Interesting

Inconsequential Childhood Memories

4 Comments

brain vs braun

Memory is a funny thing. Some people remember everything from a decade ago crystal clear. Others can’t remember where they parked their car an hour ago.

Of course a certain amount of memory can be trained. I read part of the book “Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything“, where a journalist with an average memory spends a year training for the U.S. Memory Championship. It’s an incredible insight into what is possible if you have the right system – check out a Slate article he wrote for a quick overview.

But that’s only one type of memory and the author said he still loses his car keys. There is a completely different type of memory freaks that are even more interesting. There was an awesome 60 Minutes episode interviewing a handful of the rare people that have what they call “superior autobiographical memory.” If you ask them – “do you remember what you did on April 7th, 1973?” – they’ll be able to tell you exactly what they did that day, the day of the week, what they wore, and what they were thinking about.

Sleep is also crucial to your memory. I learned somewhere that the last few hours (5-8) of sleep are when most the transfer of memory from RAM (short-term) to hard-drive (long-term) happens. So if you don’t get a full 8 hours of sleep, you aren’t learning as effectively as you could be. The fact that people sleep less these days than a few decades ago can also be partially blamed for a whole bunch of other things, like getting fat. Maybe New York should mandate 8 hours of sleep a night rather than banning sugary sodas? Hard to tell which would be more effective, but one gets all the blame.

Inconsequential Childhood Memories

I got thinking about memory because of a couple memories I have from 4th and 5th grade. Recently I’ve been spending a lot of time with kids this age, so I’ve been going back into my past to see what I remember. Some of these things are so inconsequential, I have no idea why I remember them but not more important things:

  • We did mental math problems every day in Ms. Barth’s class – “Start with 7 … multiply by 3 … add 4 … divide by 5 – what’s the number?” Well I remember one time we did it, we started with the number of hours you sleep in a night. So I started with 9. I got it wrong because we were supposed to start with 8.
  • In Ms. Walker’s 5th grade class she read off everyone’s name and you were supposed to respond if you did your homework. One time I said “yes” and she thought I said “oven” (don’t ask me how). So from then on I would answer with a household appliance. But one time I didn’t do my reading and didn’t get to say an appliance. This was the start of my 15+ year run of becoming less cool every year.
  • We read Babe – they sat us down to explain the word bitch and that we shouldn’t use it.
  • The TV show South Park came out – I had a friend named Kenny and we thought it was funny he dies in every episode (even though we didn’t watch it, we just knew that it happened!)
  • We had a Tic-Tac-Toe tournament in our class. I made the finals where I faced off on the overhead projector against someone that also figured out how to win or tie every time. After we tied a half dozen times I got bored and tried something different so we wouldn’t just tie for all of time. I lost.

Do you have any memories from 4th or 5th grade that are just as inconsequential?

 

 
Kickass quote from the author of Moonwalking with Einstein that can be applied to any skill you are learning:

The OK Plateau is that place we all get to where we just stop getting better at something. Take typing, for example. You might type and type and type all day long, but once you reach a certain level, you just never get appreciably faster at it. That’s because it’s become automatic. You’ve moved it to the back of your mind’s filing cabinet. If you want to become a faster typer, it’s possible, of course. But you’ve got to bring the task back under your conscious control. You’ve got to push yourself past where you’re comfortable. You have to watch yourself fail and learn from your mistakes. That’s the way to get better at anything. And it’s how I improved my memory.

A Startling Look into the World of Competitive Freediving

Leave a comment

Freediving is some pretty gnarly stuff. Basically you hold your breath, swim as deep as you can, and then swim back up to the surface. Simple right? Well the best in the world go 300 feet down and come back up four minutes later. If that’s not super-human I don’t know what is.

Here is a great article that takes an in-depth look at those pushing the limits in this dangerous sport. We’re talking torn larynges (plural of larynx), blackouts, and noses exploding into a bloody mess for those lucky enough to return to the surface. It’s a great read, but I thought I would point out a couple items I found particularly interesting that otherwise may not stand out in the article.

Powerful Psychology in Play

“Competitive freediving is a safe sport. It’s all very regulated, very controlled,” says William Trubridge, a 31-year-old world-record freediver from New Zealand. “I would never do it if it wasn’t.”

Cognitive dissonance much? Here is a closer look at the logic being applied: I wouldn’t do anything unsafe and I freedive, therefore freediving must be safe. Wow. Let me guess… he thinks of himself as a moral person so everything he does is perfectly acceptable.

Achieving Greatness

So why do you do this Mr. World Record Holder?

“To me, I don’t really have a choice,” he says in a soft voice. “There is an immortal peace confronting the underwater world on its own terms, with your breath at your breast. The ocean is just where I am meant to be.”

The greats in any discipline will likely have a similar answer. They were made for it and can’t imagine life without it. Since it isn’t really a choice for them, the risks and endless devotion aren’t viewed in the same way everyone else sees them.
 

 
Photo: Gavin Goodhart

It’s a Doggy Dog World Out There – Things You Had Completely Wrong

19 Comments

Oh the foolishness of youth! How far I have come. You know the saying “it’s a dog-eat-dog world out there”? Well I used to think it was “it’s a doggy-dog world out there” … what the heck does that even mean? I don’t know, but as a kid there are so many saying that don’t make sense, this was just another one.

But sometimes mistakes like this can come from too much thinking. For example, when a kid learns that Santa Claus isn’t real, she will correctly assume that elves aren’t real, but incorrectly assume that reindeers aren’t real. In fact they are a real animal and the kid might be an adult before finding out.

What other examples do you have, either from your childhood or someone else’s?
 

 
Here is a great reddit convo along the same lines. Am I the only one that thinks a lot of the things in there aren’t so obvious?

Photo: Eric

An Experiment in a New Corner of the Internet (or new to me at least)

Leave a comment

The web is an extraordinary place. Anyone that has had a conversation with me has probably received an earful about how awesome the internet is. One of the most incredible things about it is the diversity. Most people have their own little corner they know well and are completely unaware of the multitude of ways other people are using the internet.

Example: it might seem unbelievable, but some people search YouTube when they want to know something rather than Google. It depends upon your preference for consuming information – watching video or reading text. Or put another way, if you didn’t grow up using old school search engines, and instead have spent hundreds of hours watching videos on YouTube, where are you likely to go when you need information?

This isn’t your grandpa’s internet – the scale of YouTube is absurd. 48 hours of video are uploaded every minute, resulting in nearly 8 years of content uploaded every day. Over 3 billion videos are viewed a day, which is more than 1 video for each person in the world that has internet access. And it is only going to get bigger, growing at 40 or 50% since last year. Wow.

These kinds of numbers made me want to give creating YouTube videos a shot. So I did a little experiment – I made a couple videos answering simple questions:


 

I’m intrigued to find out if anyone actually watches these videos. Will they show up in Google search results on the first page? Will they even be the top result for a Google video search? How about a YouTube search? Will I like posting videos and make this a part of my internet life?
 

 
Yes, those searching YouTube for information are likely teenagers. The same ones that AVERAGE 6 text per waking hour. There is only a decade of age differential, yet I cannot even fathom this behavior.

Statistics source.

Photo: Sven Seiler

Takeaways From My Time with The Bell Curve

3 Comments

The Bell Curve is a controversial beast of a book that tickled my brain by examining a number of taboo subjects. Since collective intelligence is superior to mine, I’ll quote Wikipedia: “Its central argument is that intelligence is substantially influenced by both inherited and environmental factors and is a better predictor of many personal dynamics, including financial income, job performance, chance of unwanted pregnancy, and involvement in crime than are an individual’s parental socioeconomic status, or education level.”

The book also draws a number of insights into the class structure in America – the land of opportunity is no longer a meritocracy. A large percentage of the population doesn’t stand a chance. If trends don’t reverse, we are on a path to a welfare state with an enormous divide between the wealthy and poor (similar to many Latin American countries today).

A few bullet points for you to ponder:

  • Our country has become extremely efficient at identifying intelligence and grouping the similarly minded together (without trying to). A hundred years ago there was a wide range of smarts on the assembly lines of factories. Today there is an extremely high correlation between IQ and income, largely due to our university system’s ability to identify the brightest and deliver credentials. This results in a self-perpetuating clumping of similarly intelligent individuals – every generation it will become more pronounced.

    •  

  • 20% of children in the United States are born to single mothers of below average intelligence. We know dual parent homes are better at raising kids and that brains are inherited (to some extent). Those kids head to the plate with two strikes already.

    •  

  • Small shifts in the average IQ of the population have shockingly large effects on things like crime, unwanted pregnancy, divorce, unemployment, and welfare. As in a 2% shift of the bell curve in IQ yields a 15% difference in some of the aforementioned categories (causation not guaranteed, but with those kinds of numbers it must at least contribute). This is particularly important as it is estimated the average IQ is currently dropping by a point every generation.

    •  

  • Education spending is heavily weighted towards the underprivileged (no child left behind), rather than gifted – 50 years ago this was not the case. If the goal of education is to help each child reach his or her full potential, this unbalanced allocation of resources is not ideal.

    •  

  • It is a big no no to look at the average intelligence of individual races in America. Here are the numbers they quoted: African Americans 85, Latino 89, White 103, Asian 106, and Jews 113 (if you are a Jew does that mean you aren’t counted in the other categories?). Considering the exodus of the best and brightest from inner cities, the average IQ of those left behind is shockingly low.

 
Pretty interesting stuff, what do you think? Are these things you have thought about before?
 

Photo: xlibber

My Latest Project – The Save Our Balls Pocket Shield

8 Comments

I don’t think everyone is aware of the huge problem facing mankind. No, not global warming. This one isn’t talked about for some reason, but soon it could be an even bigger problem than global warming. I’m talking about infertility, specifically male infertility.

Children of Men is an excellent movie about the world in 2027, 18 years after the last human was born. That’s right, the human race became sterile – the scary thing is that this scenario is not as ridiculous as you would think. In the movie it is due to a genetic defect in women, but in real life it is more likely to be men that are the downfall.

Sperm counts are dropping like middle school girls running hurdles. It’s bad. In the last 50 years it is estimated that sperm counts have halved. Even worse, they show no signs of stopping – every year sperm counts around the world are dropping 1 to 2 percent. Do I need sources for this? No. I don’t care what the exact numbers are – there is so obviously a correlation, it doesn’t matter if it is only half as bad as I just said. The fact remains, we are doing some real damage.

So what is happening? Unfortunately there isn’t one answer, there are numerous environmental factors that contribute to this decline. Things like plastics, pesticides, soy products, obesity, sitting in an office all day, and more. Pretty much everything in our lives …

There is one that has come up in the last 15 years that should be more publicized – leaving a cell phone on in your pocket! Even a limited exposure of an hour a day has been shown to immensely kill sperm and lower testosterone. Luckily, this is an easy problem to fix. Enter the Save Our Balls Pocket Shield. This is a simple product I am producing that will protect your cojones – simply clip the shield to your pocket before putting on your pants and it will block the radiation from hitting your boys. Perfect!
Keep reading…

Google +1 Button For the Masses! But How Many Are the Masses?

2 Comments

Google today announced on their blog that any site can embed a +1 button on their site. This button will bring a certain amount of socialness to search results. Just head on over to this site to grab the code to drop onto your webpage.

After I put the +1 button on one of my websites (no link, official announcement coming soon) and noticed it on another site I was on, I became curious how many sites already have the +1 button setup? Is there a way that I can search for the javascript code that is used to insert the button?

I have learned a little bit about search engine optimization (SEO) because I’m nerdy like that. The fact that Google, the most popular search engine, is starting to offer a “recommend” button throws a wrench in everything. How will they account for the +1 score in search results? Does this immediately become more important than any other SEO tactics? Let’s see what the SEO gurus have to say in a couple months … (or check out this Quora answer for insight)

This quiet announcement without any fanfare is very sly of Google. This is a big deal, but they decided to downplay it. Why?

This question was posted to Quora. I’ll let you know if I receive a good answer.

Intro to Hacking Part 2 – More Hacker Stories

Leave a comment


This is Part 2 in the Into to Hacking series. Check out Part 1 for additional hacker stories and come back soon for a more technical look at common hacking methods.

Phone Phreaks
Some of the earliest hackers were phone phreaks, dating all the way back to the 1950’s – they took advantage of their knowledge of how phone systems work to do some pretty cool things.

Switch-hooking: making outgoing phone calls by rapidly picking up and hanging up the phone (5-10 times a second) to mimic a rotary dial. If you were good enough you could impress your friends by dialing without pressing any numbers!

Tone dialing: certain tones were used by the phone company which had a specific meaning to the call routing system, such as 2600 Hz to designate that a call was over. This knowledge could be exploited to provide free long-distance and international calls. It was first discovered in 1957 by a seven-year old blind kid with perfect pitch – he whistled the fourth E above middle C (2600 Hz) while on the phone and the call abruptly ended. The legendary John Draper also discovered that the free whistles in Cap’n Crunch cereal boxes also made the same tone (hence his nickname Captain Crunch), while still others used exotic birds or learned the distinct whistle themselves.

Blue boxes: as the systems became more complex, so did the hackers’ techniques. Blue boxes were fairly simple contraptions built to take advantage of some of the phreak knowledge and caught the attention of the young Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs. As you might expect, Woz was the main engineer and Stevie wanted to sell them and dominate the world. One famous demo of their device involved Woz calling the Pope pretending to be Harry Kissinger …

Free Porsche!
Radio stations love giving things away Keep reading…

Secret Recipes Revealed – Does it Matter?

5 Comments

There has been a lot of buzz recently around the possibility that Coke’s secret formula has finally been revealed to the public. Is it true? Does it matter?

Did you know only two Coca-Cola executives are allowed to know the recipe for creating the sugary syrup that goes into Coke? And that those two execs aren’t allowed to fly on the same plane for fear that it may crash and the formula will be lost forever?

But don’t think Coca-Cola is unique. There are similar stories for Dr. Pepper’s 23 flavors, KFC’s blend of 11 herbs and spices, and many others. Did you know KFC’s 11 herbs and spices are mixed at two different locations and then combined at a third so that the mixers don’t learn the formula?

Does it actually matter? I love all the secrecy, but I hate to break it to you, Coke isn’t successful because of their product. It’s their brand. It’s their advertising. It’s the memories.

And Coke knows this. All the secrecy is good publicity, so they aren’t about to publish the formula in the New York Times. But they know their true assets. As any good product manager knows, it is not all about the product.
 

 
This all reminds me of when one of my friends worked at a cookie store in town with a top secret cookie recipe that yielded the most delicious cookies of all time. When he was quitting, we asked him for the recipe. He said, “No problem, I have it memorized. 2 pounds of butter …” We didn’t have that much butter so we lost interest.
 
It turns out Coke has another secret weapon up its sleeve: one of the ingredients is illegal in the United States, unless you’re Coca-Cola. That’s right, one of the ingredients is fluid extract of coca, taken from coca leaves that have had all the cocaine removed. The DEA currently only allows one plant in New Jersey to import these leaves and I bet you can guess the company with whom they have formed an exclusive deal.
 
Sources:
  • Snopes.com on the Coke secret formula
  • ABC news on the possibility of the formula recently released. Check out the second page for other food industry secrets and rumors.

Photo: Morgan

Fan Fiction is Fascinating, But What About Fan Non-Fiction?

11 Comments

Fan fiction is an absolutely fascinating cultural phenomenon. These are the people that sit down and write anywhere from a chapter to multiple books in the world crafted by an existing fictional work. When they can make any world they can possibly imagine, why would they limit themselves to a world they previously read about? Sure, I can understand how a few people could be into this, there are some ridiculous hobbies out there. But it is much bigger than that. Way bigger. Prepare to have your mind blown.

Harry Potter is by far the most popular book world for extension into fan fiction and fanfiction.net is the most popular site for “authors” to post their stories. So let’s check out their HP section. There are over a half million stories in over 20 languages! But taking a closer look, many of these are not short stories involving a character or two. They are full on books even longer than the original Harry Potter books!

There are 1,084,170 words in the Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling spread over 7 books. If we define a book as over 100,000 words (similar in size to the first couple HP books), there are over 4,000 on fanfiction.net in English alone! And 62 of those are longer than half of the entire series. Can’t get enough Harry Potter? Don’t worry, there’s plenty more out there for you to check out.

What else is fascinating? Most authors of fan fiction release chapters as they write them. I am intrigued by this way of releasing written material – in yesteryear this is how most fiction was done. Ok, maybe not as it was written, but released by chapter. For example, Great Expectations by Charles Dickens was originally published in 36 weekly installments. Only a year later was it condensed into three books. Publishers take note: this could target a larger market – anyone and everyone can read a chapter a week but a full book seems so daunting. Oh, and it gives you the opportunity to earn more money from the biggest fans. In order to get the book ahead of everyone else, you have to buy it in 36 parts that will cost more than if you just waited a year. Brilliant!

Keep reading…