A Lifehacker post...

A comment made at Lifehacker.com:

I found "The Memory Book" by Harry Lorayne and Jerry Lucas to be an excellent starting point to become familiar with a variety of memorization techniques for remembering lists, people's names, numbers of various kinds, and so on. It was a real eye-opener for me, back when I was in college.

Although I have never sought to be the kind of person who'd want to memorize the names and faces of everyone attending, say, a conference reception, or the first thousand digits of pi, I have been able to successfully adapt some of these techniques into my day-to-day life.

The two techniques I used most involve substituting sounds for numbers and creating words with those sounds.

In my variant of the system (the basic principle of which is described in nearly every book on memory techniques, so I'll be brief), the sibilant "S" sound stands for zero, "L" stands for one, "N" for two, "M" for three, and other letters represent other numbers.

Paying attention only to sounds in the system, you can use words to represent numbers. "Moon" can represent "32"; "Lemon" can represent "132." A "male mummy nail" represents the sequence "313321." You remember the numbers by retaining images of the corresponding words.

Obviously, this system can be used to memorize any sequence of numbers (especially phone numbers, one such number, represented by the key images of a "rat" on a "mop picker" machine has stayed with me for decades).

The second technique is an extension of the first. By creating a "standard" list of words to correspond with the cardinal numbers (starting with, say, "house," "hill," "hen," and "ham" to represent the numbers zero through three), you can create a mental filing cabinet with however many places you need. This lets you remember lists ofthings.

There will be those who will say that this all sounds like too much trouble, and that the game's not worth the candle. Maybe so, but the same can be said for learning a foreign language or how to play a musical instrument: there's a certain investment in learning one has to make in order to play the game.

Cheers...

Muddling along...

The "state of the plate" is one that cries out for stress testing, which is a subject that is near and dear to my heart, at least as far as my immediate project is concerned. To wit, consider the following sentence, which crossed my field of vision not long ago:

Вертикальное нагружение испытуемого образца производят равномерно, без ударов ступенями нагрузки, равными 10% от эффективного напряжения в образце грунта после предварительного обжатия, определяемого разностью между полным давлением в камере и давлением в поровой жидкости образца, или от значения вертикального эффективного бытового давления, заданного программой испытаний, с интервалами 15 с или непрерывно, обеспечивая приращение относительной вертикальной деформации образца грунта 0,02 за 1 мин.

The specimen being tested is vertically loaded in a uniform manner, without load increment shocks that are equal to 10% of the effective stress in the soil specimen after preliminary compression, defined as the difference between the total chamber pressure and the pressure in the pore-filling liquid of the specimen, or of the vertical effective normal pressure specified in the test program, at 15 sec intervals or continuously, assuring an incremental relative vertical soil specimen deformation of 0.02 over 1 min.

There is something glorious about sentences 81 words long (as this one is)! The only problem, as far as I can see, is that the sentence makes no sense. (Fabulously, making it make sense, past accurately rendering the text, is not part of my job.)

This translation started off dismally slowly, with gobs of geological names that required a lot of online research, but now the text seems to have settled down into a steady soil-science gobbledygook that I almost understand with that part of my mind that's still an engineer.

I am quickly closing on the 6,000-words-left mark in this 9,000-source-word project. The number would be lower, but my best client called with a 1,000-word rush job, and one does not leave one's best client in the lurch, especially if one is headstrong and of the opinion that the 9,000-word job is still doable for Saturday morning.

There are three jobs from the same client lined up after this one, and one more from my best client, which pretty much assures me of Something To Do™ until about mid-December.

* * *I had been very careful when letting Shiloh out of the house these past few days, as she had developed an annoying propensity of running over to the neighbor's house to visit, which the neighbor doesn't mind, apparently, but I do. So all promenades of any kind have been done with the aid of a lead of some kind.

Today, I decided to risk letting Shiloh off the lead, and we had a glorious time where I would fling a flying disk down the long hill in the back of the house and Shiloh would tear off at Mach 3, in a curious ballet of canine legs and elbows, down the hill after the blessed thing. I find it is one of the funniest sights I've seen in a while.

* * *In other news, I've set things up to get the "triple play" from the cable provider (120+ channels of programming, broadband internet service, and broadband phone service). The tech is supposed to come out on Tuesday to set things up. Between now and then, it'd be good to figure out what it'd take to run cable to somewhere in the living room so Galina can watch her beloved tube out there.

* * *I figure I have about another hour of work left in me, whereupon I shall have to go to sleep. If I can get down to 5500 words left to do, I'll be in pretty good shape. We'll see.

Cheers...