The opposite of Timeboxing

Timeboxing is the productivity method of setting a fixed interval of time and then working on a given task for that interval. Perhaps the best-known timeboxing scheme is the Pomodoro Method.

But this post is not about timeboxing, but the opposite of this: to work on a given task for as long as it takes and measure the time taken to complete the task.

This might be the most simple-minded productivity hack ever--so simple that for years and years I never bothered to try it out.

I bought myself a stopwatch (in the picture). I didn't need to--I could have used the clock app on my smartphone--but I have a preference for actual things.

Then I start a task--let's say washing the dishes--and time myself doing it. 

What's the point? Well the knowledge of how long this task takes might well be useful for future planning. For example, I have a very good idea of how long it takes me to get dressed and prepare to leave the house, so I'm comfortable waiting until the last minute to do so.

Our perceptions of time are often quite different from reality. I just watched a show about a school for elite nannies. One of the training exercises is to give the young lady (yes, they were all young ladies) a robot baby to take care of for the night. The robot was capable of crying in different manners and stopping only when the appropriate remedy was proffered.

So the next morning all the nanny candidates were talking about what an ordeal the night had been. Asked them how long the baby had been crying, they responded "maybe three hours." But then it turned out the baby had a built-in timer and actually had only been crying for about twenty minutes.

In a related vein, I found it informative to time myself washing the dinner dishes. It was less than I expected, generally less than literally three minutes. On a really big night, like Thanksgiving dinner, maybe twelve minutes. 

I find this interesting because of couples I know, or whom I see in the newspaper, or on-line, who fight often and bitterly over who cleans the kitchen. Over three minutes of work.

And it is true that generally I seem to overestimate the time it takes to complete a task. It's good and comforting to have a more accurate knowledge.

A second benefit of timing yourself while doing a task, perhaps more important, is it keeps you focused. This is particularly important in our current Age of Distraction.

Hacking reminiscence

...as in how to trigger and improve your reminiscence of a pleasant experience. (You could do the same for an unpleasant experience, but why?)

Certain stimuli are known to trigger reminiscence. The most well-known is scent. Decades ago, my first job was at a fence company. I spend hours in the shed out back, putting pointed tops on picket boards, using a specially-designed power tool as scary as any chainsaw used in a massacre. To this day, when I smell freshly-cut lumber, it instantly takes me back to that shed.

Then again, one of my first posts here noted how the scent of wood pervaded with incense smoke takes me to a Japanese temple.

Theoretically you can stimulate a reminscence by (1) identifying a relevant scent to the experience and then (2) deliberately exposing yourself to the scent later. The problem with this is that if you leave step (1) to chance, step (2) is likely to be hard to pull off. My suggestion is to artificially associate an unusual but easily obtainable scent with the initial experience, so that you can later expose yourself to the scent at will. 

What kind of scent? Perhaps an herbal oil. These come in small convenient vials. But choose a scent you are not already overly familiar with.

I haven't tried this yet.

A second trigger for reminiscence, as everybody knows, is music. Everyone has songs that trigger memories of a certain time and place, or even a particular experience. Often the experience itself provides the musical trigger. Visit Disneyland, and when you come back you can find the ambient music loops on YouTube. Sometimes the connection is more complicated---I recently wrote about how a certain Quincy Jones song reminds me of walking in Tokyo at night.

But here again you can forge an artificial connection. On my trip to Myanmar some years ago (incredible bit of fortuitous timing), I made a point of listening to the Double song Rangoon Moon repeatedly.  And now listening to it takes me back to that trip.

So next time you are planning a happy experience, design a soundtrack for it ahead of time. Then use your music player while the experience is happening, or on the way there and back.

The Tarot system of tactical time-management

 

I am recently retired.

For many years now the list of things I want to do has far outstripped the time I have available (you too?). Retirement alleviates this situation but by no means eliminates it.

I've also long been interested in "time management," both for practical, selfish reasons and as a theoretical concept. 

In recent months I have been using a new system I developed to help me prioritize my time. I started doing this before retirement. More available time allows the system more room to play but I found it equally useful when free time was scarce. I only wish I had figured this out years ago.

Because the system uses index cards, I call it the Tarot method as a catchy name. Actual Tarot cards are not used.

This system stands on the shoulders of the giants--or at least the fat people--who went before me. Some important perspective can be gleaned from the Eisenhower Matrix. You can visualize this matrix as a sheet of paper divided into half both vertically and horizontally, thus with four quadrants. Each of your obligations goes into one of the four quadrants. 

The left half of the page is for obligations with high urgency--that need to be done soon--and the right half is for obligations with low urgency. Examples: cooking today's dinner is high urgency, since it needs to be done today; starting an exercise program is low urgency, since in the long run it makes little difference whether you start today, tomorrow, next week, or even next month.  

The upper half of the page is for obligations with high importance--feeding the baby, while the lower half is for obligations with low importance--rearranging your sock drawer. (Caveat: what is important or unimportant often depends on your own subjective priorities.)

So the four quadrants we could describe as HIHU (High Importance, High Urgency), HILU (High Importance, Low Urgency), LIHU (Low Importance, High Urgency), and LILU (Low Importance, Low Urgency). The problem many of us have (as Eisenhower described it) is that LIHU obligations tend to take attention away from HILU obligations, which are all too easy to postpone until tomorrow. Generally HIHU obligations get done, and presumably it's ok to ignore LILU obligations altogether (though I'm not sure I agree with this--subject for a future post). The Eisenhower matrix is not really a method so much as a way of looking at things.

(One can refine this matrix by allowing more than two columns or two rows--although understanding the concept might be more important than actually writing down the matrix.)

One of the major benefits of the Tarot system is ensuring that low-urgency obligations are not starved for attention--especially the high-importance ones.

The second pre-existing building block for the Tarot system is the Pomodoro Technique. This is a particular system of timeboxing, based on units of 25 minutes. 25 minutes seems to be a good length of time for maintaining focus on a given task. The standard Pomodoro Method consists of 25 minutes working, 5 minutes rest, 25 minutes working, 5 minutes rest, etc. There are many enhancements but I won't go into those here. A unit of 25 minutes spent on a single task is called a pomodoro. The Tarot method operates in units of pomodoros.

Step 1 of the Tarot method is listing out your priorities. Make a list of the activities you would like to be doing with some regularity. The list should not include anything that is non-negotiable for a given day--getting up and going to work, feeding the baby. You do these outside of the Tarot system. Limit the list to activities to be done in your negotiable time--that gray area between daily obligations and daily leisure time (everyone needs some leisure time).

Some examples of items on my own list (yeah really):

Studying Burmese;

Studying Cantonese;

Studying quantum mechanics (yeah, yeah, I like studying)

...etc... but also:

Playing chess;

Going through my CD collection; making sure I have ripped each one, and deciding whether to dispose of it;

Scanning documents;

Reading a book;

Writing this blog;

Shining my shoes;

...and so on. Currently my list has 35 items on it.

Step 2 of the Tarot method: for each activity on your list, decide what percentage of your negotiable time you would like to devote to that activity. Make this an even percentage--no fractions of a percent. The total percentages for everything should add up to 100%.

What if you have more than 100 items on your list? It could happen. Then you will have to make some tough choices. I suggest keeping a second list of things to work on at some future time. It's also possible to merge two extremely low-urgency items into one and assign that one a 1% priority.

Different items could have very different percentages, but no single item can be less than 1%.

Examples again: the largest percentage on my list is Cantonese, which is 16%. At the 1% level are things like shining shoes and scanning documents.

Step 3 of the Tarot method. Now the cards come into play. Get a stack of 100 index cards. For each item on the list, write that item on the number of cards equal to the percentage given to that particular item. Each card gets just one item. So in my case, "Cantonese" gets written on 16 different cards, while "shine shoes" gets written just one card. Now I have a deck of 100 index cards, each with a single task.

Shuffle the deck well. (It's possible to mix the cards more evenly than a random shuffle, but just shuffling is a lot easier.)

Thereafter you will use this deck to plan your negotiable time. When you have an available pomodoro of negotiable time, take the first card off the deck and do what it says. Move the card to the bottom of the deck. When that pomodoro is finished, take another card off the top and do what it says. Repeat whenever you have a pomodoro of negotiable time.

If you get a card and just can't deal with that particular task at the moment (maybe mowing the lawn, but it happens to be raining), take the second card of the deck and keep that card on top of the deck, so that you will deal with it at the earliest opportunity.

How long will it take you to get through the entire deck? That depends on your life and how much negotiable time you have available. For example, suppose you have an average of 2.5 hours of negotiable time each day--that translates into five pomodoros. So it would take about 20 days to get through the entire deck. Your very low-urgency (1%) tasks would get about one pomodoro of attention in those 20 days. But that is way better than zero.

As life evolves, you can let your deck of cards evolve with it. Take out some cards, add some new cards. It's a rewarding feeling when you wrap up a project and can pull those cards from the deck.

To be honest, there is nothing sacred about the number 100. You can add a card to the deck without subtracting one, so the deck now has 101 cards (or 102, 103...). Be aware, however, that there is always a trade-off. When you increase the number of cards in the deck, each pre-existing item loses a proportional amount of time. So I suggest being honest about these trade-offs by adding and subtracting at the same time.

One aspect of the Tarot system I have come to enjoy is as an approach to handling unpleasant but necessary tasks--like doing your taxes, for example. When the task first arises, I simply put some cards for it into the deck--enough to be sure the task will be completed by the deadline. (For example, doing my taxes takes about four pomodoros. Just a single card is enough to complete them by the deadline, since I go through the whole deck at least four times before then. And putting the card(s) in the deck, I immediately forget about that task for the time being. When the card comes to the top of the deck, I then spend a pomodoro on it and then forget about it again until the card comes around again.

The original Pomodoro method was extremely rigid as to schedules. Each pomodoro is 25 minutes, no more, no less. No interruptions allowed--an interruption immediately cancels that pomodoro. However, I have decided that allowing each pomodoro a little flexibility in reaction to circumstances makes it possible to fit more into a day--more precisely, to have more productive time in a day. So sometimes I keep working on a task for a few extra minutes if it means I can reach a milestone or even finish the project. If I get interrupted, I stop the timer and come back and restart it when I can. 

Emotionally I find that using the Tarot method has freed me from nagging anxiety or even guilt about the various low-urgency tasks that were so easy to neglect. All I have to do is make sure each of these gets at least one card in the deck and progress (may be slow but) is guaranteed.

The big lie. I have described the Tarot method in terms of a stack of index cards because I wanted the simplicity of the underlying principles to come through, and because I wanted to make it clear that the ideas do not depend on technology. However, I actually don't use cards; I use a spreadsheet that I have programmed to emulate the deck of cards. Actually, it's a little more powerful because I can in fact use fractions of a percent, and it distributes the tasks more evenly than pure randomness. But the card method described here works just fine and is easy to get started.

Mnemonics for Chinese Tone Pairs

For many English-speaking students of Chinese, the fact that tone contours can make the difference in meaning between one Chinese word and another is a major stumbling block. A simple example:

鱼跃 yúyuè with 2^nd/4^th tones (rising, then falling) means “dive.”

预约 yùyuē with 4^th/1^st tones (falling, then high-level) means “reserve.”

So one must remember the tone contour of a word as well as the rest of the pronunciation or risk being misunderstood (sometimes disastrously).

My mnemonic system for Chinese character pronunciation includes the tone of the character as part of the system. Individual characters in Mandarin have one of four tones, which some grammarian creatively named 1^st tone, 2^nd tone, 3^rd tone, and 4^th tone. We’ll leave a description of the individual tones for another time, but note the diacritical marks used to mark each tone:

1^st tone: ā

2^nd tone: á

3^rd tone: ă

4^th tone: à

The diacritical shapes roughly represent the pitch contour of the respective tone (rising for 2^nd, falling for 4^th, etc.)

In an ideal world, remembering the tone for each individual character would allow you to predict the tone contours of compound words made of two or more characters. Unfortunately, the tones of Chinese syllables appear to mutate spontaneously when combined with other syllables. This does not happen every time, but it happens often enough to pose difficulty.

For example, in the word

当年 dāngnián “that year”,

the character 当 is pronounced dāng, with a 1^st (high level) tone, whereas in the word

当天 dàngtiān “that day”,

the character 当 is pronounced dàng, with a 4^th (falling) tone. (This is all assuming my dictionary knows what it’s talking about.) The function of the character appears to be identical in both words, so why the change? If there are rules controlling this, I haven’t figured them out yet.

So we need a way to remember the tone contours of words consisting of more than one syllable—particularly two-syllable words, which are the most common. I created a set of standard code words based on the Major system for memorizing numbers. In compound words, a syllable may have one of five tones, because certain syllables of compound words lose their normal tone, becoming a “neutral” tone. A neutral-tone syllable is pronounced quickly, with a pitch slightly lower than a preceding 1^st or 2^nd tone, and slightly higher than a preceding 3^rd or 4^th tone. The English word “basket” is normally pronounced with a fairly good approximation of 1^st tone followed by neutral tone. In Pinyin the neutral tone is indicated by the absence of any diacritical mark. For example: duōme is 1^st tone followed by neutral tone.

For the purpose of memorization, I assigned the digit 5 to neutral tone. The Major system uses a consonant sound to represent a single numerical digit. In particular:

t, d, or th represents 1;

n represents 2;

m represents 3;

r represents 4;

l represents 5.

Other consonant sounds (with the exception of w, h, y) represent other digits, but the foregoing is is all we need for this purpose. Vowels of a word represent no digit. Take as an example the word “root”. The r represents 4, the t represents 1, and the oo represents nothing; thus this word serves to encode the digit sequence 4-1.

The goal now is to choose a word representing each pair of digits describing the tone pattern of a Chinese disyllable. Take as an example the previously-mentioned yùyuē (tones 4-1). To represent this I need a word with the sequence of consonants r followed by t, d, or th; I choose “rawhide”. 

Why not the forementioned “root”? I prefer to use a two-syllable word and try to get used to pronouncing it with the particular tone contour that it represents:

ràwhīde

As this sinks in, it eliminates one step of the decoding process: the word directly represents the given tone contour.

The code word is put to use by mentally linking it with the term that it applies to; recall that  yùyuē means “reserve”. I can use a sentence like:

I reserved one of the special rawhide plane seats.

And then henceforth I use “rawhide” whenever necessary to represent the tone contour of any word with a 1^st/4^th tone pattern, such as the previously mentioned dàngtiān “that day”:

That day we rode until our hides were raw.

This sentence then helps me recall that 当天 is pronounced with 4^th and 1^st tones.

Here, then, is the list of code words for all two-syllable contours (note that, as always, it is the sounds that encode digits rather than the written letters):

Tones	digits	consonants	word
āā	1st/1st	t-t	tattoo
āá	1st/2nd	d-n	Houdini
āă	1st/3rd	t-m	atom
āà	1st/4th	t-r	otter
āa	1st/5th	t-l	hotel
áā	2nd/1st	n-t	nightie
áá	2nd/2nd	n-n	onion
áă	2nd/3rd	n-m	Nemo
áà	2nd/4th	n-r	wiener
áa	2nd/5th	n-l	in-law
ăā	3rd/1st	m-d	meadow
ăá	3rd/2nd	m-n	Mona (Lisa)
ăă	3rd/3rd	m-m	mummy
ăà	3rd/4th	m-r	hammer
ăa	3rd/5th	m-l	mullah
àā	4th/1st	r-h	rawhide
àá	4th/2nd	r-n	rhino
àă	4th/3rd	r-m	harem
àà	4th/4th	r-r	warrior
àa	4th/5th	r-l	oriole

The principle can be extended to three or more syllables; for example, the tone contour 会员卡 huìyuánkă “membership card” can be encoded as digits 4^th/2^nd/3^rd and the consonant sequence r-n-m, “uranium” for example. As the string of digits gets larger you will need to resort to phrases of two and more words. I haven’t tried to standardize the code words for more than two syllables at a time.

(A completely different approach: using the digits of the Major system is nothing more than a convenience which makes it easier to commit the system to memory. Once you've made the mental connection, any word can serve to represent any concept, although something concrete and visualizable is better. An alternate approach would be to choose for each tone contour a specific Chinese word exemplifying the pattern; for example, àā  could be represented by 牧师 mùshī  “pastor.”)

Buckaroo Banzai Does Time Management

The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension is a movie from 1984:



Maybe you've seen it. If not, I recommend it. (Mild spoilers ahead.) Buckaroo Banzai is a polymath something after the mold of Derek Flint, equally proficient at brain surgery, rock music, scientific research, and combatting world-threatening evildoers. The movie offers a complex, multilayered, witty story of attempted alien conquest, refreshingly un-dumbed-down. The final seconds promise a sequel which unfortunately never materialized.

Today's report, however, focuses on a single quote from the movie, which I sometimes turn to for solace and encouragement.

Anyone who has reached the age of twenty has had the opportunity to realize that time seems to pass faster and faster as one ages. Going from age ten to age twenty takes far less time than reaching age ten. And, generally speaking, each succeeding decade goes by faster.

Naturally I am interested to see whether this phenomenon can be manipulated or even reversed. This entails understanding the root cause, which not everyone agrees on. I suspect several factors are at play.

One of which being simply that the ratio of time to things-needing-to-be-done tends to be lower for adults than children. As a boy, I recall Sunday afternoons seeming to stretch on forever (not entirely in a good way). As an adult I am never bored. There is always something to do, whether obligatory or not.

I also have the kind of job where random tasks tend to pop up, some with sudden and great urgency. It is not so unusual to face an eight-hour day during which ten hours of work need to be accomplished.

Back to the movie now. At the story's darkest hour, with the minutes ticking away to the destruction of the Earth, and Buckaroo in shackles, undergoing torture worse than death (come on, that's not really a spoiler, is it?), the arch-villain (a delightfully unhinged John Lithgow) taunts him:

Don't you realize what you're doing? Your whole planet's gonna be destroyed and you sit here wasting time.

Banzai's response is the ultimate in cool:

Time? I've got nothing but time.

And it's sheer bravado. The bad guys hold all the cards (for the moment, of course).

I remember this when I'm facing one of those days, buried in crises. I take a breath and tell myself, Time? I've nothing but time. And then it's true.

(Note of interest probably to no one but myself: for many years my imperfect memory misattributed this quote to Indiana Jones in similar circumstances, where it works just as well. My inability to locate the utterance convinced me I had imagined it.)

Learn Khmer Script the Lazy-Ass Way: Part One: The Consonants

Photo by Kim Seng.

This post describes a mnemonic system for memorizing the consonants of the Khmer script. It is similar in spirit to my method for the Thai alphabet, but uses different gimmicks. Khmer vowels are handled in this post.

Here are the main issues that I encountered in committing the script to memory:

First issue: Khmer uses a three-way contrast for stop consonants rather than a two-way contrast as in English. For example, whereas English has unvoiced, aspirated T versus voiced, unaspirated D. Khmer has a three-way contrast:

	Unvoiced, aspirated, like English "T"
	Voiced, unaspirated, like English "D"
	Unvoiced, unaspirated, kind of in between English "T" and English "D"

I don't want to get into some tangled web of Khmer phonology here—and I'm no expert, anyway. The point is that there are three categories to keep straight.

Second issue: Khmer consonants come with a built-in vowel, sometimes "A", sometimes "O." So this needs to be memorized along with the consonant sound. Example:

	is pronounced something like KA, whereas
	is pronounced something like KO.

Third issue: Khmer letters sometimes rely on rather minor (to my Latin-alphabet mind, that is) differences to make important distinctions. For example, the difference between Khmer letters:

and

is scarcely more than that between the Latin letters

and

but whereas the Latin letters are merely different styles of "S", the Khmer letters are completely different consonants. I found a few cases particularly diabolical; we'll visit those later.

The overall idea is to choose a name for each letter: something concrete and hence visualizable. The name also serves to encode various aspects of the letter, phonetic, visual, or both. Let's now revisit the first two issues identified above.

First issue: Khmer stop consonants show a three-way contrast between unvoiced aspirated, unvoiced unaspirated, and voiced. I used the same principle as Chinese Pinyin: represent aspirated Khmer stops by unvoiced English letters (P, K, T) and represent unaspirated Khmer stops by voiced English letters (B, G, D). The voiced Khmer stops are represent by a combination of the equivalent English voiced stop with a following "r" (Br, Dr). There are actually very few of these.

Second issue: Khmer consonants come with an inherent "A" or "O" sound attached. This is handled simply by using "A" or "O" as the first vowel sound in the name.

Khmer also includes a fair number of non-stop consonants (like English R, S, V, etc.). The first issue does not arise with these but the second does.

The names for the "A"-series stop consonants are given in the following table. Each cell shows the Khmer consonant, the English name, and an approximate representation of the pronunciation. I use an apostrophe to distinguish aspirated stops: thus t'a is aspirated t followed by a, while ta is unaspirated t followed by a. Don't worry about the words in parentheses just yet.

Unvoiced Aspirated	Unvoiced Unaspirated	Voiced
(tailless) Kangaroo k'a	Gas-mask ka
(fluorescent)  Chamber ch'a	(fluorescent)  Jam cha
(fluorescent) Taxi or (fluorescent) Tarp t'a	Dam ta	Dracula da
(fluorescent) Papaya p'a		Brassiere ba

Some of the table cells are empty because the alphabet contains no letter in that category. On the other hand, the t'a cell contains two letters. So far as I can tell, these are identical in pronunciation (which unfortunately does not imply they are interchangeable, any more than "f" is interchangeable with "ph" in English).

The remainder of the "A"-series consonants are given in the following table. Again, don't worry about the terms in parentheses as yet.

Khmer letter	English name	Pronunciation
	(inverted) Halo	ha
	(fluorescent) Lace	la
	Nails	na
	Satellite	sa
	(fluorescent) Quasar	!a

The last of these requires special attention. The sound of the consonant Quasar is a glottal stop. Since English has no letter to represent a glottal stop, I used "Q" instead. This also seems to be a common convention in Khmer textbooks.

The foregoing completes the list of "A"-series consonants. We turn now to the "O"-series. Again, we start with a table showing the stops in three categories:

Unvoiced Aspirated	Unvoiced Unaspirated	Voiced
(fluorescent) Kookaburra k'o	Golem ko
Chowder ch'o	Jockstrap cho
(fluorescent) Totem or Tomato t'o	Doll to	Drum do
Pomegranate p'o	Bomb po

And the remainder of the "O" series are in the following table:

Khmer letter	English name	Pronunciation
	iNGot	ngo
	NYotainori	nyo
	(inverted) Nozzle	no
	Lozenge	lo
	Motor	mo
	Rosebud	ro
	Yodel	yo
	Voicebox	vo

This wraps up the list of consonants, handling both the first and second issues identified above.

The third issue is not actually that difficult to deal with, but the explanation will be pretty lengthy. Let's take a comparative look at some of the consonants. Consider first this list:

	Gasmask
	Golem
	Jam
	Drum
	Tomato
	Totem
	Dam
	Bomb
	Pomegranate

Note that all these Khmer letters have in common the "gables" element:

The names of these letters therefore all contain the letter M as a clue to the shape. Initial M (as in Motor) does not count.

(If you are alert, you have noticed that one letter NYOtainori didn't make the list even though it contains the "gables" element. Unfortunately it was hard enough for me to find a word starting with NYO, so you have to remember this one on your own.)

Next consider this group of letters:

	Jockstrap
	Tarp
	Papaya

Note that all these have in common the "pompadour" on top:

And these letter names are distinguished by the letter P. Again, initial P (as in "Pomegranate") is irrelevant here.

Next group:

	Rosebud
	Voicebox
	Taxi

Note that the first two characters here "Rosebud" and "Voicebox" are almost identical: the only difference is that "Voicebox" includes a little extra fillip at the top:

The same structure is also at the upper-right of "Taxi". The clue for this structure is the letter X in the names "Voicebox" and "Taxi".

Note in particular the following five letters, which drove me to distraction:

	Jam
	Tarp
	Papaya
	Totem
	Jockstrap

These are the "Five Marx Brothers" of the Khmer alphabet:

Extraordinary measures are needed to keep them straight. The "M versus P" principle ensures that we won't confuse "Totem" with "Papaya", for example, but what about "Tarp" versus "Papaya"? I adopted the additional rule that letters with a smooth bottom:

get monosyllabic names ("Jam", "Tarp"), whereas letters with a crooked bottom:

get polysyllabic names ("Totem", "Papaya", "Jockstrap"). This "syllable" rule applies only to this group of five and cannot be relied upon for other letters. 

I wish this disposed of all opportunities for confusion, but no. Consider next this pair:

	Kookaburra
	Yodel

The only point of distinction is the orientation of the little loop at the upper left:

versus

I would have liked to think of yet another way to use word forms to distinguish these two cases, but by this point the system had too many moving parts to fit another one in. So I use a descriptive adjective to identify those letters with left-facing loops, thus: "fluorescent Kookaburra." The other names qualifying as fluorescent are:

Chamber, Doll, Jam, Lace, Papaya, Quasar, Tarp, Taxi, and Totem.

Consider next this group of three:

	Kangaroo
	Drum
	Nozzle

In this case, two distinguishing features need to be remembered: (1) "Kangaroo" is missing the little serif at the bottom; and (2) "Nozzle" is written with reversed orientation. Therefore the "Kangaroo" is a "tailless Kangaroo" and the "Nozzle" is an "inverted Nozzle." These points are important not merely for distinguishing these consonants, but for distinguishing them from some of the vowel symbols to be discussed in the future. 

Similarly "Halo" is described as "inverted" to keep the orientation distinct from "Lozenge" and "Satellite."

Thus endeth the system for Khmer consonants. In a forthcoming post, I will take up the system for Khmer vowels, compared to which the consonants are a day at the beach.