The Write Dude

Read About It, Write About It, Learn About It

• Home
• About
• 60 Days in a Library

Sixty Days in a Library

It was a few weeks ago (probably a month), that I was leafing through the pages of a book my step dad was reading. I found it on a table in his sun room. The book was How to Write a Damn Good Mystery by James N. Frey.

I’m not planning on writing a mystery any time soon, and I’m not sure my step dad is either, but Frey’s book seemed to offer some pretty sensible advice. That’s not what caught my eye though.

Somewhere in the early pages Frey mentioned that “it has been said” (or something to that effect) that if a person spent 60 days in a library, studying and researching a topic of their choice, that person could know more about that topic than 99.99% of the people in the world. Intriguing. Seems plausible too.

It got me to thinking. With all the resources available these days it probably wouldn’t even take 60 days to accomplish such a feat. A little figuring reveals that 60 days in a library, at 8 hours a day, amounts to 480 hours. That works out to a little more than an hour a day (about 1.3 hours) for a year. And you probably really don’t need to go to a library at all; although going to libraries is fun and it would help in accomplishing such a task.

A Personal Learning Project is Born

I decided to try it. The first order of business was to choose a subject. It had to be something I am interested in, that might be useful (or not!), and it had to be something I didn’t already know a lot about (that would be cheating!).

I kicked around several ideas before settling on something I was confident I could live with. Quantum mechanics? Interesting enough but Nah, too hard. Linear algebra? Also interesting and quite useful to boot, but I have a fairly good head start on that. What about bioinformatics? That’s a contender. What I finally settled on was Information Theory and Biological Applications.

Now I do have a decent background on related subjects that will probably come in handy (biology, chemistry, mathematics, and some computer programming). Heck I might even be in the 20th or maybe even the 50th percentile (or maybe even higher with respect to all the people in the world!) but I am a long way from being in the 99th percentile. Sounds like fun!

My plan is to set up a Google doc top keep track of my time, and after 400+ hours of study to write a thesis on a research topic of my choice. The exact thesis topic I have yet to decide, but I plan to begin by doing some reading on the early work in information theory. Stuff like Ralph Hartley’s Transmission of Information, Shannon’s A Mathematical Theory of Communication, and Information Theory Primer by Tom Schneider seem like good starting places.

My Information Theory Personal Learning Syllabus

It might be helpful to create a personal learning syllabus, so I did that too. My approach (at least at the beginning) is similar to that described by James Marcus Bach in Secrets of a Buccaneer scholar. Which is to say, that using this personal learning syllabus as a general guide, I’ll do what seems right, when I feel like the time is right, without setting up some sort of rigid plan.

I’ll periodically post my time spent on the sidebar so anyone who happens to get interested can monitor how I am doing. Here goes…

June 5, 2010  Tags: independant research, information theory, personal scholarship  Posted in: Learning

• « Previous post
• Next post »

• Search The Write Dude Blog

• 60 Days in a Library

  Time = 10.8 hours

• Archives

  Select Month February 2012 January 2012 October 2011 June 2011 April 2011 July 2010 June 2010 May 2010 April 2010 March 2010
• 
  
• 
  
•