Despite the jokey title of this blog post I’m seriously interested in hearing where our readers are coming from regarding our future economic/social situation in 2012. To that end I’ve crafted a poll that you can find on the right top side of this blog. The poll closes on the 31st and I’ll post the results in the new year. Feel free to also leave a comment below. What is your outlook for 2012?
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| Giordano Bruno’s insanely elaborate memory system. |
Yesterday we introduced an ancient memory system that can be handy for learning all those new urban homesteading skills. Today I’ll briefly discuss a way to use a related mnemonic called the Major System for committing strings of numbers to memory.
To use the Major System you first memorize a set of consonants that represent 0 through 9. From Wikipedia, here’s a table of the Major System consonants and a set of mnemonics with which to remember them:
| Numeral | Associated Consonants | Mnemonic |
| 0 | s, z, soft c | “z” is the first letter of zero. The other letters have a similar sound. |
| 1 | d, t | d & t have one downstroke and sound similar (some variant systems include “th”) |
| 2 | n | n has two downstrokes |
| 3 | m | M has three downstrokes and looks like a “3″ on its side |
| 4 | r | last letter of four, also 4 and R are almost mirror images of each other |
| 5 | l | L is the Roman Numeral for 50 |
| 6 | j, sh, soft “ch”, dg, zh, soft “g” | a script j has a lower loop / g is almost a 6 flipped over |
| 7 | k, hard c, hard g, hard “ch”, q, qu | capital K “contains” two sevens |
| 8 | f, v | script f resembles a figure-8. V sounds similar. (some variant systems include th) |
| 9 | b, p | p is a mirror-image 9. b sounds similar and resembles a 9 rolled around |
| Unassigned | Vowel sounds, w,h,y | These can be used anywhere without changing a word’s number value |
So, for example, to memorize the number “1795″ you start with the first two numbers “17″. Let’s say 1 = “d” and 7=”g”. Next add a vowel of your choice, say “o” to make “dog“. “17″ now is a dog. For the 95 let’s say 9 = “b” and 5 = “l” to make “ball”. You now have a dog playing with a ball that you can put into a room in your memory palace. For a longer strings of numbers it’s best to “chunk” them into groups of four to make them more manageable.
This is beyond the amount of time I’m willing to put into this, but you can also commit to memory 100 images to represent double digit numbers between 00 and 99 to be able to memorize longer numbers faster.
We need a term for superfluous smart phone trivia Googling. After all, with the vast archive of factoids on the interwebs who needs to remember anything anymore? But what do we miss by externalizing all of our memories into an electronic form. What about those bards of the past who could recite thousands of lines of poetry, or the Greek rhetoricians who could speak for hours at a time without notes? Thankfully the basics of the lost art of memory can be mastered in an evening. And it’s all in a short section of a 2,100 year old document called the Rhetorica ad Herennium.
Here’s the memory trick the ad Herennium describes in two easy steps. Step one. Say, for example, you want to memorize the following shopping list: goat milk, goat milk yogurt, two blocks of tofu, olive oil, sunflower seeds and cat food (tuna). Take these items and imagine them in some memorable way. Think crazy, surreal, obscene etc. As the ad Herennium puts it,
When we see in everyday life things that are petty, ordinary, and banal, we generally fail to remember them, because the mind is not being stirred by anything novel or marvellous. But if we see or hear something exceptionally base, dishonourable, extraordinary, great, unbelievable, or laughable, that we are likely to remember a long time.
Step two. place the images you’ve imagined into a physical space that you know well, say your house, your childhood home, office etc. You are, as the ancients would say, creating a “memory palace”. For my shopping list I used our house and imagined a goat in one bay of the garage (goat milk), a goat operating a soft serve yogurt machine in the other bay (goat milk yogurt), two giant cubes of tofu jumping up and down in the living room, Olive Oyl from Popeye in the kitchen (olive oil), Mrs. Homegrown munching sunflower seeds in the hallway (sunflower seeds) and cats dancing around a fish in the bathroom (cat food). When I used my memory palace at the store I was able to recall all but one (olive oil). Later I realized why. I was never really into Popeye and, as a result, using Olive Oyl was not sufficiently memorable. I later came up with a much more graphic way to remember the olive oil later, but this is a family friendly blog so I’ll forgo the description. Even though this banal shopping list is almost a week old I was able to remember it for this blog post. And one of the great features of a memory palace is that you can recall your list in any order by simply walking through the imaginary building you’re using.
While I’ve got the basic concept of the art of memory I need to do some more practice. So far what I’ve found it most useful for is learning people’s names. And, as an urban homesteader, I always find myself learning new skills some of which require memorization. Now this won’t help you find a lost set of car keys. That’s what the ad Herennium calls “natural” memory which it distinguishes from the “artificial” memory that can be enhanced with a memory palace.
I wish this handy trick had been taught to me in school. You can get the idea across in just a few minutes. While we don’t want education to devolve into rote memorization, it’s a little embarrassing to think about how much memory we’ve ceded to the Internet in the post-iPhone era.
The art of memory is a right brain, creative activity that exercises creative visualization. It’s a tool that Renaissance mages such as Giordano Bruno and Giulio Camillo used to initiate the shift in consciousness that gave birth to the Renaissance. Francis Yates’ book The Art of Memory
We’ll go over a mnemonic system for numbers tomorrow.
For an entertaining introduction to the art of memory see Joshua Foer’s book Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything.
Light from Sunday Paper on Vimeo.
This poetic video, shot in my own overlit hometown, likely expresses the filmmakers ideas about wasting electricity. But like all good art it has multiple interpretations. I’m going to suggest that it shows how electric lighting has stolen the gift of night, robbing us of our night skies and peaceful sleep.
There’s a large body of evidence that artificial light plays havoc with our sleep patterns, health and psychological well being, to say nothing of its detrimental effect on wildlife. And then there’s that night sky. You can actually count the number of stars in the sky in Los Angeles.
Thankfully this is one of the issues that we can help change on the home level. Other than one small LED light at the bottom of our entrance stairs we have no landscape lighting (though Mrs. Homegrown did sneak a string of Christmas lights past my bah-humbug filter). We can also take measures to darken our bedrooms at night. While this may at first seem like tin foil hat talk, consider that the International Agency for Research on Cancer has classified night shift work as a carcinogen.
Several years ago I heard a psychologist speak eloquently on the need for dark nights (unfortunately I can’t remember his name). He proposed getting a small town do a trial period of shutting all their lights out at night to see how it would change the well being of the town’s inhabitants. It’s a great idea. So let’s get on it. I’d like to think we can experiment with returning night to our towns and cities before that dinosaur juice peaks out.
One of the traditions my family has experimented with in the past few years is the holiday gift truce. At Thanksgiving we agree to terms. In the past we’ve exchanged names and given one gift per person or we’ve just agreed to not do any gift giving or shopping (kids are exempt). Though we haven’t tried it, another option would be to contribute to a favorite charity, say Heifer International, in lieu of gifts.
Economics professor Joel Waldfogel has studied the inefficiencies of gift giving and calls Christmas, “an orgy of value destruction.” The problem? When it comes to gift giving we’re not very good at guessing what people actually want. In a Bloomberg article Waldfogel says, “People value the items they receive as gifts 20 percent less per dollar spent than the items they purchase for themselves. These are items that are not well-suited for their tastes.”
Particularly in challenging economic times it’s hard to justify this orgy of value destruction, not to mention the stress and time spent in mall parking lots. I’m interested in how readers of this blog navigate the holiday season. Do you make your own gifts? Do you think gift giving is important? Do you give cash or savings bonds? Or do you avoid gift giving altogether?
I have a Google alert set up for the phrase “urban homestead”. Lately I’ve noticed more real estate and apartment listings using this phrase. Our neighbors Anne and Bill even used it to rent out their duplex. A rental listing that includes the photos in this post came from a real estate concern renting out an apartment in Edmonton, Canada. For $1,600 Canadian dollars a month you get:
Other than that last bit (Dogs but not cats? Someone please explain the logic.) I’m happy to see fruit trees, rain barrels and community activities listed as an asset. Maybe that common sense thing is catching on.
PROTECT IP Act Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.
This sort of advocacy is unusual for this blog, but we believe a free Internet is essential for both cultural innovation and democracy. Sure, the Internet is mostly made of porn and kittens, but we like it as it is. What we don’t want to see is it being unduly controlled by either the government or corporate interests, so we’re participating in American Censorship Day by offering up this information to our readers.
Today, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) is headed to the House Judiciary Committee. The purported purpose of this bill, and its counterpart in the Senate, is to stop infringement on copyrighted material, but the scope of the proposed law is way too broad and vague, and if you spin out the implications, downright scary. It has has the power to censor the Internet. It can blacklist or bankrupt sites on whisper-thin grounds, it will impede small businesses and new start-ups, and even punish individuals with jail time for infringing copyright in smalls ways, like, for instance, posting a family video in which copyrighted music is playing in the background.
This bill is likely to pass, and it will happen soon.
It’s hard to summarize all the nasty pointy prongs of this legislation in a few words. The video above does an brief overview–be sure to watch to the end for last second updates. Our smart friends at the EFF, who are helping us with the whole Urban Homestead trademark thing, have written several cogent, lawyerly pieces about this legislation:
Disastrous IP Legislation Back and It’s Worse than Ever
SOPA: Hollywood Finally Gets a Chance to Break the Internet
Today there is a call for mass action. You may have noticed some of your favorite sites have blacked themselves out in protest.
If you’d like to take action, the EFF has provided a page that helps you shoot a pithy email to your own congresspeople. It only takes a couple of seconds and feels really good:
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Image from the beautiful book, Haunted Air by Ossian Brown |
Mrs. Homegrown here:
I celebrate Samhain on November 1st because I enjoy marking the changing seasons of the year by making these old festivals my own. It’s so easy to lose track of time in an electronic culture. It’s even easier to lose track when you live in Los Angeles, land of the perpetual sunshine.
Samhain marks the last harvest of the year. The weather is cold enough to keep meat, so it is also the time when all non-breeding livestock was slaughtered and cured–otherwise they’d have to be fed through the winter. It also is the start of the dark half of the year, a time of long nights and introspection.
This is a time of transition, and the air is alive with the excitement of it. The leaves are bright, the branches bare and stark against the sky. The days are blue, but the nights are cold and black. The wind kicks up. Dead leaves skitter and bolt across the asphalt. The crows come back to our neighborhood around this time of year and caw in the palms: southern California Gothic. It’s my favorite season here.
The Celts believed places and times of transition–dawn, dusk, midnight, crossroads, lakes and streams, caves, etc.–held supernatural energy. These were places and times where the boundaries between our world and the other world was very thin. Samhain was one of those transition periods, and coming as it did at the last harvest, at the beginning of winter, it was associated with the dead.
And of course, within the Catholic Church November 1st is also marked as All Saint’s Day and the 2nd as All Soul’s Day, both of which honor the dead, the sainted dead and the faithful departed, respectively. And All Soul’s Day is better known around here as Dia de los Muertos (and celebrated in style).
Face it, this is the time of year to deal with mortality and memory.
Halloween is lots of fun. (I love the genial anarchy of both Halloween and Fourth of July–they’re my favorite holidays.) So I save Oct. 31st for trick o’ treaters and parties and celebrate Samhain on the 1st, quietly, with a just a few simple gestures. I don’t plan on slaughtering any animals (Did I just hear our chickens breath a sigh of relief?) so I clean the house instead, and attack one drawer or closet, and shed things I don’t need anymore, both as sort of a psychological purge and in preparation for the busy holiday season to come. I like to make a nice meal, too, something celebratory, and burn candles on the table against the darkness. Then I round up Erik and we toast our dead.
Do you do anything special this time of year?
Robert Heinlein, in his book Time Enough For Love, suggests a list of skills everyone should know,
“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”
In the planning process for our first book The Urban Homestead we used a big piece of taped together paper to come up with our version of Heinlein’s skill set. Most of the subjects on that paper, everything from vegetable gardening to cargo bikes, ended up in the book or in our second book Making It. Now, we don’t expect everyone to master all the things in our books, but it doesn’t hurt to have a cursory knowledge of, say, greywater plumbing or compost pile construction, even if you live in a Manhattan apartment. You never know when you might have to roast a pig in a pit (that will be in our next book!).
One of my favorite list of things one should know is contained in the old Whole Earth Catalog. A few weeks ago I was leafing through my copy of the WEC and realized that I had done most of the things in it (not necessarily well, mind you). Well, everything except natural child birth, large puppets and mime.
I believe we’re entering the time of the self-taught generalist. But, looking at Heinlein’s list, I’ve got a lot of things I have yet to master. Which leads me to ask you, our dear readers, what topics and skills you’re interested in learning. What’s on that skill to-do list? Leave some comments!
Thanks to the Urban Survival Podcast for that Heinlein quote.
From Mr. Brown Thumb via Kitchen Gardeners:
“This week Adam Guerrero, a math teacher at Raleigh-Egypt High School in Memphis, TN., along with three students became lawbreakers after they continued to tend to a garden after it was deemed a neighborhood nuisance. Guerrero was cited for violating city ordinances 48-38 and 48-97. His crime, as reported by the Memphis Flyer, consists of failure to maintain “a clean and sanitary condition free from any accumulation of rubbish or garbage” at his Nutbush home.
Yet another city bureaucracy has decided to crack down on a front yard vegetable garden. What makes this particularly annoying is that the homeowner is a teacher who is using the front yard garden to show his students how to grow food.
The folks at Kitchen Gardeners put together the following ways you can help:
1. Write to Judge Larry Potter at [email protected] in support of Adam Guerrero’s garden. Please be respectful. You are an ambassador for the kitchen garden cause.
2. Join the Facebook page called “Save Adam Guerrero’s Garden,” where you can show your support and receive updates about his case.
3. Sing your outrage from rooftops on Twitter using the #WarOnGardens hashtag.
4. Sign an online petition at change.org in support of the garden, which will be sent to the judge hearing Guerrero’s case.
Update: Memphis Root Simple Reader Bridgmanpotery sent a link to a local article that has more details on this story. It all started with a neighbor dispute involving a cat and a scratched 1991 Cadillac Seville!
