“Secrets of a Memory Champion”

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You might have seen this guy, he was a guest on a lot of shows after he won the US Memory Championship earlier this year.

Memory training is a topic that’s near and dear to my heart. I really think that schools should have one mandatory class every year devoted to it. Of course, it’ll never happen… any kid who masters even the basics of a memory systems has a killer advantage in our current school system, because more than 95% of testing simply checks whether you can regurgitate facts on command. And can you imagine what would happen if every kid could do that, perfectly, almost every time?! Schools would have to re-work their system to actually test for understanding! The horror!

In the mean time, a few parents will quietly continue to teach their kids how to use memory systems at home. Those kids will be fully capable of bringing home A+ report cards on almost any subject with a minimum of effort, while equally intelligent classmates will put in several times more work and pull lower grades for it.

I detest inefficiency. Schools could be so much more than just government-run part-time babysitters-slash-prisons. If the goal is learning, start by teaching the kids how to learn efficiently! If it’s just keeping them out of trouble for a few hours each day, be honest and admit that… and continue to watch helplessly as cultures that haven’t screwed up their own education systems happily take the wealth and power that you’re handing over to them.

Scammers Ahoy, Redux

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Remember that scammer I reported playing with a few months ago? Well, apparently one of his many brothers-in-crime didn’t get the memo about me. I picked up the phone earlier this month and found myself talking to another very-heavily-accented man, who again tried to tell me that my computer was infected. I briefly considered playing with this one too, but I was very busy at the time, so:

“Sorry, this scam’s already been tried on me. It didn’t work last time either.”

There was a noticeable pause, then “Oh. Okay,” and he hung up.

I’d planned to report this on the blog equivalent of a slow news day, but while catching up on two weeks’ worth of backed-up news I found this article on that exact scam, and how it’s getting much more prevalent. Apparently one English-speaking person in eight has been targeted for it so far. I’m fairly certain that regular readers of this blog wouldn’t have fallen for it even without my warning, but be careful out there anyway.

“Team IDs, looks to block gene that spreads cancer”

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Cancer is now the leading cause of death, but if these guys have their way, that will change in the next decade.

There will come a time when suicide is the most common cause of death. You’ll be able to live as long as you wish to. The only good excuse for death right now is that we’ve got to free up room and other resources for the next generation, but throwing away the accumulated knowledge and experiences of a lifetime to do so is such a waste. We’ll soon (relatively speaking) be capable of achieving the same benefit by only spending a small part of our lives in a physical body. The first generation of immortals may very well already be among us.

In fact, there’s a chance that we will be that generation. What would we need for it, that we don’t already have?

  • It would require the ability to read all the data from a person’s brain. We’re making progress toward that already. Our achievements in that field are small right now, but they’ll get ever-larger, and at an ever-increasing pace. In the next hundred years, at most, that ability will be old hat.
  • We’d also need the ability to store exabytes of information. Hard drives are growing ever-larger, and much faster and more durable forms of memory are already on the horizon. When the need arises, we’ll have the memory capacity for it.
  • Finally, we’d need the processing power to simulate physical life for those stored minds. With the ever-increasing pace that technology advances, we’ll have that capability long before it’s needed as well.

Sounds like science fiction? It is (though it’s not common even there, as immortality makes it hard to design a good story). But that only means that it’s not reality yet… look at all the modern conveniences that have happened in the last century, and look at when they first appeared in fiction. As I’ve pointed out several times on this blog, today’s science fiction is tomorrow’s science fact.

“Reducing Bribery by Legalizing the Giving of Bribes”

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Legalize the giving, but not the receiving, of bribes, giving the briber every incentive to report the bribee — including getting his bribe money back.

I have to admire the guy who came up with this. The only reason to criminalize the giving of a bribe is moralistic outrage, a system like this would be a hell of a lot more effective at eliminating the problem of bribery.

“Little kids and memory”

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What’s your earliest memory?

It has always struck me as curious that no one remembers anything from when they were really young. I have vivid memories from when I was six years old on, but only a handful from before that, most tied to strong emotions or discomfort, or (strangely enough) the layouts of the buildings and the neighborhoods I spent a lot of time in… I can still mentally walk through my grandmother’s house and garden, and the fascinating dusty old dirt-floored garage/shed behind their house. And while I may not recall the furnishings, I could draw you a fairly accurate plan of all three floors of the house, the land it sat on, and the streets immediately surrounding it.

But the thing that prompted these musings is a study some Canadian scientists have done recently, suggesting that while adults rarely remember anything from before age three or four, young kids have verifiable memories as far back as when they were eighteen months old. Even more curious, when they were brought back a couple years later, they couldn’t recall those memories even when prompted.

In a very real way, we are our memories, and it will be very interesting to see what else science can figure out about how the memory system works.

(The URL is from the lyrics of the Statler Brothers’ song “Do Your Remember These,” which is almost as old as I am.)