Weeknote for 4/28/2024

Still behind, but I’m working on it!

Learning

🤔

I started collecting memory palaces and names for representing numbers and continued exploring other mnemonic ideas. For palaces I started with my childhood home, which took me about an hour to decide on 100 landmarks. The other palaces have been less tidy, and I launched into a project of photographing my usual walking locations to mine them for landmarks. For some of the outdoor locations I could rely on Google Street View, such as my drive to work. For others I started with my phone camera, but at the end of the week, I realized it would be easier to use my old 360-degree camera, which has barely gotten any use since I bought it to capture the 2017 eclipse. The outdoor locations are trickier than buildings to turn into palaces, because I have to decide how to divide the streets or paths into “rooms” and find five landmarks in each one that would be distinctive enough to remember.

But it’s not only visual distinction that can make a landmark memorable. While walking through the woods I watched a woodpecker defending its home, and it reminded me of the importance of stories for adding significance to objects. Now I’m sure I’ll always remember that random tree as the woodpecker tree.

For the list of names I drew from a spreadsheet I made of Yan’s 10,000 famous people list and filled in the gaps with MemoEmpire and occasionally Playback.fm. I could quickly tell that some letters were harder than others, particularly O and N. Not that there weren’t famous names with those initials, just not many that I knew. It showed me there’s a narrow range of life where I pay attention to its people.

For other number mnemonic ideas I looked into representing digits with objects of different sizes, such as birds, and geographical locations along a north-south axis to form journeys through a number’s digits. I also thought about other lists I could memorize to represent numbers: Pokémon, TV series episodes, SCPs, and Backrooms levels. And to help me think about mnemonic substitutes for abstract terms, I bought a book of dad jokes to study puns.

Video

🤓

I wandered back into the land of liminal spaces with a video of unusual office photos. I’d watched it before, but this time I got sucked into a little research project trying to identify which of the images were real and which were rendered. I figured most of them were computer graphics, because why would people create offices that looked like those, and why would they take photos of them? It turned out most of them were real, and they were photographed to advertise the space or to showcase an architect or design ideas or to advertise the lighting, elevators, or carpet or to document the building or just to capture the liminality. One image was a screenshot from the show Family Ties. And one of the few renders was from an old Apple screensaver of an office slowly flooding. For some reason we liminal space enjoyers love flooded buildings.