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?

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.

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.
 

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?
 

Photo: Eric

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?
 

Statistics source.

Photo: Sven Seiler

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

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!
 

• You might ask, why not just stop carrying your cell phone in your pocket? Guys have nowhere else to put it. Next you will probably ask, why such a gimmicky product name? Hopefully it’s memorable and helps with viral-ness. Who is interested in starring in or otherwise helping with a hilarious infomercial-type video?
• There are a couple sources on the radiation pocket protector product website. I recommend watching the video and checking out the studies.
• Big thanks to Fenner for coming up with the name Save Our Balls. I think he threw it out as a joke and I actually liked it!
• The website is a WordPress site hosted on EC2. It would have been easier to host somewhere else, but EC2 is taking over the server world so I figured I’d give it a shot. It took longer than I expected …
• I was hoping that Adwords would be able to generate a bunch of sales of the product. Unfortunately this does not appear to be the case – there simply isn’t enough search volume about cell phone radiation hurting sperm/testosterone. And it is way too expensive to bid on more generic “improve sperm count” / “low t” terms.
• Let me know if the nerds are interested in hearing more about my first EC2 and Adwords experiences and I’ll consider dedicating a post to it.

Photo: Kelly Schott

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.

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 – in the early 90’s the radio station I grew up listening to, KIIS-FM in Los Angeles, ran a “Win a Porsche by Friday” where they gave away a new Porsche to the 102nd caller. Kevin Poulsen wasn’t about to leave it up to chance though – he used his incredibly deep knowledge of the switch networks of Pacific Bell to his advantage. He simply blocked the radio station’s 25 phone lines from everyone but himself. I would love to hear a recording of his fake excitement when he found out he won!

Half Life 2
The original Half Life computer game was an unbelievably huge success. So naturally the development company, Valve Corporation, immediately started working on a second version. But it wasn’t going smoothly – almost 5 years later they still weren’t even close to releasing the game, and it was about to get much worse. An 18 year-old fan of the game was so curious about the upcoming sequel, he hacked into the company to find out as much as he could. Curious as a cat, he made the mistake of downloading all the source code … and then he shared it with some friends, who then shared it with a few more, and before he knew what happened, anyone in the world could download the source code on the internet or popular file share programs. Oops!

Stuxnet
Stuxnet was a computer worm that ran wild last year. But that isn’t quite enough to get a mention in this article. This worm was unlike any before it – it specifically attacked industrial equipment and the target was Iran. The belief is that its actual target was a little more specific than the country: Iranian uranium enrichment facilities!

The worm was incredibly sophisticated. So sophisticated that it is believed it could only come from a group of hackers with explicit government support (Israel is the number one suspect). What made it so sophisticated? It used an unprecedented 4 zero-day attacks on Windows! A zero-day attack takes advantage of an unknown software bug – these can often be exploited by viruses and the exploit can sell on the black market for up to a hundred thousand dollars. Thus, the hackers could take advantage of the vulnerability before even Microsoft knew about it (day 0) which gave them a large head start. Then multiply that times 4.

It also used two other methods that were brand new: sticking an infected flash drive into the computer would automatically install the rootkit with actual signatures stolen from separate companies (rather than creating their own fake signature). The ultimate goal? To vary the frequency on specific centrifuges used to produce enriched uranium for nuclear bombs and do it in an undetected fashion.

In the past year numerous security experts have examined Stuxnet and the more they find out, the more impressive it is. As many as 30 programmers are believed to have written it due to the multiple programming styles. And its also suspected that the payload and the delivery mechanism were created by different countries due to their different approaches. Was this is the first documented example of cyber warfare? Was it created by the United States? Check out this Vanity Fair article for an excellent synopsis.

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.
 

• 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 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!

With fan fiction though, you can’t always be confident that there will be a next release – sometimes the “authors” just stop in the middle and move on with their lives. I like to think this is when they find someone in the real world that actually loves them and is freaked out by their hobby. But that’s just my take.

Now on to the non-fiction side of things. What is fan non-fiction? Well it isn’t technically a term, but here is how I define it – a non-fiction work written by a fan based upon the world in a fictional work. Does that make sense? I hope it will soon.

The TV show Lost was extremely popular for fan non-fiction. Fan’s would write essays analyzing the various clues in the show in an attempt to predict what was going to happen next or how it was all going to end. They erroneously believed the producers were also keeping track of this stuff and were going to answer all the questions in the last show to tie up every loose end. Turns out the producers wanted to entertain and make money, the fans are the ones that actually care about this stuff. Need proof? Check out this video of a World of Warcraft fan asking the game’s designers a question about a flaw in the plot:
 

 
There was a recent Baseball Prospectus article analyzing Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. In particular, they wanted to figure out the baseball game in which Ferris caught his foul ball and who hit it. In other words, merge the fictional world in the movie with the real world. Turns out it was on June 5, 1985 between the Cubs and Braves. Ferris caught a foul ball to left field hit by the Braves Claudell Washington in the top of the 11th inning. But the actual filming of the scene was on September 24, 1985. Check it out for the details.
 

 
The article also goes on to analyze the feasibility of Ferris’s day. He stole a noon lunch reservation, went over to Wrigley for a 1:25 game that lasted 3 hours and 9 minutes. That means he caught the foul ball at 4 pm at the earliest. Given that they arrived home at 5:55 pm, that leaves less than two hours for: a trip to the museum holding kids hands, putting their heads against the glass of the Sears Tower, two dances at a parade, a quick dip in the pool, and Sloane’s house. Wow, what a stressful day!

A 16 page practically academic work analyzes the social structure in the TV show The Office. My character (Jim Halpert) starts off as a loser (more in the economic sense than the cultural sense you imagine when you hear the word) and progresses throughout the course of the show to become a sociopath. If you want to know what the heck that means, click the link. The depth of this analysis is outstanding – I am as big a fan as the next guy, but who seriously thinks about The Office this much?

What other examples can you think of? Do you enjoy fan non-fiction? Is it fun to analyze fake worlds and people as if they were real?