If you're like most digitally connected humans of the 20s (2020s, to be clear), endless streams of information rushes through your awareness each day. Push notifications, email subscriptions, endless-scrolling social media, and news feeds ping you at every minute of the day, creating a Chicago rush hour of information trying to squeeze into the peripheries of your consciousness.

We consume so much, yet retain so little. I actually do learn interesting facts during YouTube binges; I do find thought-provoking opinion pieces amidst mountains of journalism; I do pick up noteworthy shenanigans from social media feeds. But these infrequent gems of knowledge get drowned out amongst the all-too-noisy backdrop of today's Information Age.

As I droned on for the past few years consuming and then losing gigabits of information, I started to wonder why I should even bother to read something if I'm going to forget about it. I reflected a lot on how I absorb information and how it departs without a proper goodbye.

From here, I started a project whose goal is to create a robust system to collect and endure new information that I absorb and then recall them with a rythm based on that information's relevancy to my daily flow.

I partioned my brain into two distinct levels. The "core" level holds information that get recalled and augmented through my day, my L0 cache, if you will. For instance, I reference my knowledge in software engineering and UI/UX design for work on a daily basis and I also keep important updates about my family and closest friends through everyday conversations. I'm not worried about losing this kind of information because their frequent usage ensures their endurance. When I accumulate more bits for these areas, those bits funnel directly to this persistent store.

What I do worry for is the "peripheral" level. Information stored here don't get used on any predictable or frequent basis. On occasion, they may be recalled in big bursts. Take, for instance, my memory of Unity's keyboard shortcuts when I'm creating a VR project. I'll have these shortcuts in hot memory access for a couple of months, but they quickly grow cold after the project's completion. In other cases, information is recalled with a predictable basis but at a very low frequency. A poignant example is the password to my FASFA account which I use once a year (hence I've adopted password managers).

Some examples of core level information:

• Full-stack software engineering principles
• UI/UX design patterns
• My most committed clubs at college
• Everything rock climbing
• Shooting photos
• Events surrounding my family and close friends
• Basic life errands, like what to shop for groceries

Some examples of peripheral level information:

• An emerging furniture design trend that I love
• Latest iPhone leaks
• A new word I learned: protean
• What happened during my last car servicing
• A really profound shower epiphany
• Insights from a neat conversation with a colleague

One key characterstic about the peripheral level is that knowledge can slowly gravitate toward the core level if repitition or predictability increases. Peripheral knowledge also tend to coalesce into larger blobs as they enter the core level. As a college student, I'm strongly considering entering the tech industry. Thus, my knowledge base about that field lies at my core level. However, through countless career fairs, infosessions, news articles about X, Y, and Z companies, I accumulate scattered bits of information that unite together to evolve my perception for the tech industry. These small bits of information first started at the peripheral level, but merge together with other semantically-adjacent bits and eventually all converge toward my core level.

Now, the inverse is also true, wherein knowledge at the core level can fall into the outer rims of periphery. However, core knowledge tend to be far more stable. The overarching knowledge categories at the core level core are more centralized and comprehensive, whereas the categories at the peripheral level are very distributed and can have a variety of sizes. For instance, a broad category at the core level can be "work-life balance in the tech industry," whereas at the periphery level, a category can be merely "recent remote work policies by Facebook."

The Öpik-Oort Cloud is a theoretical sphere of matter enclosing our solar system. It's inner and outer boundaries are estimated to span 2,000 to 200,000 astronmical units (Sun — Earth distances), and its outer boundary is considered the edge of our solar system. The spherical cloud is kept in equilibrium by the forces of Sun's gravitational pull and gargantuan galatic tides from nearby stars and the Milky Way. It's hypothized that certain types of comets, including Halley's Comet, originate from the Oort Cloud, formed via disruptions of equilibrium by giant outer planets.

// connect the metaphor

// talk about implementation (Notion API, repetition algorithms)