When you read, your visual senses are completely flooded. You should also be engaging in Slow Thinking (System II type thinking) as described in Thinking, Fast and Slow. This is self-aware, effortful thinking.

You are generally not capable of directing slow thinking at two tasks, which is why you shouldn’t text and drive. And it’s why you can’t read and listen to a podcast.

But what if you could listen to something? What ever the book is for, could your audio senses augment what you are reading?

I am not just talking about an embedded audio clip. To listen to that, you’d stop reading. I am talking about a book’s soundtrack.

In a movie, the soundtrack is integrated to provide a deeper experience. Sometimes it’s meant to be as prominent as the foreground, and other times, it might not be consciously noticed.

Movie visuals and audio are synchronized. So, to do this, the reading device would need to know exactly what you were reading at any point. In this sense, it’s more like a video game soundtrack, which is also synchronized, but has to follow the player’s actions.

Let’s assume that’s possible. Given a book device that knows exactly what you are reading at any point and can produce sound, here are things it could do:

1. If you stop and stare at a word or phrase that is jargon the book defined, it quickly reminds you of the definition.
2. Like Peter and the Wolf, we could assign small musical themes to the major ideas of the book. When you are reading something that is related to one of those ideas, the theme would play.
3. It could use generated sound or music that goes from calm to more of crescendo as you progress through a chapter, giving you a sense of how close you are to the next break. For example, rainfall that becomes more of a storm—an audio progress bar.
4. I think fiction would use this more for entertainment/art, but one exception is trying to read Shakespeare. I remember the left-hand side page having contextual information for the script on the right-hand side—maybe the context could be delivered aurally while you read.

If we could do this, it would drive book design to take sound into account (rather than it just be guessed at by a device) and eventually evolve the medium further away from text-only books.

In Playing a Book, I said:

You don’t read a programming book, you play one. I mean play, like playing a game. In a game, you progress through levels by learning and applying skills. At the end of the level, you play against a boss that you have to beat to progress.

I want to clarify that I don’t mean “Gamification”. I don’t want a book to seem like a game—I want it to literally be a game.

In a gamified book, you would just write the book as normal and then give the user a badge when they complete a chapter. Or maybe you’d assign points to various things.

The distinction I am trying to draw is that playability is something you start with to drive your design. Gamification is something you slap on at the end.

The basic template for programming tutorials is:

1. An introduction with a motivating example
2. Step-by-step how-to style instructions with code
3. Conclusion

But, if the way to learn programming is to write programs, this template breaks down at step 2. At the end of the tutorial, you have working code, but since your brain was engaged in reading and typing (or copying), it’s hard to absorb the information. I know that when I have “done” tutorials, I didn’t really learn the material in a way where I could do it on my own later.

So, perhaps tutorials shouldn’t give you all of the code, but instead provide enough information for you to write it yourself.

For example, here’s a code sample from a tutorial I wrote about GameplayKit:

enum GameOutcome: String {
    case win
    case reset
}

Instead of showing this, I could have written: “Declare a string-based enum named GameOutcome with two cases: win and reset.” There could have been a button that revealed the code.

Another way would be to use Steve McConnell’s coding technique from Code Complete. He suggests writing the comments first and then writing the code beneath (and between the comment lines), so like this:

// GameOutcome is an enum of the possible final states: win and reset.
// It needs to be a String-based enum because we use the
// raw value in GameplayKit methods that take an AnyObject.

This really only works for very simple code (I know because I tried to write the above example for more complex samples and couldn’t). A tutorial like this would get the reader playing instead of reading and help them practice composing code instead of copying it.

Yesterday, I wrote about how Quantum Country is helping me understand what books are for. As a recap, QC is a series of essays about quantum computing. You should think of it like a text book—they are not trying to write a pop-sci, hand-wavy, high-level overview, but a serious science/math book suitable for a college level class. Basic linear algebra is a pre-requisite to understanding it.

The book is also an exercise in a new form they call the “mnemonic medium”. Embedded throughout the text are interactive flash cards that test you on the material you just read. Depending on how you rate your own memory, they will used spaced-repetition algorithms to show you cards more or less often—the aim is to show you a card just before you will forget the answer. Using this system, you should be able to remember the content indefinitely (and need to visit and test yourself less often over time).

Does this work? I was tempted to review the book by just listing out the facts I remember, but honestly I think that would be boring to read. I did do that exercise, and I can remember quite a bit right now, but I just finished the book last week. I read it fairly slowly over six weeks and did the cards as prompted. I also did a few of the proposed exercises (which involve linear algebra), but not all of them.

In addition to the mechanics of quantum computing, I do think I also understand the higher level “point” of it. I don’t think I could make my own circuit to do something, but I could do the math to analyze a circuit. I have also gone on youtube and watched the more challenging presentations on quantum computing (the similarly math-y ones) and was able to follow them quite easily. If the “What is it for?” for Quantum Country is to teach the reader quantum computing, I can say that it was successful at that for me.

Here is a motivating example of why you’d want to know about quantum computing. In quantum computing, the fundamental unit of computation is a qubit (or quantum bit). They are quite a bit harder to make than our classical bits, but a system of N of them can represent 2^N states, and a state change on that system (affecting every qubit) can be done in constant time.

We are currently extremely limited in the number of qubits we can make and keep stable. Reading the result of the system is noisy and imperfect. However, we have still been able to do computations that are impossible on classical computers (just because of sheer size). This feat is called quantum supremacy, and has been achieved by a few research groups.

The essays include a description of a quantum computing search algorithm that can (probabilistically) find a value in an unordered list in O(π/4*(sqrt(n))) time (instead of O(n)). Just knowing that that is possible and the basics of how it is done was worth the read to me (even though I can’t say I fully understand it).

So, if you can multiply matrices, I would say to read Quantum Country enough to see if it interests you. I would at least try to get through some of the embedded flash cards to experience the mnemonic medium.