Sunday, June 30, 2002

A beautiful naked blonde jumps up and down

If you don't remember where that phrase comes from, then you need to read the rest of this item.

Some years ago Harry Lorayne and Jerry Lucas released "The Memory Book". I should know, I have two copies.

Anyway, they offered any number of ways to help remember otherwise incomprehensible things. For instance, consider the number 91852719521639092112. How long would it take you to memorize it, if you needed to? It didn't take me long at all using the Lorayne/Lucas scheme. Using their system, numbers are translated into consonants, and vowels are inserted as needed to convert the string of consonants to a phrase you can remember. So one way to express that number from earlier is also the title of this post.

I was into this for a while in college. I wound up visiting a house in Atlanta and I remember the street number to this day. The person who brought me there was kind of touchy, and I really didn't have to point out that the street number translated into "mule shit". I don't figure on going back, and it's just as well - I don't remember the name of the street.

Someone blogged on some mnemonic devices a while back. I remember a few from engineering school, such as the color code on resistors. Each color stripe represents a digit or an exponent based on its position, and the colors (black, brown, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet, gray, white) can be remembered by "bad boys rape our young girls, but Violet gives willingly."

Biology wasn't my long suit, but I was able to remember the taxonomical schemes of the day (kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species) from the lamer but effective "King Philip came over from groovy Spain".

Of course there's the flip side of this, where meaningless numbers stick in your head for some reason. For instance, 1.71E98. That's 69 factorial, the biggest factorial that the old "slide-rule" calculators like my long-retired TI SR-50 could calculate without overflowing. The square root of 69 is easy to remember too - eight something...

This one is arcane: May I have a large container of coffee? There are several others like this, but the trick is that the number of letters in each word is the corresponding digit in pi - 3.1415926.....

This one is timely - to remember the "circle of fifths" in music there is "Father Charles goes down and eats bananas".

Enough. I'll bet you remember at least one of the above.

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