Inconsequential Childhood Memories

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.

How Do You Influence Others on Sensitive Subjects Without Making Waves?

Most people avoid confrontation when possible. Makes sense, why get into a dispute if you don’t have to? But sometimes a little confrontation now can avoid a massive fight later on – by talking through things early, you can keep harmful thoughts from building up inside until they boil over. This is important in almost any relationship – business partnerships, love interests, foreign relations, etc. However, we don’t do it because it can be very uncomfortable. Some subjects are very sensitive: sexual orientation, religion, political beliefs, finances, the list goes on.

I’m generally very passive in this regard, just letting people believe what they want to believe – especially with religion and politics (but then again maybe this is just because I don’t have the burning passion about them that some people have). My thinking took a turn after reading the appendix of “Eating Animals”, in which the author explains the importance of vegetarians spreading the gospel to end factory farming and save the world. I learned that if you have the goal of making change in this world, you are going to need to recruit others on your side, even when the subject is sensitive or others don’t immediately care.

One individual can have a humongous influence with the ripple effect, where the new recruit turns around and recruits someone else. In the example of choosing not to eat meat, there are three meals a day where you influence others without getting up on a soapbox. But is that enough? To do more would require an uncomfortable conversation. I am willing to make the personal sacrifice of limited food options, but am I willing to put myself in awkward situations where I am apparently judging others’ beliefs?

Meatetarian or vegetarian is not even the most sensitive of subjects. What about other areas I might like to influence those around me? Especially those that don’t obviously and publicly occur three times a day. Even worse, during these conversations I would likely find strongly entrenched beliefs rather than the chosen indifference of meat-eaters. Good luck to anyone who wants to talk to my Grandfather about how the president is performing.

I recently watched a TED talk about the most sensitive topic of all, religion. It is ridiculous in this day and age that we can’t openly talk about religious beliefs when the other person isn’t the same religion. It’s even more ridiculous that such small differences in beliefs lead to wars. The first step to overcome this is to openly talk about religion and truly understand one another. Well, what better way to start this understanding than watching a video you are not likely to agree with? Here is Richard Dawkins advocating militant atheism. Keep reading…

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

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

The Lofty Goal of Eradicating Polio

Almost a year ago I wrote a post titled The Concept of Infectious Disease Eradication. It was all about how the everyone has come together to fight to rid the world of certain diseases forever. The only time this has been accomplished was with smallpox from 1950 to 1979, but we are getting very close to doing it again with polio.

Armies of volunteers are mounting a heroic effort to get rid of polio forever. We haven’t had polio in the United States for many decades, so you may not even be aware that it is even still around. But it is a terrifying disease that leaves many paralyzed and is still hanging on in the poorest areas of the world. The picture above is of four people in an iron lung to allow them to breath.

There are millions of volunteers delivering the 30 cent treatment to every child in the most remote and destitute communities. Highly recommended and inspirational video:


 


 
On a completely separate note, my good buddies Tom, Kyle, and Rainer are launching their premium short shorts business, Chubbies. It’s going to be huge. Follow them on Twitter and definitely sign up for their email list for fun launch events coming this summer.

Assorted Internet Awesomeness

I’ve been sitting on a few bookmarks without posting them because they are just too short to make into a whole post. Of course the logical thing is to put them together to make one awesome blog post.

The first is for the fellas. I have always felt that one of life’s little joys is urinating on ice (TMI?). Snow makes a good substitute as well. Well here is something that lasts a lot longer and is potentially cooler:

The next is for the grammar nerds. You know how when you quote a passage with a typo or grammar error you use [sic] to designate that it wasn’t your mistake but the person’s you are quoting? Well what happens if the person you are quoting put [sic] when there wasn’t really an error? Check out this post with the possibilities. This reminds me of my obsession of using parenthesis within parenthesis (not that I do it that often (but I would if it were more socially acceptable)).

Here is one for the computer nerds – what is the most common phone number? What does the internet think is the most common phone number? Not the same thing! The number 2147483647 is the largest 32-bit signed integer, so if a website stores the number that way and someone enters a number larger than that, their phone number will be stored as 214-748-3647. Which begs the question, who in Dallas actually has that number and how many phone calls do they get that aren’t for them? Keep reading…

Samsonite and Jumping the Shark

Pop culture references are fun. They let you express yourself with minimal effort, kind of like Facebook. They can be dorky, funny, or cool, but they can also be clever. Do you quote Star Trek, Seinfeld, or Shakespeare? Are you someone that drops obscure references without expecting anyone else to understand? Can you make an original joke or are they all derived from something you’ve heard before in a movie or TV show?

Beyond simply dropping quotes into conversations, I enjoy idioms – a phrase with a different meaning than the literal words (think “back seat driver”, “flip the bird”, or “kick the bucket”). One of my favorite idioms that is widely used is “jump the shark.” The phrase comes from the show Happy Days way back on September 20th, 1977 – 30 million viewers tuned in to watch the third part of the opening episode in season five. Why is this episode so memorable? Fonzie actually water-ski jumps over a live shark to prove his braveness, wearing his leather jacket the whole time of course.

What does the idiom mean? It is the point when a television series reaches the point of no return – it has lost its original magic and tries to recapture the spark through increasingly absurd story lines. It happens to just about every long running TV show, can you think of any “jump the shark” moments in the shows you watch?

Here is my real question for you – is it socially acceptable to make up idioms based on pop culture? Keep reading…

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

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…

Disjointed Things You May or May Not Enjoy

I don’t have any coherent thoughts to share with you today, so I thought I would go with two completely disjointed things that I enjoyed in the last week.

The first is one of my favorite paragraphs I have read in a while (mainly because there are so many links). From a TechCrunch article about how the startup Tagged underwent a major pivot:

First, some context. We’re not at all unique. Many successful startups go through some form of pivot, changing their direction when their first idea was not successful. PayPal was beaming money between Palm Pilots. YouTube was a video dating site. Twitter was group SMS, which came out of a struggling Odeo. Pandora started as a B2B music recommendation service. Groupon started as The Point, serving collective political action. The list goes on.

And a silly math video. Check it out if you like word problems that make no sense, videos designed to look older than they are, or even just dry humor.

Bear Grylls – All That Is Man

Bear eating fish

Bear Grylls is a man’s man. He makes your annual camping trip look like a luxurious stay at a five star hotel. He makes the TV show Survivor look like a bunch of cry babies on a rough vacation. And he makes any meal that is cooked seem extravagant.

Bear is famous for his TV show Man vs. Wild which drops him into various remote wilderness survival situations – Grylls must overcome various obstacles as he fights his way back to civilization. However the show, and Bear Grylls, receives flak for staging certain events and misleading the audience into believing Bear receives no assistance from his crew. I am not going to argue that the show is 100% accurate, or try to assess how difficult the stunts are. Instead, I will point to real elements from Bear Grylls’s life that exemplify his manliness.

After college Bear Grylls joined the British Army and was selected for the uber-competitive British Special Forces as a paratrooper. How bad ass is he for getting in? They start with around 200 top notch candidates and after intense physical training for a couple weeks, only 30 to 40 remain. Next comes jungle training (where Bear likely picked up a lot of his skills on the show), combat survival, escape and evasion, and the dreaded resistance to interrogation (which lasts for a loooong 36 hours). Everyone that makes it to the end is rewarded with a favorable transfer, but only the best are allowed in the Special Forces. Bear Grylls was reportedly one of four in his class selected.

His life doesn’t get much easier from here. In 1996 his parachute ripped on a routine jump, sending him crashing to the ground with tremendous speed. He landed on his pack and the result was 3 crushed vertebrae – it was initially unclear if Bear Grylls would ever walk again. Keep reading…

Introducing an Island within a Lake, on an Island within a Lake, on an Island…

Photo: George Tapan

You are probably trying to work this out in your brain right now – how can you have an island within a lake, on an island that is within a lake, that all happens to be on another island?

Let’s start at the end and work our way down to the smallest island. The largest island in the Philippines is Luzon. On Luzon is a big freshwater lake, Taal Lake, that is roughly 15 by 10 miles. But the lake is not just water – on Taal Lake there is a medium-sized island formed by a volcano, appropriately named Volcano Island. Here’s where things get crazy. On Volcano Island is a lake sitting within the volcano crater. And just one more for good measure, in the crater lake is another small island (the speck in the middle of the picture above).

Does this remind anyone of the children’s song with the descriptive lyrics, forever zooming out and always ends with “and the green grass grows all around”?


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