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?
 |
| 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?
