Pattern matching, the value of smaller blog posts and a new word

Three things I learned this week were: pattern matching to turn noise into meaning, I published my first entry on my swift learning journey and I learned the word ‘liminal.’

• I listened to the You Are Not So Smart podcast episode on desirability bias. The first part of the show has an interesting demonstration of ‘perceptual pop-out’, but in audio form. A sound was played but all I heard was noise. I had trouble making sense of the sound. Then another sound is played that gives the ‘pattern’ of the noise. Once I heard that, I understood the sound. It was no longer noise. But upon learning the pattern, I could not ‘un-hear it’. My brain recognized the pattern and could not just hear the ‘noise’ anymore. I wonder if my brain will remember the pattern after I have forgotten about this episode. If I were to listen to it again in, say, a year, would I hear noise or would I understand it?
• I published my first entry on learning swift to my blog, dev.to and Medium. I decided to break things up into smaller chunks as putting everything into one blog post would be too long. It also allows me to get feedback on my work sooner. The experience of publishing to dev.to was good. It uses markdown, so it was easy to cut and paste my entry over. Posting to Medium was finicky. I had to change the format of my post as it used tables to layout some data. However, medium does not support tables. I will try posting a few more times to Medium to see how it goes.
• And finally, I learned the word ‘liminal’ which means being in a transitional state or on a threshold.