ferrellweb

I told some class I’d post this info.—I just don’t remember who. (3rd period, was that you?) Anyway, we were talking about memory techniques, and I mentioned one I’d seen for specifically memorizing numbers. Here’s the link I promised: The Red Table.

Like I said in class, the basic principle is that each number from 0-9 is assigned to a phonetic unit (not so much a letter, but a sound, this is important—it adds flexibility. Check out the table, you’ll see.) Once you’ve learned the table, you can encode and decode long numbers as words, which ought to be easier to remember.

If you find this interesting, you also might want to check out the tips for memorizing the table, and play with the online test. If you’re really into it, there’s even software you can download (PC only; sorry my Mac-ies) that will suggest words to go with numbers you enter, so you don’t have to think them up yourself.

If you’re still on a memorizing kick after that, you might want to check out the other method I mentioned, which is technically known as the “loci method” (loci is Latin for “place,” yes?), where you mentally attach items you need to remember to certain places. Here’s Wikipedia’s explanation, and evernerve.com has a description that emphasizes the startling and bizarre for even more recall power. Finally, our friends up at Maryville host a page with brief explanations of several memory-methods on it, including the loci method, and an interesting alphabet-grid method (at the bottom) that’s similar.

Remember, there’s no “magic” way to memorize stuff that doesn’t take, you know, some amount of work. You still have to memorize something. These methods (and others like them) are just ways to hack your brain to make the things your memorizing more…. memorable.

All right, we’re serious this time. (I think.) Forget emailing papers to yourself due to “can I open this at school” compatibility fears. Forget the cut-and-paste dance with Google Docs to preserve formatting, proper margins, and other stuff pesky teachers require.

Behold, the majesty of Buzzword, Adobe’s brand-spankin’-new Flash-based online word processor:



This is the new champion, kids. It’s got a beautiful, smooth interface, and will do everything you need for school: headers and footers, automatic page numbers, double-spacing, adjustable margins… there’s a word-count and spell-checker. It has a small but elegant collection of basic fonts to choose from, and looks like it handles inserting pictures and tables simply and well. As with other online writers, you can invite collaborators and leave comments.

Buzzword will open .rtf files and Microsoft Word documents (.doc files) from your hard drive, if you’ve got stuff you’ve been working on and want to import. It saves automatically as you’re working, and an icon in the corner shows if you’ve made changes since the last save.

The best bit, of course, is that your work is saved online: start a paper at home, go to school, log in to Buzzword, finish it up, and print it out. No worries about disks, drives, emails, etc.

All you need to do is pick a username and plug in an email address and password, and you’re ready to go. Go check it out!

I stumbled across Protagonize today, and thought I’d mention it here, for what it’s worth. I think I remember doing this in some English class once when I was a kid— somebody starts a story on a piece of paper, folds their part down, and passes it on to someone else, who adds a paragraph, and so on, until the class has created a collaborative monstrosity.

Protagonize is kind of like that. Except on the Web. And with a choose-your-own-adventure twist. On the site, users create “addventures”— from their web site:

An addventure is a type of online interactive fiction that combines aspects of round-robin stories and Choose Your Own Adventure-style tales. Like a round-robin story, an addventure is a form of collaborative fiction in which many authors contribute to a story, each writing discrete segments. However, like a gamebook, the resulting narrative is non-linear, allowing authors to branch out in different directions after each segment of the story. The result is a continually growing work of hypertext fiction.

As a user, you can start stories, add to existing stories, keep track of favorites, and even subscribe to stories in your favorite RSS reader, if you’ve a mind to.

The few stories I browsed through seemed to veer toward the silly and ridiculous eventually (some quicker than others!), but some seemed fun, regardless. If you’ve got an idea for the beginning of a story, it might be fun to post it, and see where others take it. Or, just log on and add your 2-cents to existing stories.

Teacherial advisory: I haven’t browsed the site extensively, but I’m sure that, since the site is open to the Intarwebs, that if you spend enough time there, you’re liable to run into some sort of offensive language or content. They do have posting guidelines, a designation for “mature” stories so they’re easy to spot and avoid, if that’s your desire, and a way to report questionable content.

That said, play safe and use common sense if you decide to check them out.

A little while ago, I plugged Dan Carlin’s excellent Hardcore History podcast. I thought I’d bring it up again because he just released a sort of “interim” episode (all too short!) in which he interviews James Burke, writer and host of a few of my all-time favorite documentary series: Connections and The Day the Universe Changed.

In this interview, Burke touches on the nature of history, how historians of the future might view our time, and a host of other mini-topics, including his Knowledge Web project. From the interview:

All this stuff about learning all the stuff you need to know about chemistry so you can become a chemist (or a physicist or a musicologist or a physiotherapist or an archaeologist) is all a plot to make life easier for teachers. In other words, you divide knowledge up into neat boxes and it makes it easier for teachers to grade— because what happens is you give a set of questions to a student and they have one correct answer and that’s easy to grade. I mean, Charles II did what Charles II did and nothing else. And if you get it right, you pass the exam and get yourself whatever it is you’re going to get yourself. And this [the Knowledge Web project] is an anarchic approach. It says, That’s not how history happens, that’s not how life happens, that’s not how knowledge happens. It is all immensely interconnected…

Sound interesting? Listen to the interview on Dan Carlin’s podcast [MP3 file] [iTunes], or check out the Knowledge Web site. It’s still in development, but there’s a swell video showing what one might expect from such a thing.

The New York Times “Week in Review” writes up its take on the state of English lingo in Buzzwords 2007: All We Are Saying.

What follows is by no means a complete list of the words that took our attention this year, but rather a sampling from the thousands that endured long enough to find a place in the national conversation. Although many were not first said or written in 2007, they are nonetheless the tattoos, scars and medals that differentiate this year from any other.

Go have a look.

Sweet merciful heaven. Its— You— I mean… it’s a sort of game, see? Where you… or this guy… anyway, there’s some kind of Brussels sprouts… and I guess it’s Christmas… and… Oh, man. I’m better than this, I really am. Merry Christmas, you guys. Sorry.

Crank out holiday greetings galore with Worktank’s Holiday-O-Matic! There’s no quicker or more convenient way to pepper your friends and relations with randomly-generated sentiment. May your chestnut roasting be benign and filled with Swedish meatballs!