A friend of mine in grad school had a photographic memory for strings of characters, but only when those strings were not sentences that actually meant something.
So "ax23#re67" he could recall perfectly with no problem, but a sonnet by Shakespeare not so much.
Is the three-dimensional tic-tac-toe also to be played in your head? I think this might be a neat web toy to implement. Invisible tic-tac-toe.
My least favorite thing about e-books is that I have a quasi-photographic memory in that, when I want to refer back to something in a physi-book, I can almost always remember how many pages back, and even which precise part of the page, the information was. I don't see the text, though, because why would I even have to look?
Is the three-dimensional tic-tac-toe also to be played in your head?
Yes.
I do not have a visual memory. I've memorized hundreds of poems and large sections of novels, but it never appears in my mind as text; I just feel the rhythms of the words. It's the same with phone numbers. I memorize the sound of the phone number. Shopping lists, same.
OK, so the only information you get, I assume, is what the last move your opponent made was? Do you think you'd be good at that? I think it'd be fun to try.
If you're killing time in a situation where you don't have access to a pencil, paper, or internet/reading material, where does your mind go?
I bought a smart phone just to avoid the possibility that could happen.
I think 3 and 5 are also true for me to some extent. I don't think I could do the tic tac toe thing- I have a good visual memory but not for that kind of thing. I remember layouts of houses and what paintings looked like and things pretty well, but a bunch of xs and os? no way they would stick.
I've memorized hundreds of poems and large sections of novels, but it never appears in my mind as text; I just feel the rhythms of the words. It's the same with phone numbers. I memorize the sound of the phone number. Shopping lists, same.
This is me. Although while I don't have a visual memory (I can make pictures in my head but it's a fair amount of work), I have a non-pictoral spacial memory that sort of serves the same purpose. But the tic-tac-toe would be really hard: I could probably play 2D by concentrating, but I think I'd break down at 3D.
I'd be game for trying. I have no idea if I'd be good at it or not. I can see the board pretty easily in my head. Playing in a comment thread makes it easier, since there's a record of all previous moves.
Also we'd need some notational system, which doesn't seem terribly hard.
(I don't think I can actually play, because I've got the baby home with me today, and I don't think I've got enough prolonged concentration left over.)
Oh, yeah, I could do it fine in a comment thread I could refer back to, I think. Holding the memory would be where I'd lose it.
I just feel the rhythms of the words.
This is both fascinating and baffling to me. Like an extension of knowing the right spelling to a word? I'm not a great speller, but I've got enough intuition to get me through my non-Unfogged life.
If you're killing time in a situation where you don't have access to a pencil, paper, or internet/reading material, where does your mind go?
if I don't have something specific to think about, I play games with my eyes. Like, look at a corner and make the perspective go backwards, or ... I have more that I like doing but I can't really think of any concise way to describe them. Basically doing optical illusions on my brain with whatever happens to be nearby.
I ask because I'm working up a design in my head for a web-based invisible tic-tac-toe game (this is the sort of thing I occupy my mind with in the absence of external distractions, BTW).
I like the idea of showing a blank board that you click on to make moves, but maybe even that is too visual.
I actually don't think I'd refer to the comment thread history much, because I'd find the notation cumbersome, but once I'd pictured the move, I think it would stick. I'd definitely switch to red and blue in my head, instead of Xs and Os.
And what happens if you choose a square that's already occupied? Instant death?
12: Can you remember song lyrics? Same thing, you just don't have the tune to rely on. (And for poetry, I know more poetry imperfectly than I do perfectly -- I know, e.g., rhyme words, how the poem scans, and most of the key words, and I remember it sort of by filling in the missing bits, which is usually pretty close.)
for a web-based invisible tic-tac-toe game
Like a comment thread?
I've occasionally been jealous of Russian intelligentsia types who can rattle off pages of poetry off the top of their heads. And many of them can probably play mental chess as well, literally not figuratively. I find it takes serious effort to memorize a relatively short passage and it tends to fade pretty quickly.
If you're killing time in a situation where you don't have access to a pencil, paper, or internet/reading material, where does your mind go? What problems do you tackle? Or what topics drift to mind?
Fucking.
vI just feel the rhythms of the words.
Me too. And I find heebie's visual methods of cognition as baffling as she apparently finds us.
17: Yeah, the music gives me scaffolding. But I remember music fairly visually. Not totally, because it's auditory, but somewhat.
On the other hand random facts and figures related to history or politics seem to just pile up with no effort at all.
I cannot remember facts and figures whatsoever. Or orders of magnitude. I get impressions, sort of, but I don't trust them at all.
18: But then you can see the game history, which defeats the purpose and can lead to easy accusations of cheating and, perhaps, a disastrous drop in comity.
Is there an organization in your mind to how you remember facts and figures?
I keep trying to press the organization, because I can't imagine remembering something that you're not partially re-deriving, based on some organizing principle. I suppose I can remember rules exceedingly well, just not content.
I occasionally think I should deliberately add some more poetry -- I haven't memorized much new since the Peace Corps, and it's handy to have around exactly for dull moments where you don't have anything to amuse yourself with. (It's also nice having something to perseverate on when I'm being athletic -- I find a sonnet gets me comfortably up the hill I complain about biking home. Usually Hopkins -- the stresses are good for slow moving hard work.)
25: True, true. Plus, I was teasing. Would you make available which squares had been taken, and were hence blacked out? Or add an extra way to lose, by playing a square which had previously been played?
I'm terrible at proper names, which is bad for a lawyer -- I don't know any case names at all unless I've been wallowing in the particular subject matter recently. I remember how things came out, and I don't have trouble finding things again, but I sound like a moron discussing even fairly elementary legal stuff I haven't boned up on recently.
I'd think it would have to be the second choice, since the object of the game is to memorize the board. Or you could just lose a turn, but that's probably the same as losing anyway.
I would do well at the 3D game, until I saw something shiny and then my gameboard would evaporate.
I bet I could do 3D tic-tac-toe in my head pretty well.
I haven't had to memorize phone numbers in ages, but unless there's an immediately striking visual pattern, I do it by simple repetition. Eventually you find yourself having memorized it.
12: Rhythm doesn't have to do with spelling for me. And for most longer strings of text, I don't think about them as words having meaning at all. It's just a string of sounds. The first sonnet I memorized was Donne's "At the round earth's imagined corners"--if you look at it, you'll see it's a bitch of lists and odd turns of phrase. It wouldn't do to memorize it as words. But once you've got the flow of the sound down--"All whom war, dearth, age, agues, tyrranies, despair, law, chance hath slain, and you whose eyes shall behold God and never taste death's woe"--then you can think about what it means. There are line breaks in there but I don't hear them in my head so I don't know where they are without counting.
Is this just me? When I have to repeat a memorized number and I slip up at all, even from a distraction, I become totally incapable of recalling it until I stop trying and forget the incident.
I pick my nose, serene in the confidence that I am invisible to the other drivers stuck in traffic.
No, I'm also mostly visual. I used to be good at arithmetic; not so much anymore, but I'll see how many stops it takes to factor the number of my subway car.
I changed fields completely 12 years ago, so I can torment myself with thinking about phenomena that I used to understand well while I now have only hazy outlines.
I remember a few sonnets, bits of Shakespeare, Auden, one minor Czech poet.
I am curious whether the idea of mental exercise being useful is supported by any research at all. It feels right, and I do it sometimes, but it would be nice to know whether, say, rapid context switches or exercising short-term memory was better.
I am so happy to read 29. I am terrible with case names, and I couldn't remember the names of our "clients" in the first-year moot court until I forced myself to learn them the day before oral argument.
35: Yeah, me too. You should see how frustrated I get when I can't get part of a poem right. It's like someone left a piece of tape in my brain covering up that spot.
If I'm alone or have nothing to read or look at, I think about sex, meat, or my various failings.
I can't really process anything without creating a narrative around it. This was a big problem in math; I needed some kind of story to explain why something made sense as opposed to just looking at the magical visuals and understanding things or whatever.
"If you're killing time in a situation where you don't have access to a pencil, paper, or internet/reading material, where does your mind go? "
My fallback, any time I feel the need for some directed mental activity, is to pick a 6- or 7-letter word and try to figure out how many words I can make from those six or seven letters.
Doesn't everyone do that?
I'll see how many stops it takes to factor the number of my subway car.
I've never gotten the hang of factoring in a leisurely way, the way most mathy people seem to.
In 6th or 7th grade I got really bored in math class and memorized maybe 50 digits of pi. I realized years later I had done it phonetically. (I think I can still recite it.) I have to say a phone number out loud to get it from a page to the phone buttons.
This is all fine except it's impeded me in certain areas of book-larnin'. One reason history has always fit badly into my brain is that I don't know where things are in relation to each other. I studied Slavic stuff for years and couldn't draw you a crude map of Eastern Europe. Even the U.S. is a challenge...I can do it, but states are the wrong size and I have to place some of them by thinking, e.g., "when you drive from Chicago to Lexington, you go through Indiana" or something I know experientially.
Doesn't everyone do that?
Ha no.
One thing I definitely cannot do is play chess without the benefit of a board.
One reason history has always fit badly into my brain is that I don't know where things are in relation to each other.
Oy, this. I've gone through various periods of self-improvement trying to beat geography into my head, and I'm better off than I was, but it doesn't come naturally at all.
Playing chess, even with a board, requires a lot of visualization of meta-information about which squares are under attack, and visualization of future board states too, so you might say it's hard enough already.
The tic-tac-toe thing seems trivially easy, although I couldn't remember a long block of text if you branded me with it.
I think the tic-tac-toe thing seems easy because it's like a hugely simplified version of mentally following the moves in a chess game just by reading the notation. ((E.g.) And that's definitely a learnable skill (for me at least); I found it very difficult at first to follow more than a few moves without getting lost, and sometimes even had to stop and draw myself pictures, but after reading a few books it became second nature.
How about a nice game of chess?
My fallback, any time I feel the need for some directed mental activity, is to pick a 6- or 7-letter word and try to figure out how many words I can make from those six or seven letters.
Used to.
One thing I definitely cannot do is play chess without the benefit of a board.
Same.
I use mnemonic associations, often pretty stupid ones.
So if I had to remember the phone number (848) 355-1731, I'd think "a Boeing 737, plus one for each digit; the route number of Rockville Pike; and the year before George Washingon was born."
But that only works for numbers. I can't remember text.
If I'm killing time with no diversions? I start mentally rehearsing the logistics for something I need to do. What I need, what order to run errands, where I've left the tools, how to fix the sprinklers. I am especially compulsive about this for a big or complicated dinner party. By the day of, I've probably rehearsed the shopping and cooking a dozen times.
If I have a crush on someone, I might daydream about how he realizes his feelings and woos me in elaborate ways. But more of them time, if I'm directing my thoughts, it is about logistics. Or what Chopper said.
There seems to be a basic division here between visual and auditory thinkers. I'm definitely on the visual side.
47 sort of anti-pwned; I hadn't seen 44 or 46.
Can you remember song lyrics? Same thing, you just don't have the tune to rely on.
I can recite I think all of Tatiana's letter from Onegin but I have to stop here and there to hum if I get stuck.
I can recite poetry, or, more likely, worry about something, or have a really elaborate sexual fantasy, but when I have nothing to do on the train or something, no books or music, I try thinking of nothing. I've been working on it for eight years and I've gotten pretty good. I can think of nothing for about half an hour.
Ordinary tic tac toe probably not too difficult. 3d sounds like torture. In fact I'm not sure I'm visualising it correctly, all I can imagine is a cube.
Block of text easy-peasy, though more so when I was younger. If we had a verse to memorise I could do that in the couple of slack minutes before class started properly. I do it in a combination visual and oral method - reading out loud or sotto voce but also remembering some of the shape of the words and the text. For long things I have to memorise it also helps to write it out.
Text feels like it connects directly into my mind. You know those games where you have to memorise all the objects on a tray? I'd do much better memorising a list of names of objects.
Maths was one of my best subjects in school. I took it at higher level for my leaving certificate which I think only around 20% of students did and I got an A which only 10% of those taking that level did. I particularly liked calculus and probability. Geometry not so much.
I don't see phone numbers on a keypad although with rotary dial phones there used to be an element of muscle memory in the recalling of a number.
I'm not a chess player -- I just know how the pieces move, and am a tiny bit unsure of how the rules around, e.g., castling work. While I certainly couldn't begin to play without a board as I sit here, I vaguely suspect that it wouldn't seem that hard if I were a serious player, and knew what the moves meant more: that it'd be easier to remember the position of the pieces as a culmination of a meaningful process than as an arbitrary arrangement.
(I'm also good at categorizing things.)
I enjoy chess, but I've barely ever played it, so I'm terrible.
I've been playing a lot of chess ever since I got a new computer that came with a chess program.
Text I'm hopeless at (at least with precision, I have lots of almost quotes in my head--Google, Wikipedia and IMDB were just what I needed).
For numerical stuff, I could memorize if I had some kind of formula that I can run through in my head a few times (first three digits of phone number go into last four x times with remainder y, for instance).
When nothing presents itself, let me introduce you to my rich inner fantasy life.
The spoken-out-loud thing is interesting. My only tangentially related experience is that singing outloud with songs I know well works fantastically well to keep me alert if I get drowsy while I'm driving. Listening to music or talk radio alone isn't sufficient, but belting something out perks me right up.
that it'd be easier to remember the position of the pieces as a culmination of a meaningful process than as an arbitrary arrangement.
Someone did a memory test with masters and beginners. For gibberish positions, masters and beginners were about equal. For positions arising from games, masters destroyed the beginners.
heebie seems to be very far on the visual end of the spectrum.
For numbers, I need to find some way to make it a date, and then I have it. I recently got randomly assigned a PIN number that's the year of a prominent medieval battle, and I wanted to send the bank a thank-you note.
There seems to be a basic division here between visual and auditory thinkers. I'm definitely on the visual side.
I'm very definitely not visual (frequently I can't give a physical description for a person I was talking to earlier in the day), but I don't know that I'm auditory either.
Embarrassingly I have a terrible memory for tunes.
I have a good memory for textual information. Either written or spoken, I remember words. When I was a teenager I could often reconstruct significant segments of a conversation from memory (I can't do that anymore), and I've always been good at remembering information from books.
I can't remember names to save my life, but they aren't really words.
Also, I remember things I heard. Strings of numbers especially. I do like factoring, but don't remember to do it often. I don't remember long texts perfectly on one hearing, but on one hearing I've got a pretty good headstart on memorizing it.
I never picture anything. I never picture the action as I read. When someone gave me a graphic novel to read, it was as if I were reading a play. He'd ask me what I thought of someone's clothes or the setting and I had zero recollection of it. I never object that a movie got the casting wrong or anything like that because I never form images of characters.
I am way the hell over on the auditory processing side of things.
Oh wait, I think I see now - I was picturing a cube like a 3x3x3 Rubik's cube with Xs and Os on the faces, but you mean where, say, the X is in the space three dimensionally so if on an edge participates in both faces, and a corner one is in three.
I've been working on it for eight years and I've gotten pretty good. I can think of nothing for about half an hour.
That's really good. I've spoken to many lifelong meditators who say they can't do that.
67: Huh, me too. Even most of the aforementioned elaborate fantasies are mostly dialogue. I never figured out why.
singing outloud with songs I know well works fantastically well to keep me alert if I get drowsy while I'm driving
Gosh, that's the same for me.
If I'm bored and killing time I either worry about logistics, like Megan, I'll rehash or imagine conversations in my head (if I'm alone I will sometimes talk to myself), or (and this is also an embarrassing admission), I'll think about NBA stats.
It's one of the things that is both entertaining and troubling about having decided to follow a sport, is that it's great source of material to waste brain cycles on.
69: With the lights off, at home, I can do almost an hour. I'm not someone who practices any particular school of meditation, but I am insanely mentally auditory and feel deepest relief when I can shut it off.
I can visualize detailed maps in my head and go through them. Probably something to do with my childhood atlas obsession. Phone numbers were also always easy for me to memorize. I still remember some from high school. Historical facts have always neatly fallen into interrelated patterns for me and mentally playing with those is one of those things I do when I have nothing to read. That or obsessively read every bit of text I can get my eyes on (that and bilingual labels will teach you a surprising number of words), sexual fantasies, politics, or thinking about books I've recently read. Strangely enough, while I'm great with names found in history books, I'm worse with those found in fiction, and completely hopeless at remembering the name of someone I've been introduced to until I've met them several times.
On other thing that's interesting. I've recently started doing crossword puzzles. I'm not very good at them, but I have found that I process clues differently if I read them than if I hear them. So, if I'm working on a puzzle with somebody and they read me clues sometimes hearing it will trigger an answer which I wouldn't have gotten nearly as quickly if I was looking at it.
That isn't surprising, but it also boggles me slightly.
I'm very definitely not visual (frequently I can't give a physical description for a person I was talking to earlier in the day), but I don't know that I'm auditory either.
I'm more auditory than visual, but I feel as though I store a lot of stuff in a format that isn't either -- talking about it I want to use spacial or tactile language, but that's a metaphor rather than a straight description of what it's like. Knowing where things are (like, if I need to find a book I haven't touched in four years in totally disorganized bookshelves), I'm not picturing the location, but I know where to put my hand on it. Or math -- I don't remember mathematical processes by recalling the sound of a sequence of words, or looking at a formula or diagram in my head, and it's an effort to pry the math out into coherent words (spent the weekend working with Sally on algebra, and ran into this some.)
I'm very definitely not visual (frequently I can't give a physical description for a person I was talking to earlier in the day), but I don't know that I'm auditory either.
There must be other tracks. I can't tell how much we're all slotting ourselves into visual/auditory tracks just because we have words for them.
I'm very definitely not visual (frequently I can't give a physical description for a person I was talking to earlier in the day), but I don't know that I'm auditory either.
Certainly it's quite plausible that there are more categories than just visual and auditory, or that it's more of a spectrum and you fall somewhere in the middle.
70: You know, I actually debated as to whether I was telling people my PIN by saying that. It'd make it on a list of top 50 European history post--classical and pre-modern battles, but it's not the Battle of Hastings.
Heh, when I was younger and had more trouble with this, I definitely on more than one occasion recited poetry in my head to keep from [euphemism] too soon. (Vaguely re:27)
If you're killing time in a situation where you don't have access to a pencil, paper, or internet/reading material, where does your mind go?
"sex, meat, or my various failings" is my favorite list I've read in a while. For me, sex and failings, or anyway lots of rehashing of whatever is going on in my life. It used to be a problem on long drives: WHAT SHOULD I THINK ABOUT NOW? If I'm tired and low on mental resources sometimes I can sink into a piece of music or really just a phrase of music in an almost alarming way. Early this week I found myself obsessively playing a passage from Ariadne auf Naxos on the infernal stereo within. (The little exchange that goes "Ich überlebe diese Stunde nicht!" /"Du wirst noch ganz andere überleben." and then the big orchestra swell before "Ein Augenblick." This parenthesis for the benefit of Oudemia and Jesus, if anyone.)
I'm betting Bouvines, Agincourt, or Hattin. Three tries before the ATM machine cuts me off.
I can't tell how much we're all slotting ourselves into visual/auditory tracks just because we have words for them.
I'm sure we are to some extent, but I'm finding it really interesting how a lot of traits seem to be bundling together even when you wouldn't necessarily expect it. See 67 and 71, for example. This makes me think there is something to the "visual" and "auditory" categories, even if they aren't the only ones.
79: For instance (and I think this might be what LB was saying), I recall where things are in a map/schematic way but it is not really "visual" as I do not really recall the visual details. For instance, I will recall a quote was on the lower half of the right page towards the end of a book but before the last chapter, but without a picture of it. I guess "spatial" would be the term. Back when mnemonics was a big branch of learning, I know that was one scheme that was used.
It used to be a problem on long drives: WHAT SHOULD I THINK ABOUT NOW?
Looking at the surroundings usually does the trick for me in these circumstances, and even more so on, e.g., train rides where I don't have to focus on driving. I usually bring a book on the train, but I don't always read it. Even on trips I've done many times, I can usually find plenty of interesting things to look at. The exception is trips I've done many, many times, such as the drive between Albuquerque and Chaco, where I got so used to the scenery that I began to rely on listening to the radio to keep my mind occupied.
Strings of numbers especially.
I do really well with numbers. I can still rattle off the phone numbers of my high school friends, even though those aren't even their parents' numbers any more, much less theirs. And I haven't dialed any of them in 25 years but there they are, pointlessly taking up valuable memory space.
Recently, though, if I'm dialing either my current or ex-wife's phone, I have to do it without thinking or I'll get them confused because they're so similar. Swapping out letters for the numbers (except the one zero, which remains a zero), the numbers are BCA-0BDD and CDD-BCAA.
I'm not visual, but I have an excellent sense of direction. I don't see a map in my head, but I do feel where I am and what direction I'm pointing.
Ooh, found one, and "memory training" for an index term:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21327348
It works, good.
I used to love chess, my feelings changed when I could no longer beat a computer. Go is still OK.
I do the same thing for PINs, find a thing that happened on the relevant date, dividing by 2 or 4 if necessary.
Math can definitely fit into a neither verbal nor spatial mode-- remembering calculus of residues, asymptotic properties of Bessel functions, how to develop some series, none of these are words or pictures.
So it seems like there's a spatial type of memory as well, which is apparently a separate axis from visual/auditory.
Anyone else here have the experience in a new city of it first being a random set or unconnected places, then it suddenly comes together into a whole? Its happened to me whenever I've spent more time anywhere new. At a certain point there is a mental map that just appears in my head.
And on visual, I'm not sure. For certain things, absolutely, I can remember paintings and sculptures from early high school Italy trips. I'm also decent at remembering faces, as opposed to the names attached to them. Ditto for visual memories of movies. On the other hand I am absolutely horrible at remembering movie or TV credits. Whenever somebody names an actor I have to check their Wiki to see what, if anything I've seen with them.
Do you memorize phone numbers by seeing the pattern on a keypad, or by recording the numerals?
Phone numbers I memorize by sing-songing them in my head. Words I learn by envisioning the written word on a page. I'm visual/tactile, or something, I guess: I find myself invisibly twitching my fingers to type a word, which I associate with something I used to do when I played piano, twitching my fingers to play the piece I was attempting to learn.
I do feel where I am and what direction I'm pointing.
About thirty degrees to the left of where my nose is pointing.
I'm quite good at spatial memory and figuring out directions. I can sort of relate to 90.1, although for me it's generally not so much a sudden snapping into place as a sort of gradual filling in of details on my mental map.
90: Yep. New places I learn first as a series of routes -- like leaving strings behind me. After I have enough routes covering an area, they'll spontaneously knot themselves together into a network that gives me a working map.
Do you memorize phone numbers by seeing the pattern on a keypad, or by recording the numerals?
I didn't have a keypad phone until I got to college. I'm not sure when the Swiss phone company began offering them for home use, but the only ones I saw were either in offices or illegal modified American ones. (It was the old Ma Bell style system).
89: Blind people are often very good at getting around, of course. Seeing can be disorienting, depending on your environment.
I know there's been a fair amount of research on spatial memory in the planning and environmental psychology literature, but I haven't read much of it. Kevin Lynch at MIT wrote a lot about this in the context of urban design back in the fifties and sixties.
Anyone else here have the experience in a new city of it first being a random set or unconnected places, then it suddenly comes together into a whole? Its happened to me whenever I've spent more time anywhere new. At a certain point there is a mental map that just appears in my head.
I'm actually sometimes amazed at the degree to which I have trouble with this if I don't consult a visual map. If I never look at a map, a new city can persist in my mind as a random set of unconnected places for a disturbingly long time. OTOH, with a brief look at a map, even before I've ever visited an area, I'm able to fit all the real world places into the mental map very easily.
I feel a little dizzy if I don't know what direction I'm facing.
Blind people are often very good at getting around, of course. Seeing can be disorienting, depending on your environment.
Right, and it's interesting that some of the least visual people in this thread (such as you and LB) also have good spatial memory.
what direction I'm facing
I have found it helpful to feel around for the lumbar region.
99: Yeah, getting out of the subway at an unfamiliar stop, there's a feeling of almost vertigo until I've locked down my orientation.
Yep. New places I learn first as a series of routes -- like leaving strings behind me. After I have enough routes covering an area, they'll spontaneously knot themselves together into a network that gives me a working map.
I do this too, but I've found I often don't seem to realize that this road bends that way, or that road bends this way, so my mental map can be functional enough for me to get around and still give a pretty distorted picture overall. But then I'll see an actual map, and everything will suddently make sense ("so that's why that little road connects those two roads! that always seemed odd to me..."), and then after that it becomes kinesthetically obvious that of course this road bends that way, but I'd just always missed it before.
One of the annoying things about living in (at least this part of) New Jersey is that it's very difficult to tell direction, since the streets don't line up to the cardinal directions and they don't intersect at right angles either, plus it's all flat so there are no major landmarks.
If I never look at a map,
Unless I'm always with locals or it's a really, really small place, I think that would make me feel a bit sick to my stomach.
In terms of visual memory I'm jealous of those who can recognize nature stuff easily: rattle off every mountain in site, recognize trees and flowers - all that stuff is difficult for me with the exception of mountains when I have them as part of a mental map, but not so much as precise shapes. E.g. I could once rattle off the entire alpine panorama as seen from Geneva, but put me in a different place and I might have trouble recognizing the Mont Blanc.
Obviously my reaction is in the context of the west, with its wide-open spaces, huge mountains, and rigid street grids.
I don't understand people who get confused by subway stations. As long as you know which way the tracks go, you've got all four compass points right there.
I guess some cities have straighter subway lines than others.
99: Depending on what you mean by "know," that could be an awesome superpower.
To find north, decide firmly that you are facing north. If you do not feel dizzy, then this belief is accurate. Otherwise, turn very slowly until you no longer feel dizzy. You are now pointed toward true north.
In principle you could locate any object within a reasonable distance that way.
with its wide-open spaces, huge mountains
The Alps tend to be more like a downtown skyscraper district without a grid. Steep walls rising up everywhere around you. It generally only gets wide open once you've hiked up a ways, particularly when you reach a major ridgeline.
My mom has this running joke how she can never remember anything about movies, but she'll always remember the movie theatre she saw it at, and where she was sitting in the theatre.
My step-daughter has an uncanny memory for dialogue from the movies that she loves. She can pretty much recite whole movies from start to finish. On the other hand, it was many years before she memorized "2+2=4". If she's having a bad day that might still confuse her.
102: The most important app on my smartphone is the compass, for exactly this reason.
I guess some cities have straighter subway lines than others.
Someone hasn't spent much time in the outer boroughs or tried to figure their way through the maze of Fulton/Broadway-Nassau station.
The Alps tend to be more like a downtown skyscraper district without a grid. Steep walls rising up everywhere around you. It generally only gets wide open once you've hiked up a ways, particularly when you reach a major ridgeline.
I suppose the Rockies are like that too, when you're actually up in them, but that's not where most of the cities are, and the towns that are up there are very, very small and easy to get around just on account of that.
Leaving the station, you usually have to turn too many times for me. If it's familiar, that doesn't kick in, but in an unfamiliar station I can't hold the orientation of the tracks with me up a flight of stairs, through the turnstiles and across the mezzanine, and up another flight. (I wouldn't actually say I have 'good' spacial memory. Just that some of the things I do remember, that's how I store them.)
Obviously my reaction is in the context of the west, with its … rigid street grids.
You should visit Palo Alto some time.
113: Huh. I could get a compass for my phone. I might do that.
Palo Alto isn't the west in any meaningful sense.
I was probably thinking of my wife, who can't even seem to use the tracks to help. But I probably have some particular aptitude for keeping track of my direction. If I'm driving to a new place, I always write down the directions there and never bother with directions back home.
I think I could do the grid tic-tac-toe, though even that would take real concentration to keep the state of the board from disapearing/reconfiguring without my knowledge. Cube would be completely beyond me. I am somewhat visual, in terms of remembering images, placing text on a page, and so on, but can watch my brain fall apart when tasked with increasingly complex pattern recognition. Given a tile floor with equally sized tiles, my brain will start aggregating them into slightly larger squares. At a certain point, let's say seven or eight squares per side, the coherence of these squares will fall apart and fall apart into lines or some smaller shape.
As we've discussed before, you just need to assume Manhattan is north-south or you're fucked. DC is interesting that even with the "slanty" river, dude stuck with the N-S, E-W as the primary orientation (of course the diagonals).
I'm a trifle embarrassed to report that my mental map is almost entirely food-indexed. I can remember where food stalls are among street fairs; know the farmers' market booths pretty thoroughly, even at markets I visited long ago; anchor neighborhoods by restaurants or food stores. I might be part crow.
I know there's been a fair amount of research on spatial memory in the planning and environmental psychology literature, but I haven't read much of it.
There's a summary on some of that in this book. The book is pretty lightweight, but interesting. The one fact that I have started paying attention to in my day to day life is the idea that, if they aren't thinking, people judge the distance of a trip based on the number of turns (and, presumably, decision points) that are required, rather than linear distance.
123: Sounds like a trait that was useful in the veldt!
I hate that disorienting effect of subways. In cities that I've primarily experienced through subways, like Paris or Brooklyn, I basically have no fucking clue where I am because you just keep popping up out of the ground like a confused gopher.
My view is that the best way to get a spatial sense of a city is to bike in it. Walking, you can't go far enough. Driving is better but your focus tends to be on the major arterials. Biking, you can get far enough to see how things interconnect and also a sense of how they flow together.
I have a fairly poor spatial and numerical memory, but my memory for text is great -and used to be freakishly good; as a child I used to read ahead in the book that my parents were reading to me and my smaller brother, and then correct them when they misread a word the next evening which must have led them to think "I have spawned a monster" like the parents on that Alan Partridge show. I'm still good at poetry, etc. There's no great trick; just read, repeat it mentally, go back a few hours later and reread, and so on until it's memorised.
I see that I haven't understood how visual and non-visual memory are being used here. From 5:
I do not have a visual memory. I've memorized hundreds of poems and large sections of novels, but it never appears in my mind as text; I just feel the rhythms of the words. It's the same with phone numbers. I memorize the sound of the phone number.
Right. No visualizing swathes of text as text, but hearing it. I do, though, need to 'see' a single unfamiliar word or name spelled out on a page before I can call it my own. I've considered this visual at least to the extent that I can 'see' when a word isn't spelled right.
But perhaps this isn't visual memory in the sense you all are using the term. I should read the whole thread, eh?
Brooklyn
Embarrassingly, living my whole life in NYC, this is still how I feel about Brooklyn. I own bits of it, here and there, but largely I'm prairie-dogging up out of the subway and walking a couple of unconnected blocks to my destination, without a mental map.
I don't remember(!) how many times I've heard the story of the child who insists on having the same book read to her each night, and who vigorously objects to any minor changes in phrasing that might occur.
My six-year-old nephew just got a pirated copy of Rio on Friday and he appears to have memorized the script over the weekend.
When I lived here in '99 I used the World Trade Center a lot for emerging-from-subway reorientation. So every time I get lost, the terrorists have won.
Walking, you can't go far enough.
Not all cities are LA.
133 I used that for years to figure out myorientation when I got out of the subway. For at least a year or two after 9/11 I'd instinctively glance around looking for the towers.
133: I was pissed about that after 9/11. I never liked the buildings as buildings, but those bastards knocked down my orientation point (particularly useful in the West Village.)
131: I recently went back to Park Slope for the first time in several months to get my hair cut, and somehow, the disorientation of having severe allergies, newly short hair, and a lack of recent experience with the Brooklyn numbered streets sent me into one of the most frightening states of being lost I've had in a year, since my first anxiety attack. I can't figure out what got me so lost. I was saying in my head that I had to go farther north, which I did, but when I hit 12th street I was all OMG WHERE AM I? I knew what direction to go in, but the numbers weren't matching up with what I was expecting. So for about 10 blocks I just followed my internal compass, ignored the street signs, and arrived at the subway just fine.
I can remember how to spell almost anything as soon as I've seen it written down. But I usually forget names of things or people unless I've seen them written down.
124: Huh, sounds interesting.
Given the earlier discussions it's worth mentioning that I've started using the library again, over the past year or so, and that is a perfect example of a book that I wouldn't have read except for the fact that I saw it in the "new books" shelf at the library, and that I'm glad I did.
It isn't worth buying and I'm not even sure it's worth seeking out, but to have it fall into my lap and read it over a slow weekend was nice.
131: Brooklyn is very difficult. Weird shape with wraparound bodies of water except where Queens is, a lot of different grids of varying extent that are non-aligned, arterials that sometimes follow the local grid and sometimes cut across etc. Who the fuck knows where north is? And what use is it?
There's a difference between what I remember and how I memorize. My memorization efforts tend to be blunt, brute force repetition of the thing to be memorized. My memory - when I remember something well - tends to be vivid, visually and/or auditorily*. This can be deceptive, since my memory can be quite vividly wrong sometimes.
*The dictionary in the browser says that's not a word.
Right. One properly tries to figure out where one is relative to the adjacent giant ocean.
I definitely care a lot how a person spells their name.
"Kristina" and "Christina" are two separate names to me.
142: There's a old thread here where I talk about driving from Tennessee to Kentucky, and feeling somewhere inbetween claustrophobic and vertiginous, and realizing that I didn't have a big enough body of water to orient on. An ocean is ideal, Lake Michigan was fine, a big enough river will do. But not knowing which way the water is feels wrong.
Do people with a good sense of direction smell different or something? I've been trying to figure out how everyone knows that I know where South 4th and Driggs is or whatever. On a subway platform, even if I have my headphones in and am clearly rocking out with myself, people will bypass 20 other people to ask me how to get to wherever. Last week, walking through Williamsburg, I got asked for directions seven times in half an hour. Maybe everyone gets this all the time? Or maybe I look nonthreatening? Or maybe I'm the only person in Williamsburg who is clearly not cool enough to judge you for not knowing where Kent is?
138: I can remember how to spell almost anything as soon as I've seen it written down. But I usually forget names of things or people unless I've seen them written down.
Yes, pretty much. Except that I can usually also envision the spelling on a page, without actually writing it down, and still retain it. Not always. I tend to ask people to spell things that I'm unfamiliar with, in any event, and writing it down is helpful, even if I don't later need the piece of paper.
Or maybe I look nonthreatening?
This. I get asked for directions a lot, and I'm pretty sure it's harmless-white-lady syndrome -- I'm perceived as demographically likelier to be polite and responsive than the available alternatives. I'd guess you're getting the same thing.
144: Agree totally, except I get entirely thrown off in Cali., because the ocean is on the wrong side.
I have a terrible internal compass, but can get by pretty well on the internal visual aid. "If I've made this assortment of turns, this way should take me to my home base." Like someone else above, curvy roads wildly screw me up. Having a compass in my car is really helpful.
This is fascinating. When confronted with nothing to do, I tend to do logistics à la Megan, or think of things to cook, or make lists in my head of various things, or plan imaginary gardens, or tell myself stories.* Last night I fell asleep while thinking about kitchenware. If at all anxious or feeling bad about something socially, I'll dwell on that and replay conversations. I'll think about things I've read and rewrite stories. I'll even occasionally contemplate work problems and reorganize my ideas, etc. In the case of nothing to do while in an unfamiliar place, I like to observe and puzzle out what I can of a place or person's history.**
I remember things that I read fairly effortlessly. Being able to recite, though, means that I have to spend a lot of time writing things out as that is what cements it in my head. The same goes for things that I'm listening to - I will not remember anything if I don't take notes. The notes aren't used later, they just serve to cement my memory.
I have a poor memory for numbers and suck at math. In addition, I have horrible spatial memory/intelligence except, it seems, when it comes to geography and my place on the land. I'm really good at that, despite not knowing my left from my right. (I do get lost, but not generally if I've at least glanced at a map.)
*Said stories were often elaborate and stupid wish-fulfillment type things; now that I'm happy with my personal life I actually have a hard time getting these going sometimes.
**For example, riding in a bus from the George Bush airport to Houston center city, you drive through the fascinating Fifth Ward. I used my historian detective skills and had the history of it pretty much figured out before getting to my computer and having a chance to look it up. (Not actually a hard task, but it's fun.)
As with phone numbers, I now store all location information in my iPhone. In a few years I expect I'll be lucky to remember my name.
Santa Cruz is a tricky place for people who orient themselves by the ocean, since its ocean is south instead of west (except for some parts which also have ocean to the west and east).
One properly tries to figure out where one is relative to the adjacent giant ocean Ventura Boulevard.
Come on now, Megan, we know the real story.
you drive through the fascinating Fifth Ward.
We saw a documentary once on the Fifth Ward. It was indeed super interesting.
Brooklyn is very difficult.
I always assumed Queens was the worst because of all the streets and drives and avenues. Once, on the way to Let Me Be The First To Suggest Fresh Salt, I was in the front seat of the cab and the cabbie was one of the ones that wants to talk, so I asked him some dumb questions about driving a cab culminating in "wow how could anyone ever get to know Queens," to which he responded that Brooklyn was much more uknowable. "Only the dead know Brooklyn," said he, and I had that thrill of hearing someone casually/accidentally say something beautiful and weird. I was like "I have been let in on a poetic piece of cabbie lore!" Except it's actually the title of a story by Thomas Wolfe. And an album by someone called The Shirts. Oh well, sort of.
Yeah, getting out of the subway at an unfamiliar stop, there's a feeling of almost vertigo until I've locked down my orientation.
I had precisely this experience this morning. (Not helped by the fact that one of the landmarks in the area has been torn down since the last time I was at that particular BART stop.)
That's very funny. Yes, Ventura Boulevard is a big street of my childhood, along with Victory and Vanowen.
But past Ventura, there is the giant ocean.
"Do people with a good sense of direction smell different or something? I've been trying to figure out how everyone knows that I know where South 4th and Driggs is or whatever."
No. I have a fairly unremarkable sense of orientation (better than some, worse than others) but I get asked for directions all the time, even in foreign cities where I don't speak the language (just understand enough to know I'm being asked for directions). I have no idea why. I must seem to know where I am, but in a very nonthreatening kind of way.
I'm asked for directions a lot, too, especially considering how much I look like an immigrant. It could just be that 160 and I spend a lot of time in places where people get lost.
Palo Alto isn't the west in any meaningful sense.
What are the meaningful senses of the west?
The senses that don't apply to Palo Alto.
It is apparently possible to look askable. People ask me where things are in book and record stores a lot, and yes, I did work in one after college but I don't think they gave me some kind of "ask me" tattoo or anything.
I get asked for directions a lot. I usually have useful answers.
The senses that don't apply to Palo Alto.
Which are?
164: Maybe you dress too much like a clerk?
164: Do you tend to pay attention to people who look lost or confused or to ignore them? I think I do the first one, based in no small part on years of working interactive customer service things. That's my theory for why people tend to approach me for help in finding stuff, anyway.
Which are?
Aridity, wide open spaces, lack of oceans, etc.
Aridity, wide open spaces, lack of oceans, etc.
Sorry, the intermountain west doesn't count.
I would have included "street grid" but this looks pretty grid-like to me.
170: Au contraire, the intermountain west is the only west that counts.
I like 169 as an answer about 165. When asked about the area, Teo will tell you about aridity, etc.
When asked about the area, Teo will tell you about aridity, etc.
I can neither confirm nor deny.
Memory seems to have exaggerated the extent of the parts that aren't gridlike and which confused me so much when I arrived.
Useful answers would keep going to include soil types and a 100 year hydrograph. Which I imagine teo would also tell me.
The only conceivable one of Teo's criteria that wouldn't apply to Palo Alto is being near an ocean -- there are plenty of wide open spaces nearby (not in the town itself, but there aren't in fucking Santa Fe, either).
teo is almost entirely correct, except he's talking about a specific canonical "west" when there are actually several, one of which contains palo alto.
"Almost grid" can be worse than no grid, so things like El Camino Real slowly deviating from the grid or Embarcadero cutting across can disproportionately disorient people. For instance in the Pittsburgh downtown triangle area merely having the two river-oriented grids at angle is more confusing to me than the rest of the city's spaghetti layout (which is generally topographically controlled--although learning the topography-defying tunnels and "land" bridges is a must).
I have a friend who I bet would get along with teo really, really well.
I think what teo really meant to say was that the west is where one seldom hears a discouraging word.
179.1 completely ignores the existence of Boston. Which, incidentally, does have a topographically controlled layout, after a fashion, it's just that the topography has been altered beyond recognition by waves of landfill and razing.
179.1 completely ignores the existence of Boston
How so?
Actually, this entire thread up until 183 ignores the existence of Boston. And Prague. And Ulan Bator.
185: obviously I meant the version of 179.1 that exists in my head, which is a subtle rephrasing of the 179.1 you might have read upthread.
But it mentions my home city with nice specificity, so that's a plus.
187: Actually I meant to bring up Boston at several points which has its own flavor of geographic incoherence plus people steering at you aggressively if you hesitate. But I didn't know what to say about it.
Distinctive things about "what is the one true west?" discussions: aridity, emptiness.
Tumbleweeds, but I understand they're actually Ukrainian.
Just to piss off the JSTOR haters.
teo is almost entirely correct, except he's talking about a specific canonical "west" when there are actually several, one of which contains palo alto.
Fair enough. Certainly coastal California can be considered part of "the West" in various senses (presence of street grids being one of them), but overall I would say it definitely resembles the East Coast much more than either resembles the interior West.
The true west is that which shall never meet the true east.
I like that the "Great American Desert" originally referred to the Great Plains. Which conference was originally the Western Conference? Hint: That is what Thurber called it.
Where (in the west?) is Carmen - San Diego?
192: I've actually grown to be quite a fan of Boston's street layout. It sacrifices navigability for historical narrative.
And in response to 177, I would admit that I haven't been to the Bay Area since I was a little kid and remember basically nothing, so I'm not going to go to the mat with arguments about Palo Alto. Just from maps and stuff, though, it certainly seems to be right in the middle of a huge swath of more or less continuous development lying between an ocean and a large bay (with, admittedly, some mountains in there as well). So some open space, maybe, but definitely near an ocean and presumably not very arid.
196: For certain values of "resembles".
Anything west of Plato, Missouri is the true west.
It is obvious and intuitive that any lands surveyed off the Mount Diable or San Bernadino monuments are "the west." There may be other wests as well.
195: Just to piss off people who can't access an article because they don't have an institutional subscription? This seems like a valuable way to spend your time?
206: The ways in which Big Academia retains and reinforces its elite status are many and varied.
I've been wondering when Rutgers is going to cut off my JSTOR access now that I've graduated. They haven't yet.
208: Maybe it's like a cell phone overage and you're about to get a huge bill.
Geez, you people. "The West" is everything on the other side of the Appalachians.
209: I think Cornell gave me six months, then cut me off. No bill.
206: Yes. It's not like that article is topical or anything.
There's really no way to link to locked-up stuff without making people (including myself) angry about it.
More seriously, my brain does pretty much divide the country at the Mississippi River.
208: I've usually been cut off at whatever the standard expiration date was for all computer services (e-mail, personal webspace, etc.) But when I dropped out of grad school the first time, the form asked me for my official drop out date. I picked the latest one I could, and then was cut off at exactly midnight that night while I was downloading pdfs of journal articles.
The Mississippi doesn't go all the way to the top.
I've been to Zagreb. The old part is quite nice, in a Die lustige Witwe sort of way.
As for the OP, I used to be able to tell a professor for whom I worked in college the vertical-horizontal shelf coordinates of most of the books in his office, the descendant of a trick I used to be able to do for pretty much the whole of the children's and literature sections of my hometown library. Ironically, I was fired in short order from the only job in a library that I've ever had.
I'm not really interested in the article in 195, but now I'm reading it, because I have jstor access.
Huh, that's pretty interesting after all!
216: God intended everything north of the Mississippi to be Canada.
Look, California is part of the West, because I need the right to wear a cowboy hat.
221: The court room rules in my home town specifically stated no cowboy hats or string ties on the lawyers.
Anyone can wear a cowboy hat. It's merely a question of how dumb it looks on any given person.
I have a hard time believing the Mississippi isn't roughly the centerline of the country measured from East to West. Really, it's not even close.
214: Ignoring Moby's useless pedanticism in 216, if I had to give a single line it would be a few hundred miles west of the Mississippi--splitting St. Louis & KC, Des Moines and Omaha, Little Rock and Tulsa or Dallas; and New Orleans and Houston. 98th and 100th meridians are other more westerly possibilities. The 100th beloved of Western "purists" and other assorted assholes.
The 98th and the 100th are both reasonable, but the whole area between the Mississippi and the High Plains is basically transitional both physically and culturally.
Regarding having nothing to do, I once read an article that separated explorers, adventurers and people like that into two gross categories: the kind who could be trapped in a cave by a sudden storm and spend every waking hour until it broke noting minute changes in conditions, correcting the expedition's logs and cheering up their companions and the kind who would spend that time writing in their journals about their feelings.
224: The geographic center of the Conterminous United States is near Lebanon, Kansas which is very near the Nebraska border and about halfway across the state east to west.
224: I am reminded of that whenever I tell people about my super-awesome plan for three north-south high-speed rail lines: Vancouver-Tijuana, Montreal-Miami and Toronto-New Orleans/Houston. Someone often reminds me that the middle line ought to cut through the big square states from somewhere like Calgary.
We are handicapped as easterners, LB. Turns out people in Missouri have a very different (and thus far, entirely opaque) conception of what "the midwest" means than I do.
My working definition of "Anywhere off the coasts that isn't 'the south' but that a cowboy hat would look costumey" doesn't perfectly identify the Midwest?
229: Just for that I'm not going to tell you which of the two courses I followed when I was stuck in a cabin in Iceland for two days.
People seem to have a hard time understanding that the west coast of South America is approximately parallel to the east coast of North America. Even though it's right there on the globe.
230: I like that you listed those out of geographical order to throw people off. Also, Toronto to Monterrey via Dallas would be better.
'cuz then you could take the maglev to the schlitterbahn.
234
Or that Boston is farther east of DC than it is north of DC.
Calgary to Juarez would "work" in a physical sense, but the only major city in between is Denver and there's no way that would make financial sense unless it's a pure pork-barrel political thing.
Heebie, are you one of those people who can visually understand why fundamental group of SO(3) is Z_2? Like the plate trick. I am completely incapable of understanding the trick, or what it has to do with anything.
I always found it odd that completely visual people and completely auditory people could both coexist in mathematics departments. I'm in the AWB/pf camp. For example, I can memorize a text (it's like I memorize a recording of myself reading it). When I read a book, I almost never try to visualize anything. It's just exists at the level of narrative.
Strangely, Oklahomans consider themselves Midwesterners.
235: I remember Monterrey as the city in Mexico where they threw a whole tenderloin on the table and asked whether I wanted two.
A favorite map of mine--US Center of Population 1790-2010. (Note: Alaska & Hawaii make it about 10 miles further to the west)
Strangely, Oklahomans consider themselves Midwesterners.
Well, they do share a long border with Kansas.
That map also shows that in 1950 or so, they stopped snapping the center of population to the nearest town.
But yes, the Midwest is the least coherently defined American region.
230: The NAFTA I-35 corridor beloved of conspiracy nuts could serve as the middle one if slightly extended. Although Thunder Bay, Ontario is a bit of a lonely terminus.
One of the things that I'm still not used to is how the "east" in Canada (when used as short for "east coast") refers to a relatively sparsely populated, not-so-well-off-economically region. Basically, the maritimes. Ontario and Quebec seem to be Ontario and Quebec. I don't know if midwest means anything in that context.
246: Why don't you just surrender our precious American gall bladders to Soviet Mexico, comrade?
Shockingly, a few minutes of wikipedia browsing has not left me much closer to understanding 239.
The only route that really makes sense for the middle one is Toronto-Detroit-Chicago-St.Louis-Dallas-Houston-Monterrey.
I don't know, maybe the high-speed rail route could turn Winnipeg into the metropolis of whatever region it's in.
252: I'm pretty sure Winnipeg is the metropolis of whatever godforsaken interior region it's in.
No disrespect to Moostissoostikwan intended.
250: "Canadian Border Towns, the Shame of the North." National Lampoon article from 1973 with Bruce McCall drawings.
249: Although I like doing the plate trick if it is what I am thinking of.
Oh I see what the plate trick is. Okay, neat. Now: on to this "fundamental group" concept.
225: Useless, but topical. That's kind of improvement.
I don't know if midwest means anything in that context.
My impression is that the closest equivalent to a "Midwest" in Canada is Ontario. It's not that close an equivalency.
251 gets it exactly right. Much as I love the interior West, it's not a place where north-south high-speed rail makes much sense.
Apparently Palo Alto gets less than 16" of rain a year, which makes it "the West" by a famous summary which I can't remember. I think. I think it's 20" that's the cutoff. Teo? Megan?
When obliged to fend off boredom invisibly, I often recite poetry to myself (remembered by something between rhythm and the repetition of phonemes and the argument... that wasn't very useful). The more anxious I am, the more likely I am to subdivide and rotate shapes in my head, though, for instance projecting a circular cut through each face of a cube. Sometimes I change the cube, sometimes I think about how it would feel, sometimes I change the lighting.
When I have to fend off boredom in a public place, when, say, waiting, I observe things, and people. This seems natural.
I think it's 20" that's the cutoff. Teo?
Yes, 20" is a standard threshold used in the nineteenth century. The 100th Meridian roughly equates to the line west of which average precipitation is less than 20", which is why it's the classic defining line for the West. In California it's more complicated, though.
Yes, Palo Alto is in a rainshadow and certainly gets more water than 15" of precip would produce. I'm a mild Ecotopian, anyway, so Palo Alto is just south of Cascadia to me.
An average Seattle living room gets only ten inches of rain.
You folks that can only orient with the aid of the ocean are very brainy.
I don't know about these ocean-specific people, but knowing that the water's that way, whether it's ocean or river or lake, is very important. Mountains may kind of, sort of, work for the same psychological purposes; flatlands I'm really lost in. Much as LB related in 144.
I orient myself by means of the sun and stay still at midday and at night.
Actually, I use the ocean/bodies of water quite often for orientation, but rarely worry about the cardinal directions for everyday things.
but rarely worry about the cardinal directions for everyday things.
Which can be a little embarrassing at times. I doubt I'd fare well in D.C., where everything's designated by whether it's in NW, or NE, or whatever, and there are same-named streets in each of these quadrants. It would become routine after a time, I'm sure, but it seems a silly way to set things up.
are you one of those people who can visually understand why fundamental group of SO(3) is Z_2? Like the plate trick.
I didn't remember off the top of my head, but rereading wikipedia on SO(3), yes, my understanding is totally visual.
I remember the plate trick, but I'm having trouble remembering/re-deriving exactly what the bijection is between SO(3) and holding a plate face up but allowing your arm to do whatever it wants. I'm sure it's terribly obvious.
One thing I definitely cannot do is play chess without the benefit of a board.
I orient myself primarily by cardinal directions, and mountains when available. I'm pretty indifferent to bodies of water, and as I noted above New Jersey drives me crazy.
I doubt I'd fare well in D.C., where everything's designated by whether it's in NW, or NE, or whatever, and there are same-named streets in each of these quadrants. It would become routine after a time, I'm sure, but it seems a silly way to set things up.
I would advise you to avoid Salt Lake City.
277: I've noted that already, yes.
Doesn't it just seem much more natural to have uniquely-named streets? I say yes. It's like people suffered a failure of imagination or something.
In Boston the streets change names every three blocks (intentionally). Heaven!
I'm probably going to DC in a few weeks. I'll try not to get lost.
For those not familiar with Boston, it should be noted that Sifu is overstating the case.
On the memorization spectrum of auditory/visual, I feel stupid.
In Boston the streets change names every three blocks (intentionally). Heaven!
In Warsaw they do that, and the names change every three years. OK maybe an exaggeration, but conversations with my dad, who lived in Warsaw for almost twenty years were a bit funny 'you went on what street to which street?'
Back on the sort of OP, I've always been good at mental arithmetic, math not so much. I've also known people who were brilliant at math but sucked at mental arithmetic. The fact that I tended to crush them on standardized test math sections says a lot about the usefulness of those tests.
88 asymptotic properties of Bessel functions
This is the sort of thing I don't really want cluttering up my head, and yet there it is.
I orient myself by means of the sun and stay still at midday and at night.
I feed my kids handfuls of refrigerator magnets before long trips. Then, if we get lost, I put them on a smooth surface in their sock feet and they gradually turn due north. Plus, it secures them to the luggage rack.
Doesn't it just seem much more natural to have uniquely-named streets?
Natural, maybe, but the practical impact is that to know how to get anywhere you have to literally memorize the name and location of every street. Grids of numbered streets (or some other regular and easily understandable system of names) make it so much easier to find your way around.
Since we're talking geography, based on a recent visit to Detroit, I've come to this conclusion: if you think your city is badass and awesome, and it's not Detroit, you are wrong. I fucking love that place.
I'm not really overstating the case. The original street layout in Boston -- in a practice that was I think continued for quite a while -- streets changed names every few blocks (possibly every mile) to aid in mail delivery. (they didn't have house numbers, I guess?) Even newer streets often change names at town lines. They have built some streets that are long and consistently named, but not all that many, and certainly not all the main roads.
Luckily, they built a giant tunnel so out-of-towners can just shoot through and pop out the other side of town and keep going.
Damn straight it's nice to drive through a tunnel and keep going.
Oh good, I'm glad (having caught up) this is actually a geography thread, because the rest of the thread was making me feel like an alien, since I don't think my thought processes are visual or auditory, or what people were calling "spatial," either. I don't know. Information just comes to mind or it doesn't.
I love to walk all over a city, get lost repeatedly, and eventually start to connect it all in my head. I think this is why I seem to be much more violently opposed to the idea of living in car-centric places than most people I know. How do you ever get to know the place if you can't wander?
288: Understood, but I still say it's unnatural, teo. There's no history, no winding and wending along the way, with grid-like numbered streets. It is true that eventually something like 112th Street, or 31st Street, has people nodding in recognition: oh, right, that area. Still.
Uniquely-named streets that don't adhere to cardinal directions are like bookstores that invite you to browse.
(/analogy ban violation)
292 -- You just wander around with your fucking car, you communist. Admittedly this hobby of mine (I really do enjoy driving around randomly) has gotten more expensive.
I guess I actually prefer Boston to its suburbs or New Hampshire, so maybe the tunnel doesn't do that much.
294 -- whoo Kobe whoo oh shit.
I was actually kidding up above. It's totally annoying. There's no way to know your way around in Boston without memorizing the entire street "grid". That sort of defeats the purpose.
I'm with essear on this. I hate to drive as a way of exploring and enjoy doing so on foot.
The parts of NH that don't contain people are great.
I love to walk all over a city, get lost repeatedly, and eventually start to connect it all in my head.
Yes.
I think this is why I seem to be much more violently opposed to the idea of living in car-centric places than most people I know.
Yes, but also the lack of a driver's license might affect my views of living in burbland.
Now what is wrong with New Hampshire, now? (Aside from its politics lately.)
I don't mind driving in big loops as it reminds me of high school. I just like to know where I am.
I really enjoyed driving randomly in southern California -- "holy crap, now it's snowy!", "wait, where am I? Every sign for blocks has been in a script I've never seen before.", "hey, look, mexico" -- , but I can't imagine doing it here. On the other hand, walking randomly in LA basically consigns you to the life of a vagrant for the two years it'll take you to get somewhere unexpectedly interesting.
Unless your town was built in the middle ages or has a downtown that's being destroyed by a Walmart, it's too big to effectively explore by foot. Drive or bike, bitches.
Actually I like New Hampshire fine. It's no Maine, and stay away from the coast, but whatever. I want to go ride my bike there.
Grids of numbered streets (or some other regular and easily understandable system of names) make it so much easier to find your way around.
I like Chicago's way with this problem: the streets have names, but also the numbers on each street march in sync, so, while you might not know how to get to an intersection given by street names, it is obvious how to get to 1200 N and 800 W from wherever you are. And the same goes (obviously) for the streets themselves; 1243 West Whatever Street will be one block south of 1243 West One-Block-to-the-North-of-Whatever-Street Street.
Compare San Francisco, where the numbers on one street and the numbers on the parallel street one block north or south (or east or west) don't necessarily have anything to with each other, so that 433 Baker Street is a block west and a block north of 433 Broderick Street (the parallel street immediately to Baker's east).
San Francisco is still dirt easy to get around, though. I was amazed when I moved there.
I love to walk all over a city, get lost repeatedly, and eventually start to connect it all in my head.
What's really weird is being in places that have extensive subway networks, especially when the subway maps have the schematic form taken by, canonically, London's Tube map; you can know the areas around given stops quite well, while having only the faintest idea in what actual geographical relation those areas stand to each other.
I want to go ride my bike there.
As long as you're okay with hills. Lots and lots of hills. And windy roads. In southern NH, lots of lakes and streams and ponds as well. Not bad, overall.
As long as you're okay with hills. Lots and lots of hills.
Well, right. That's why. Plus dirt roads!
Can we please get back to focusing on how awesome Detroit is? You hippies could try to explore by foot, but you'd get stabbed in front of an unbelievably beautiful art deco buildin and then get run over by a Cadillac CTS-V.
307: That's not entirely true. I can be a huge number of useful or interesting places within an hour's walk of my house. I can walk to my office in fifty minutes by a half dozen substantially different routes.
Unless your town was built in the middle ages or has a downtown that's being destroyed by a Walmart, it's too big to effectively explore by foot.
Definitely an East Coast/West Coast divide on this, I think. Lots of East Coast towns are small enough to walk around.
Aside from its politics lately.
We've been over this before.
s/b "abandoned beautiful art deco building"
318: Like abandoned buildings are rare.
Many European cities have an old city jumbled streets/new city something resembling a grid pattern.
I still say it's unnatural, teo.
Well, okay, but I say it's totally unnatural to have cities and streets at all. No streets on the veldt.
There's no history, no winding and wending along the way, with grid-like numbered streets.
This I don't really buy, though. There's plenty of history with gridded streets; it usually takes the form of "some greedy white guy in the nineteenth century bought up a bunch of land and bribed a railroad company to route its tracks nearby and set up a station." No winding and wending, true, but it's a type of history I can relate to.
Unless your town was built in the middle ages before the 1920's (US) or 1950's (Europe) or has a downtown that's being destroyed by a Walmart, it's too big to effectively explore by foot.
Again, not all cities are LA. And those that are, are not real cities.
I love exploring old state roads and countryside, and I love driving as its own activity. Especially now that I live in the future and have an iPod that plugs into the stereo. I would probably thrive as a long-distance trucker except I only really like driving small vehicles. Maybe cross-country drug smuggling.
Well, okay, but I say it's totally unnatural to have cities
Uh, man is a political animal, dude. Totes natural.
Uh, man is a political animal, dude. Totes natural.
What I mean is that "natural" is not really a useful criterion for evaluating urban design.
323: You could be a comically inefficient long distance moving van driver.
I mean, in one sense, all city designs are natural, because they are created by people, who are part of nature. In another sense, no city designs are natural, because they are created by people, who are separate from nature. Neither strikes me as a very useful way to evaluate the cities.
Mormon city planning is fascinating and deserving of much more study than it gets.
Aren't there any regular Roman grids left in what used to be frontier towns in Yurp? No? What a pain in the neoclassicism .
Neither strikes me as a very useful way to evaluate the cities.
They should be evaluated on the amount of military force they use to keep kids going to a nearby public school.
328: teo, in all honesty, since I come from New England, I favor winding roads that are based on the topography of the landscape, that follow the contours of a river or stream or hillside or mountain, even if it's inconvenient. I like roads that still bear names however vaguely related to their old Native American names, or at least pass by places bearing such names. It's a romantic thing, I suppose. I wasn't trying to be actually useful in evaluating cities. Just a personal preference.
330: That is 12 times 11. Twelve is for the tribes of Israel and 11 is how many eggs you get home from the store uncracked.
||
OKC is an unusual basketball team. How is it possible for a team that young to look that relaxed in a close game in the Conference Finals. They've been making some mistakes, but they don't look tight. They look like they're just trying to play their game.
That just doesn't happen.
|>
What's that town in Poland built according to some Renaissance ideal?
It's a romantic thing, I suppose. I wasn't trying to be actually useful in evaluating cities. Just a personal preference.
Yeah, sorry, I understand that, and I don't mean to offend. I'm not much of a romantic type, plus I come from an area where towns are made up of gridded streets with clever naming/numbering schemes, and I feel strongly that that's just as historic and worthy of esteem. (Some of those schemes incorporate Native American names! And some of the towns even have real live Native American residents!) Your use of the word "natural" as if it were a universal truth rubbed me the wrong way, is all.
334: They appear not to have given much effort to the task of designing a coat of arms.
On the other hand, walking randomly in LA basically consigns you to the life of a vagrant for the two years it'll take you to get somewhere unexpectedly interesting.
When we were in LA for MLA, I took the baby for a walk from the Wilshire Grand to I-thought-it-was-nearby Little Tokyo, just taking a quick look to see what general direction I should go and heading out. Thinking back on it, I can't believe she put up with it. It was pretty hot and sunny out, too.
Btw, for anyone traveling in Poland, Zamość is well worth visiting. It can be combined with Lublin which is also nice in a decrepit old town sort of way (unless they've restored it in the past decade, which is quite possible).
330: Streets 132 feet wide??
Interesting, the standard line seems to be "wide enough for a team of four oxen and a covered wagon to turn around", which I've heard about other cities with wide streets (Dayton, Ohio--not sure if their 132 feet, however).
Here is a scan of Smith's plan from 1833 (found here).
the standard line seems to be "wide enough for a team of four oxen and a covered wagon to turn around"
I've definitely heard that as the basis for the Mormon standard. One of the really interesting things about Mormon planning is that it so clearly developed out of mid-nineteenth-century Midwestern ideas about planning, which also underlie a lot of the ideas of the American planning profession as it developed, but it took them in a very different direction.
346: It took me a long time to get used to the idea that no place is too stupid for a Pittsburgher to try a u-turn. I should be glad they don't have oxen.
339: And don't forget that teo delights in draining the wonder from the world.
349 was more fun before I read the link and realized "Wonder" wasn't a penis name and that it was "from" not "into."
Anyway, you know what you can do without writing or wheels? Build huge gridded cities.
I sort of merged 351 and 352 and thought that without writing or wheels one could build huge penis cities.
The gridded city of girded wonder.
Unbelievable, I thought the game was over.
352: But it's not a very good grid. The drunken Irishmen who laid out St. Paul did a lot better.
349, 351: Best comments in that thread are form two spambots at the end. There are no penalties against awesomeness... or attractiveness. -- Design Your Own Tattoo and This article gives the light in which we can observe the reality. this is very nice one and gives indepth information. thanks for this nice article -- Wii Homebrew.
359: Well, writing and wheels do help.
359: There was a mix of spatial, visual and verbal people carrying out the instructions.
johnhollinger:
I think we're done here ESPN live chat 11:24
Oops.
"The East" in Canada is mostly Ontario, BTW; Quebec is Quebec and the Maritimes are the Maritimes*. Unless you live in Ontario, in which case "East" and "West" refer to subregions of Ontario, not other parts of the country (or Quebec). I suspect but don't know for sure that the same would hold true for Quebec. "West" for Maritimers seems to denote the prairies, and does not necessarily include the West Coast (which to everyone is the "West Coast"); Ontario and Quebec are always again referred to as separate entities.
(* Yes, Ralph Klein's famous "Eastern bums and creeps" speech was mostly about Maritimers, but that's actually an eccentric use of the term "Easterner.")
Huh. Out here, I definitely hear the regions referred to as you describe more often than not, but I've definitely heard Canadians use east to mean the Maritimes, and don't remember hearing it much to refer to Ontario at all. Maybe I'm confusing east with east coast and actually hearing the latter. Or maybe it's because they know they're talking to an American.
Just today, I floored a Canadian by knowing that Regina is in Saskatchewan. You guys must think we're all total fucking morons. Which, okay, fair.
365: Oh, it is occasionally used that way, just not very often FWICT.
366: Come to think of it, I doubt I could point out similarly-sized cities in the States with any reliability, even if they were the capitals of states.
You guys must think we're all total fucking morons. Which, okay, fair.
This seems pretty universal. Unnecessary clarifications I've heard when people try to tell me where they're from:
"I'm from a city in France, but not from Paris. You probably have never heard of it. It is in the south of France, a city called Marseille."
"I come from a small island nation in the Caribbean called Cuba."
Come to think of it, I doubt I could point out similarly-sized cities in the States with any reliability, even if they were the capitals of states.
Let's see! Here's some US state capitals in the same general size range as Regina (100K-250K people):
Columbia
Des Moines
Hartford
Jackson
Lansing
Montgomery
Providence
Richmond
Salem
Springfield
For how many can you identify the corresponding state?
Really seems like Providence should be much bigger than that. I guess they don't count most of the metro area.
Yeah, these are just municipal populations. Some of the metro areas are much bigger.
371: Yeah, I think of Richmond as more populous for the same reason.
Des Moines is Iowa, Hartford is Connecticut, I had no idea Jackson Mississippi and Montgomery Alabama (?) were that small, Providence is Rhode Island... beyond that it's a little hazier. Richmond is one of the Virginias but I forgot which, Salem is in the northeast somewhere, Springfield is in... uhhhh, Simpsonia. Columbia I really couldn't say, I always think of "the District of Columbia" when I hear the name.
372: That's not really a fair comparison, then, for a lot of them. Regina doesn't have a metro area.
Oh, and I skipped Lansing entirely. I believe it's in a southern state... one of the other Virginias?
375: Fair enough, but limiting it to comparable metro areas leaves a much smaller list.
Anyway, you did pretty well. 5 or 6 out of 10, depending on whether "one of the Virginias" is close enough for Richmond, Virginia.
Here's the full list:
Columbia, South Carolina
Des Moines, Iowa
Hartford, Connecticut
Jackson, Mississippi
Lansing, Michigan
Montgomery, Alabama
Providence, Rhode Island
Richmond, Virginia
Salem, Oregon
Springfield, Illinois
Proof that Canadians are weird #205: Richmond is one of the Virginias but I forgot which but knowing the capitals of Mississippi, Alabama, and Iowa.
Well, there is a state of West Virginia, right? (Not surprised I was so far off on Lansing.)
If we want to talk about metro areas, these appear to be the only state capitals with metro populations between 100K and 250K:
Augusta
Bismarck
Jefferson City
Olympia
Santa Fe
Springfield
Topeka
Interesting that Springfield is the only one with both municipal and metro population in this category.
Well, there is a state of West Virginia, right?
There is, but there aren't any additional Virginias, and few Americans would group even the two together for most purposes.
The really obscure state capitals are even smaller, of course.
Olympia? I guess it can't be part of Seattle-Tacoma, but it's not far away. Possibly closer than Sacramento is to the Bay Area.
I haven't read all of this thread, but I have a quasi-photographic, or at least very good, memory for 'facts': trivia, mostly, but also things like historical dates, names and so on. If I am attending to something because I'm interested, I will normally just remember it with no effort needed. I'm the sort of tedious idiot who remembers exactly who played bass on that obscure 70s album, or which King was on the throne when such-and-such a battle occurred, and so on. Not because I try to remember, I just do. I read it, or hear it, I remember. I also do that thing neil mentions in 3, where I usually just know where something is in a book, by the shape of the words on the page.
My brute force short/medium term memory is also good. The 'you have 30 seconds to memorize this 20 digit number' stuff. A year or so back, worried that my memory was getting a bit crap, I bought one of those memory training books. There was test at the start: lots of memorizing lists, 20 digit numbers, long strings of binary, and so on. The introductory blurb said something like:
'The average person gets about 30 - 40% of this test right, someone with a good memory may get over 70%. With extensive training a memory expert can get over 90%.'
However, the two (short/medium and long) don't really overlap much. When I make a conscious effort to memorize things, like poetry for exams, say, then I'll do it just fine but a few weeks later it'll be utterly gone. I think the only poetry I remember at all, verbatim, is stuff I learned as a child. I'm quite envious of the 'Russian intellectual' types teraz kurwa my mentions above because that sort of long term memory for lots of extended prose/poetry, I don't seem to be good at. I'm also totally crap at remembering events in my own life. I've never tried playing chess without a board, but I expect I'd be crap at that, too.
There was a lot of memorization in my Russian classes. The idea of memorizing the entire Bronze Horseman was appealing, and if I'd been younger I'd probably have tried. I took the other option of letting my Russian skills decay completely.
I've generally done well with remembering phone numbers and pins and passwords, though lately I've been losing track of infrequently used passwords on sites that I rarely use but have to log into. But I've done poorly on memorizing similar strings in testing situations.
Also, on page 531 of the algebra text we used in high school, there is a text box explaining the remainder theorem. I can't remember what that theorem is, though. Also, on page 484 (494?) of the edition of Campbell's Biology textbook we used in high school - the one with the quaking aspen on the cover - there is an amusing picture of some small animal. I can't remember what animal it is, though.
Regarding having nothing to do, I once read an article that separated explorers, adventurers and people like that into two gross categories: the kind who could be trapped in a cave by a sudden storm and spend every waking hour until it broke noting minute changes in conditions, correcting the expedition's logs and cheering up their companions and the kind who would spend that time writing in their journals about their feelings.
I would be interested to read that article, because there's definitely the same split among polar explorers: you've got the cheerful types like Parry and Ross who get frozen into the Arctic and immediately start printing ship's newspapers, organising ice cricket matches and putting on drag shows, and the emo types like Greeley and Hall who just accumulate gloom and misery and hopelessness. (Greeley's log: intensely annoying.)
I've played chess without a board on several occasions. The first time was really hard, but it gets easier. It's also a lot of fun - the feeling of satisfaction in seeing even basic tactics is considerable.
I don't think my thought processes are visual or auditory, or what people were calling "spatial," either. I don't know. Information just comes to mind or it doesn't.
This. When I memorise text or phone numbers, I just repeat the string until it sticks. Which for a phone number is three or for times. I probably have 50 odd 7-digit numbers of my most frequently dialled contacts that I just know. There's nothing visual or auditory about it. I just reach for the phone and dial the numbers. That said, I have no idea what my best friends' numbers are, because I only ever call them on my mobile's autodial. With geography, there's definitely a more spatial/visual element to it, but it's still basically brute force repetition. And I'm terrible at remember names or things I've done.
On Tic-Tac-Toe, the 2D one is trivial. I used to do it lots when I was testing out the Wargames thing. 3D would be harder, but doable, I reckon.
389: I once played Monopoly without a board.
I once bowled without a ball or pins. I sat on a plastic chair anchored to the floor and drank beer.
But there was beer, right? Otherwise that's just silly.
And the chairs were in a 'U' shaped layout.
395: Of course, it was a league game.
On state capital populations, it looks like Montpelier, Vermont, wins the title for smallest, with around 8,000 people, which is noteworthy if only because that's also the exact number of seats in neighboring New Hampshire's state legislature.
Wow. I didn't realize how unpopulated Vermont is. Combining the populations of all of Vermont's nine cities wouldn't even get it into the top 200.
I was about to be surprised that no one had yet mentioned that 3-d tic tac toe is a stupid concept because it's not a playable game (in that: whoever goes first will always win, unless they do something stupid (traditional tic tac toe has a similar flaw, of course, in that whoever goes first can't lose, but at least the game can be played to a draw)), but then on googling it I see that it's actually played on a 4x4 grid. That makes more sense. Or at least, it's not obvious to me that it doesn't work.
I had a plastic 3D tic tac toe thing (4x4) when I was a kid and played it a lot for a few weeks. It was quite hard to lose if you went first, but I was far too young to prove it. You certainly didn't necessarily win.
Heebie, did you ever try memorizing a recording? For example, would you find memorizing Mel Gibson reciting the "to be or not to be" speech from Hamlet easier than memorizing the words on the page? Or are they equally difficult?
399: A better way to put that would be "Vermont has no cities."
402: Right. I'd initially assumed it was 3x3x3.
You could make it more fun by making the center squares or cubes off-limits for the first player, though, yeah?
A strange game. The only way to have fun is not to play.
Because I said 3x3x3 in the OP. Without thinking about it. Not having actually played, myself.
I found this memory training thing the other day (in some article about how to improve your IQ) - http://www.soakyourhead.com/dual-n-back.aspx Having dabbled a couple of times, today I played it for 20 rounds, scoring 932 with an average N of 2.90. For 2-back, I was getting close to 100%, 3 was more variable, and 4 was 13-15 out of 20 (so never got to 5-back). As n got higher, my visual score dropped off more than my auditory score. It's supposed to be something you can improve at.
Heebie, did you ever try memorizing a recording?
No, I never have. I should give it a shot. My guess is that I'll be terrible, because there's no scaffolding to hang on to and remember it by.
In fact, I know I'd be terrible because I can never, ever remember quotes from shows or dialogue, until I've seen it a lot. I know a bit of Goonies, but I really worked at it.
Because I said 3x3x3 in the OP.
That might be where I got the idea.
408: you can improve at almost any test with training, and a surprising number of tests generalize to other, related tasks. That said, it's not really clear what's happening cognitively and the generalization process is not well understood. I believe I've read that you can get significant improvements on a broad variety of intelligence-loaded tests by playing a lot of first person shooters, so maybe that's a better option.
409: No, but it could be. I guess Jumanji as well.
This thread makes me rail against the self-imposed strictures of pseudonymity. OH, THE THINGS I COULD LINK. But no!
412: Or maybe join the army? It's basically just FPS but with better graphics.
410: Can you remember song lyrics?
I have a strict policy of not reading the first 409 comments in a thread.
I've tried playing 3x3x3x3 noughts and crosses (a.k.a. tic-tac-toe); surprisingly unchallenging. Playing it in your head might be tricky.
Apart from anything else there's always the danger, when contemplating dimensions beyond those we know, of inadvertently attracting the attentions of the denizens of these unsettling and non-Euclidean domains, denizens whose inhuman and hungry minds can easily be turned to thoughts of br
I would be surprised if Heebie is all visual, because she has, IIRC, a natural sense of poetic meter and a knack for song lyrics. Maybe being a mathematician helps develop the visual memory to the point that the auditory seems weak, but it's very hard to get meter if you don't have a pretty developed sense of sound-memory.
ief shining moment that was known as Camelot.
I've tried playing 3x3x3x3 noughts and crosses (a.k.a. tic-tac-toe); surprisingly unchallenging.
At first I was bowled over. Now I imagine you just draw 3 3D games, and check off a finite list of possibilities between boards before moving, and it doesn't seem too bad. In your head would be nuts, though.
421: Math runs the full gamut from totally visual people to totally auditory people. I can't follow anything visual, personally. For example, there's something called "everting the sphere", for which there are even videos, but even though I could tell you the definition, I have no idea what's going on in that video. On the other hand, when I was in high school I had the exact same poetry memorization assignment and I liked it so much I would memorize extra poems.
adford Exchange collectable plates.
Hey, heebie, do you understand visually why Boy's surface is an immersion of the real projective plane?
I make my Intro to Poetry students memorize and recite a sonnet or longer. The class is mostly taken by non-English majors, and I figure this way they'll get to walk away with something other than the ability to identify a line of anapestic tetrameter. Anyone can memorize a sonnet, but at least a few students every semester will choose a big fat non-rhyming poem, and I get so excited.
eaking down the odds of Mitt Romney becoming the Republican nominee for President.
Or maybe join the army? It's basically just FPS but with better graphics.
And amazing force feedback.
Anyway, I forgot to answer the last question in the OP: panic. Seriously, I go to extraordinary lengths to structure my life so that I'm never in a situation without internet or reading material. I get bored incredibly easily, so my bare minimum walking around material consists of internet enabled phone, iPod Touch (with Kindle App and hundreds of games), newspaper (Grauniad/FT) and usually a physical book and/or magazine. For long distance travel, add several more books and magazines, a DS, a PSP, a laptop and back-up batteries.
435: The standard non-detention punishment at my school, the equivalent of "lines", was to write out a sonnet 10 times. I ended up knowing about a dozen off by heart. I'm not sure I can even remember Sonnet 18 now.
I wish I could wear a bra. Tattoo is in the way. :-(
Weirdly, I don't think I've ever memorized a sonnet (not even Sonnet 18) or much of rhyming poetry in general. Since I have lots of work to do, I just spent the last 15 minutes trying to think of a rhyming poem that I memorized, and the only thing I can come up with is the first ten lines of Lycidas.
a rhyming poem that I memorized
I thought everybody had memorized "This Be The Verse".
I can't believe that Boy's surface thing would actually make real projective space any more comprehensible for anyone. That's nuts.
I am a relic from an age of rote learning - times tables, Latin declensions, English poetry, to be chanted with glassy eyes at the beginning of class. I'm not sure it was altogether a bad thing.
An elderly teacher told me that he had once set a small boy to memorise Browning's "Home Thoughts from the Sea" as a punishment for some minor infraction, and when it came to hear it, the child began:
"Nobody, nobody, cape St Vincent to the northwest died away..."
"Let me stop you there. What does 'Nobody, nobody, cape St Vincent' mean?"
"Oh, it doesn't mean anything, sir, it's poetry."
The way deaf kids do addition and subtraction is crazy. You can count up to any number on just one hand in ASL, and little kids who learn ASL natively can count forwards and backwards on either hand without really thinking about it. So in like 2nd and 3rd grade when they're doing addition and subtraction problems they count starting at two different places (to add) or forwards on one hand and backwards on the other hand to subtract. I can't do this at all because I can't keep the conflicting streams of numbers in my head straight, and I don't have the rote muscle memory for counting without thinking about the numbers (which is what I think the kids do).
380: but knowing the capitals of Mississippi, Alabama, and Iowa.
I think knowledge by foreigners of US geography is probably tied heavily to how much of that geography you've encountered either through personal ties or through the media. Certainly that's the case with me. For example, if you know the history of the civil rights movement and the "freedom rides," you know the capitals of Alabama and Mississippi. If you've known someone from Iowa, you're likelier to know the capital of Iowa.
The only Canadians who can identify the capital of Wyoming are fetishists.
434: I'm having trouble visualizing joining up the last seam, like I can't see out exactly what the forced self-intersection is. I've got two of the seams stitched up, by pushing the self-intersection off to the third. I think I can figure it out, though.
448: Wow. That's super intense. Hurts my head just contemplating it.
One year, the Chinese national Wushu team gave a performance at Berkeley and our martial arts club went. They did very spectacular acrobatics and were gorgeous. Then, they did one of the basic forms (maybe Long Fist, but I don't remember), which probably bored the rest of the audience, but we all sighed to see it done so perfectly. Then, they did the mirror image of the basic form. The rest of the audience was probably as bored as they had been to see it done regular, but all the martial artists were staring with their eyes popping out of their heads. They can do the movements in mirror image! They aren't just chained and referenced to the starting point, but understood and under intentional control. To this day I'm amazed.
Okay, I see why I'm confused. There are two ways to stitch up the last seam. I can see both, but I'm still stuck on which stitching gives the projective plane. I should be able to figure this out.
Impressive, heebie. But... does it help with anything? If it was hard for even a hyper-visual person like you to get, it doesn't seem like it's a useful model of projective space, does it?
My mental image of projective space is just a sphere with little arrows pointing between antipodes.
I don't have a visuospatial sketch-pad. The world is all just a bunch words dancing around.
457: I suppose there might be some property or map that lent itself naturally to this model? Otherwise I can't think of anything. Usually I do your sphere-arrow thing, too.
Oh, plus it's a total party trick in Unfogged threads. Hit me with another one, Walt!
420 et seq: well, come on. It wouldn't be a Lovecraft reference if it didn't stop ominously halfway through a sentence.
(Response to way up in the beginning of the thread:)
I vaguely suspect that [playing chess without a board] wouldn't seem that hard if I were a serious player, and knew what the moves meant more: that it'd be easier to remember the position of the pieces as a culmination of a meaningful process than as an arbitrary arrangement.
This is definitely the case. Various chess players would spend time at my host family's house in Hamburg (where my host father works for a chess company), and they not only could reconstruct entire games that had been played, but could also go back to particular moves and spin out different possible ends to the games.
Also, you can show a very good chess player a board from the middle of a chess game for just an instant, and they will almost certainly be able to reconstruct it. Whereas if you show them a board with the pieces randomly arranged, or even from a game between rather bad players, they have a much harder time.
463: It wouldn't be an unfogged thread if everybody had to feel constrained by your reference just because they understood it.
What's a chess company? They make boards and pieces? They publish books? They organize tournaments?
Re 452
I don't get why being able to do the mirror of the form means anything other than they've learned it both ways? I mean rote learned and done the muscle memory thing with both versions. I can't see it as an amazing thing from that description.
In my thing we don't do forms, but it'd be fairly standard to get given a 6 or 7 move combination off the cuff, practice it a few times and then be told to do it starting with the other side mirroring. Much less complex than wushu forms -- which can be very cool to watch -- but the basic mirroring thing isn't hard, even without programming the form in via repetition.
They make chess programs and books, keep up databases of games, sponsor training for promising players, publish a magazine, and have a site where you can play chess online. Famous players - recognizable by their playing styles - will occasionally play on the site (under pseudonyms), and my host father is very good at stoking the gossip about their identities.
Man, I love the existence of all the different worlds out there to be famous in -- chess fans gossiping about chess luminaries. We had a guy who works in the specific corner of the computer market Buck writes about, and he rather sweetly seized a moment when Buck was out of the room to check with me and see if I really appreciated how important Buck was. Which he is, of course, from the point of view of what this guy does for a living: if your world is a specific IBM product line Buck is the big deal journalist out there, but that's a very small world to be famous in.
s/b 'We had a guy over for dinner'
471: AWB's roommates could've helped you prepare him.
Yeah, but they would have put him over high heat and then just wandered away, and we can't be having that.
Yeah, I didn't know anything about chess gossip when I moved in there, and boy did I learn fast. I also later had a funny experience at the intersection of two different "worlds out there to be famous in": chess luminaries and Indian immigrants in southern Connecticut. I was at a holiday party at the house of my then-boyfriend's parents, who are originally from southern India. I heard two older Indian-American men talking about Vish/wanat/han An/and, and upon mentioning that I knew Vishy, and that in Hamburg I had spent a week learning to cook Indian food from his wife Aruna, I suddenly found myself at the center of quite a large group of middle-aged Indian-American men wanting to know all about them. One of them ran out to his car to get a picture of Vishy to show me. He traveled with it all the time.
This is a neat on topic math thing: In this picture there are two figures - one with two unlinked loops, and one with two linked loops. They are topologically equivalent. But how can that be?
475: Heh. This is one of those things that I'm just not quite visual enough to do successfully. It's got to be some sort of version of pulling one hole around the other to link/unlink them, but I can't see it clearly enough to check that it works.
Hmm, I get why a coffee mug and a torus are topologically equivalent, but I'm not so sure about the dog bones.
means anything other than they've learned it both ways
Maybe that's all it means. But it blew our minds. We always, always did Koryo in exactly the same sequence. If I started it now, from any step, I could automatically go from there. But if I tried to do it in mirror image, I would get hijacked into doing the same way I've always trained it. It would take me incredible mental discipline to override the conditioning. In fact, I had never considered it until I saw that team do it. I dunno. It'd be like spontaneously reading right to left without having heard of Arabic, or something.
I was unusual among teachers in that I'd make my students face the back wall to start sometimes, so that all their cues weren't from their room orientation. But even so, I had never thought of mirror image. Don't know why it was so powerful, but it stunned a bunch of martial artists in a totally different way from just "better acrobatics than we could do, but only twenty percent better and we mostly understand what it'd feel like to pull of a shadow of that on our best day." Yeah, I guess it was the prospect of overriding our own muscle memory. And thinking of it in the first place.
Want some halfway steps, or is that spoiling things?
but I'm not so sure about the dog bones.
They go into heat and it just kind of becomes an irresistable urge.
And yeah, the Chinese national team probably trained that. I mean, obviously they did. But those athletes! Even if they were picked up for the team when they were young, they had still probably done Long Fist many thousand times. Whenever they were taught the party trick of reversing it, it must have taken a whole lot of work to adjust.
I think you need the limitless malleability of the figures to sort of pull the "Attaching point" of one loop through the other, but I do not visualize it well. The actual physical properties of "stuff" get in your way of imagining it (or mine at least).
It seems like the second object is topologically equivalent to any solid with two holes bored through it which don't intersect. But is the first one?
re: 478
Yeah, when I did things that had forms we always did them one particular way, too. The thing I do now is very different, and as a matter of course we'll reverse combinations mid-drill, or change leads, or do other things to mix it up, so you get very good at not doing things in that programmed way. But, on the other hand, nothing we do is as complicated or lengthy as a wushu form, so it's a lot easier.
but the basic mirroring thing isn't hard, even without programming the form in via repetition
Well, sure. We did short combos of stuff on both sides all the time. The thing that blew me away was that they were overriding the form they had programmed in, and I knew how strong the programming was for the forms that I've learned. The second I stopped concentrating, I'd be back to doing it the way I'd done it thousands of times.
Man do I suck at topology. Just thought I'd mention that again. I'm going to be worrying that bone the rest of the day.
484 is right, of course, and I think it's also equivalent to a hollow sphere with three holes in it (not sure if that's clear -- a sphere with a bubble of empty space inside, and three tunnels from the outside to the bubble.) That seemed as if it was going to help me link the rings, but then I lost it again.
Yes, halfway steps please.
1. Take the unlinked dogbone, and lay it on a table. Take the center connecter, and smush it into a rectangle. Now the two links look like horseshoes stuck to opposite sides of a rectangle.
2. Lift the horseshoes up 90°, like wickets.
3. Now imagine that the center rectangle connector is a pool, and the wickets are free to travel wherever they'd like, as long as both legs stay in the pool.
4. Suppose the wickets try to pass by each other, but they hook legs, and get snagged. Suppose they don't notice they got snagged, so the legs keep travelling but their top parts are hooked.
5. Now thicken up your wickets back into bread dough, and that is the linked version.
Hang on, I think I've got it. Shrink the bit that connects the two loops to nothing, and then it's obvious. I think.
489: I would not have thought you could describe that clearly enough in words that I could see it, but you did. Nice.
I don't see an anthropomorphism at all.
I mean, people really only have one hole.
496: I keep acting like vegetables can really talk.
OT: From the What in God's Name Could Anyone Involved Possibly Have Been Thinking files:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYNjL9_rCJc
448: also insane: the mental abacus high-speed arithmetic technique practiced competitively in india and (I think) Japan. The really young kids actually do the abacus motions, but the older kids just kinda twitch their fingers down by their sides.
Every double torus is equivalent. Duhhh.
re: 501
Years ago, bored, I found a book on techniques used by calculating prodigies. I learned a few and then was too lazy to continue, but some of them are fun and surprisingly useful. Baby steps, compared to what people who are good it can do, but was an interesting insight into it.
Out of context, 489 is pretty hilarious.
493 and 505 are super gratifying, because explaining math simply is what I do for a living, so it's awesome to exhibit it here and get positive feedback.
This belongs 100 comments back or so but: I was told by various people during my Slavic studies that an older generation of Russians (my parents' generation or maybe grandparents') knew Onegin by heart, in its entirety. I never asked around enough to see if this was even anecdotally true because I liked the idea too much.
501: Chisenbop! There were commercials for it on TV when I was a kid, and I was fascinated by them.
508: Oh, lord. I was obsessed. I think my mom might even have bought it for me, at which point I lost interest.
507 I knew people of my parents generation, i.e. those right before or during the war, that knew Onegin by heart. My parents, who both love Onegin, would make them recite sections from time to time.
Oh wow. I'm totally teaching my kids that.
I'm not clear on what there was to buy or advertise, though.
A book or video on how to do it? This was before there were videos on the Internet explaining everything.
This was before VCRs were consumer items. It must have been a book.
I taught myself how to count on my fingers in binary back in high school -- you can count to 31 on one hand, which seemed at the time like the sort of thing that might be convenient. Haven't done it in forever, though.
The ease and existence of the internet is very surreal sometimes.
Oh sorry. Yes, a book! I can still picture it.
My mother tried to teach us Chisenbop. I have no idea why, and frankly, I never got the hang of it.
I had a secret code, which was basically that you build each letter out of straight lines, except you lengthen your straight lines so that they criss-cross all over the place and obscure the letter.
I was super fast and wrote passionate journals entries all the time, especially during class when someone might notice how mysterious I was, although I knew being too obvious would make it seem self-congratulatory. Other people needed to notice it, not have it shoved in their face.
However, I could barely read what I wrote, since I wasn't actually corresponding with anyone, and never practiced reading it. This was circa 5th grade, maybe middle school.
My mother tried to teach us Chisenbop. I have no idea why, and frankly, I never got the hang of it.
Are my kids going to feel this way about me?
521: Pretty much regardless of what you do and about many more things than Chisenbop.
If you want more Unfogged party tricks, heebie, do you understand the video in 431? 'Cause it makes me want to lie down and close my eyes.
523: The video is pretty incomprehensible to me, but how's this presentation?
Chisenbop! There were commercials for it on TV when I was a kid
Wow, this takes me back...
My grandmother bought the records & book for me when I was little. I think she was convinced that if I mastered it my future as a scientific genius was assured.
I never did listen to them except once for about 2 minutes (ended up in science anyway, though).
517: I think there's an entire translation online as well. Unfortunately, it is Johnston and not Phalen. Can't win 'em all.
If I had a lot more energy I would go back and express the above in an Onegin stanza.
Phalen s/b Falen. Lately I'm some kind of cautionary tale about what autocorrect does to the brain. Not that Phalen or Falen is likely to be in autocorrect. I assume you'd end up with phallus.
I totally get the everting the sphere thing. Totally.
508: hm, possibly? This one appears to be associated with an organization called UCMAS, but they keep calling it "Zhusan", which seems close enough to "chisan". Who knows. It's not done on a table, though. The younger kids hold their hands up like an abacus is in front of them.
Do topology classes utilize a lot of play-doh? It seems like it would be very useful for things like 489.
I taught myself how to count on my fingers in binary back in high school -- you can count to 31 on one hand, which seemed at the time like the sort of thing that might be convenient. Haven't done it in forever, though.
Hah, I hadn't seen 515. I did that, too, and then mostly used it to create the joke "four!"
I'm still pretty quick with it, but never really mastered addition.
I do the binary counting thing, and can do both hands, so up to 1024. It's fast enough that I can use it for counting things that go by quickly. Still mostly a party trick, though.
532.1 cont'd: and then if you're really pissed, "132!"
"Seventeen" and "nineteen" work in the right crowd.
Heh. I invented for myself a rudimentary Chisenbop -- ones on one hand, fives on the other. Never knew of any others. If only I'd stayed in Mathletics a little longer.
524: No, I don't get it at all. Now I'm going to have to memorize Eugene Onegin to convince myself I don't have a brain tumor.
I don't think I have a party trick. I have one friend who can sing "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" starting with the first note on any word of the song and one who can conduct in 4/4 with one hand and 3/4 with the other. I want a party trick. (I told the latter party trickster I was going to learn circular breathing for my party trick but I don't really think I am.)
conduct in 4/4 with one hand and 3/4
Not that hard to do. It just takes a little practice counting in 12s.
"Watch me visualize an embedding of the projective plane in 3 space" goes over really well at parties.
But then you break out the dough and horseshoes and the party gets swinging again.
My party trick is that a boost heebie's self-esteem. I can totes do it at parties where heebie's not there, but it's not as impressive.
Growing up I had a piano piece with that problem, and my teacher taught me to chant "Not dif-FI-cult. Not dif-FI-cult."
The "Not/fi/Not/fi" is your 4/4 beat, and the "Not/di/cult" is your 3/4 beat. Easy-peasy!
I have tried the "Not difficult" thing. It does not help. Another way-musicaler-than-me friend recommended "pass the goddamn butter" but I don't remember how that works.
I've played a couple of guitar pieces that have one part in 4s and the other in 3s, e.g. Mertz's transcriptions of Schubert for guitar. I've never been able to make use of the sort of mnemonics in 542, I usually just divide by 12 and then slowly/laboriously work through it until the rhythm becomes 'music' at which point I can remember it. Always envious of people who find reading that sort of stuff easy as it's like pulling teeth for me. Triplets where the note lengths are longer than 8th notes always stump me, too, on first reading.
I used to crack walnuts on my forehead.
You know, for visualizing topology.
496 I don't see an anthropomorphism at all.
An anthropomorphism is an arrow in the category of people?
542 works for 2 against 3, "pass the goddamn butter" works for 3 against 4. 2 against 3 is also nicely represented by "Hark! How the bells!"
I have terrible trouble with this, and my method for dealing with it is along the lines of 544.* I might try some of these chanting devices.
*Or more truthfully, grow too frustrated to go on, and then put down my music and wander off to do something else for a while.
ooh, I think I got the sphere eversion thing.
I want a party trick.
Cry, cry, masturbate, cry?
550: Well, if you know it's going to be that kind of party...
one who can conduct in 4/4 with one hand and 3/4 with the other
I can do this. I can also beatbox and hum at the same time. (I usually demonstrate with "Mary Had a Little Lamb" for some reason.) Do I get to come to the party?
I think you'll find the skill that pleases the most people when synchronized with beat boxing is having a giant safe fall on you.
552: Is it like this guy? (When I discovered this video, I was shocked because I know this guy pretty well, and he has almost 20 million hits on this video? How famous is internet famous?)
OTOH, it's kind of gratifying to know that party tricks that were totally cool at your house party are actually cool to other people too.
re: 548
I have put in the work when I've really liked the music, but otherwise, yeah. The sad thing is, I'm an OK sight reader for a guitar player,* and can play middlingly difficult stuff on sight, but just woefully bad compared to, say, piano players who are so used to working with different time signatures/feels against each other.
* which is a bit like being an OK basketball player, for a pygmy ...
Is it like this guy?
Sort of. Less flute-y, but same idea.
553 made me laugh.
551 It's his party, he can cry... if he wants to.
I'm working on a party trick where I turn one orange into two oranges.
If I've followed some of the above correctly, one orange is topologically equivalent to two oranges in that neither one is a torus. Et voila.
I'll name one of the oranges Tar ...
Those are some choice oranges you've got there.
