

fithukuma

• Work on Getting Things Done. This is something that I've played with on and off for about a year and a half, and I can see a lot of potential benefits to the system. I still spend too much time sitting and thinking about what should be done next (though a little less now), and a lot of time worrying about forgetting something important i have to do. But I never had the discipline to collect all my tasks and put it into the system; currently, I have a sea of index cards with half the items crossed off. This is my favourite pick since I need to get a lot of things done in the next month.


• Lose weight. I have some 35-40lbs extra compared to my weight of about a year ago, and that really needs to go. The exercise, while improving my health and energy levels, has been entirely unhelpful with losing weight. Diet change is clearly the way to go, but that requires a lot of discipline. This is high on my priority list, but on the other hand, if I can at least keep my weight stable and put the diet change off another month, I won't have lost much.


• Go to bed early. Ever since the semester started, I've been behind on sleep. I've managed to get nearly 8 hours a couple of the nights, but usually it's more like 6.5, and, especially with the exercise, it's just not enough. I'm toying with instituting a policy of "in bed by 11:30 unless there's a deadline," since there's a hope that may increase my productivity.


• Handle email better. My current goal is to check email at most 4 times a day, and respond to as much of it as possible in that sitting. This may be a subgoal of the GTD goal, though perhaps a little more within reach.

What should my february resolution be?