Memorization Projects - Pipers

Chapter 14
Memorization Projects
The Capital of South Carolina is … ?
Utterback & Onnen
PI
V-E Day and Other Top 100 dates
366 Days of Memories
CPE1704TKS and Passwords
How I Did It
http://www.pipers-place.net/larry/quizes2.htm
Larry Piper’s Quizzes
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Chapter 14
Memorization Projects
The Capital of South Carolina is …?
“If a man does not keep pace with his companions,
perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.
Let him step to the music he hears,
however measured or far away.”
Henry David Thoreau
I have always had this thing about memorization. I’m not aware of how it started, but it
probably has to do with my keeping of lists (see Chapter 17).
Certainly in K-12 school, the ability to remember “facts” was an asset. However, I
would say that my interest in memorization more related to my interest in learning.
Also, I have a stronger need than most to organize my learned facts into lists, and
hence this facilitates my memorization abilities.
I should state up front that I have no special memorization powers or techniques. I
simply use the brute force repetition method. I do seem to be able to recall past details
of my life; this book would not be possible without that ability. But my memory tends
to be “selective” rather than comprehensive. My daughter-in-law Robyn is much
better than I in remembering what she has read. Certainly, if you asked me to
memorize a sequence of cards or numbers, or remember items in a list or people’s
names or faces, I would do no better than the next guy.
This chapter, you could say, goes down “memory” lane. The two Jims from high
school, my encounter with the John Davidson TV show, my abnormal interest in PI,
my innate interest in computers, my good fortune to get in on the ground floor with
computers at Dow have all provided a direct path to my present day mission –
memorizing an event for each of the 366 days of the year. (If you were to swim in my
lane each noon hour, you would find I was counting the laps by reciting the event for a
given day within a given month – 72 lengths equals two months plus 12 more days.)
The previous page is from my web site where I organized all the lists, poems and
sayings which I had memorized. My idea was to have a place where I could quiz myself
from time to time on my lists.
A funny thing happened during my second cardioversion, 18Aug2010. I had correctly
identified the event which occurred on the birthday of all three nurses. One nurse
blurted out, “are you an idiot savant?”
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Utterback + Onnen (the 2 Jim’s)
Sometime around 1950 when I was in the 7th
or 8th grade, I saw an upperclassman (Jim
Utterback) rattle off the 48 states in under
60 seconds. That chance encounter so
impressed me that I decided to duplicate
the 'trick'. Then around 1952 we had Jim
Onnen join our freshman class. One day he
rattles off the Declaration of Independence.
When I asked him how he did it, he said his
former school required all students to
memorize the Declaration.
It took me 20+ years to get back to these memorization examples but when I did, I did so with a
vengeance. I must have over 50 lists that I have mastered, and another 50 lists that I keep for
reference.1
PI
Hey, I'm an engineer. The mathematical constant Π, PI, has been with me
since freshman algebra in high school. I was fortunate to have Mr. Kirtley to
not only guide me through this class but to inspire me to go on to greater
math classes.
By my junior year I bought a slide rule and a table of math functions. I was
hooked. Sometime about then I started memorizing the values of PI, maybe
just the first 10 places. But PI kept calling to me. By the end of college I had
not progressed much, but soon after I got serious. I worked my way up to 40
places and plateaued out at 50 places.
My system was to memorize PI in groups of five digits. Once the Internet
sprung to life, one could find all sorts of PI fanatics. Eventually I earned my
certificate for knowing PI to 100 places.
I own and have read a number of books devoted to PI. Three stories jump out in all these books. The
first is the mandatory explanation of how PI is an irrational number—it cannot be expressed by the
ratio of two integers. The other two stories involve calculating a value for PI, which could be classified
as BC, before computers, and AC, after computers.
The best story of the BC era was a guy named Shanks who spent something like 20 years of his life
advancing the accuracy of PI from 100 places to 500 places. Unfortunately, he made a mistake around
the 200th digit, so about 10-15 years of his life was wasted. A good story, but apparently Shanks was in
the slammer at the time. So what else did he have to do with his time?
I wrote a thesis paper in 1968 on Monte Carlo Simulation (see Chapter 6-CMU). One of my
simulations was an estimate for the value of PI by throwing random darts at a square with a circle
1 In 2011 I read a book, Moonwalking With Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything,
Joshua Foer, 2011, Penguin Press. I mention it in the Bibliography; you will find it fascinating.
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inscribed. The value of PI/4 could be estimated by the number of darts inside the circle divided by the
total number of darts thrown. Two of the fastest main frame computers of the time gave me an
estimate to three place accuracy with about a minute of computer time. Computer time was very
expensive at that time; today any PC could do a comparable job to at least 10 place accuracy in a few
seconds.
My final story on PI involves the Double Ironman described in Chapter 12. Late in the event when my
body’s gyroscope was not functioning very well, and I was being driven on by sheer will power, Judy
needed a way to determine my true physical and mental status. So out of the blue she asked me to
recite the value of PI. When I could and did, she knew I was still rational. So I challenge you to sneak
up on me sometime and ask me to name the first 30 to 40 digits of PI. If I cannot, something is wrong,
and it may be time to start on Aricept.
Top 100 Dates
What are the most important dates in history? What are the most important day(s) in your life? Put
them all in one spot, in a list, not just on current calendar.
Play this game with me. I have asked this question to a number of my friends who can look back over
the years with some perspective. Played with a a younger audience, who has neither the perspective
nor the history learning (as JayWalkers amply shows), the question “does not compute.”
Write down the top 10 events in history. (Try to put a date on each.) Use your own definition of Top 10.
Then add in your own personal Top 10 events, interspersing the two lists by rank. Now step back and
examine the time period to include your parents lifespans. Then expand your thinking to include
importance to the United States. Your list should have doubled in size by now. If you reach back to the
start of the 20th century or even the Civil War, you should begin to see a pattern.
Does your list include mostly events or mostly people? Have you focused on entertainment, or sports
or inventors? Is the first occurrence of something more important than the current fad or technology?
My own list is based upon the most significant or most important events that influenced my life today,
and they are listed on the following page.
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366 Days of Memorization
This story is about my quest to memorize a memorable fact about
every day of the year. That would be 366 different facts, for which
I would know: the month, the day, the year, and what happened,
for example, April 18, 1775, the ride of Paul Revere.
Now why would anybody do something like that? First, I have
always been impressed by people who have memorized things.
Consequently, I have worked since high school on my own lists:
presidents, states, capitals, PI, and some miscellaneous poems.
I once saw John Davidson on TV do his routine. He was a singer,
and he would work the room, asking for couples who were
celebrating their anniversary. When they told him their wedding
date, he would sing a song that was #1 for that year. When you
did the math, he really only needed to memorize about 25 song-date combinations. The song’s lyrics
were undoubtedly already in his repertoire.
Then computers came along. In the late ‘70s I had control of one at Dow (see Chapter 5--SyFA), and in
my spare time I began keeping birthday lists. I would print a crude calendar for people on their
birthday. At first my list was modest. It included my immediate workers. Then I added the girls I was
coaching. Then famous names that appeared in the newspaper were included. Pretty soon pro athletes
were added. By then I could print out a calendar for any date in a year and guarantee the recipient
would have at least 20 other names who were born on the same date.
Technical limitations and efficiency considerations forced me to go with a 50 character field. This
meant I could have five birthday items in a 256 character word size—with mandatory end-of-line and
end-of-word characters. The 50 character limitation was parsed out as: 10-first name, 17-last name, 8date codes, 10-comments and 5-character codes to designate source, class and death. I scoured the
library reference books until ultimately I reached nearly 100,000 names and dates.
Then I realized all my data was trapped in a Dow computer and one day I would be leaving.
Fortunately, the IBM PC was emerging, and someone created a conversion program. I left the job with
five 1.2M, 5.25” floppies that had all my birthday data. Soon many web sites popped up with birthday
data similar to mine. I lost my interest in compiling a massive birthday database, and instead focused
on the events that occurred on various days.
Somewhere around 1999 I switched my goal to memorizing a specific event for each of the 366 days in
a year. My intention was to “impress” anyone I met by telling them what had happened on the day they
were born. I have previously mentioned how I was impressed with the two Jims in high school and
John Davidson on TV. Hyrum Smith of Franklin Planner fame also impressed me with his
memorization efforts. But it was the Harlem Globetrotters that convinced me to go for it. Say what?
Logic says one cannot memorize four facts for every 366 days of the year. That would be 1464 facts.
Logic also says that Globetrotters will not make all the “trick” shots they use. But that does not prevent
them from attempting the shots. And when the ball goes in, people remember the shot. Similarly, I
hoped people would remember the times I was correct, and forget about my “misses.” For awhile I
even settled for the idea of “coming close” - like the guy at the carnival that bets he can guess your age
within two years or your weight within three pounds. I went so far as to concentrate on every fifth day,
which means memorizing only 84 dates. Although I abandoned this partial solution, it did give me 84
fixed points from which I could reference other dates.
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So how does one accomplish the goal of memorizing 1464 facts? First you have to gather the “facts”,
which means you have to come up with 366 verifiable, legitimate events. Once you start your quest for
dates, it becomes obvious that all sorts of publications have their own lists. Birthdays are a favorite
item, but I chose not to go that route. Rather, I wanted to collect the most significant event, from my
point of view, which occurred on each date. A side effect to this approach is that you become a real
history buff.
The process becomes ridiculously simple: find a publication that prints one or more events for each
day and select the one you like. Write it down on some master list or calendar. Repeat the next day.
At some point you have to start doing the memory work. But don’t get too excited about the
memorization part; you will soon find out that the dates you have collected need to be “revised.”
Revision consists of two efforts: 1-using a different event, or 2-correcting an event’s true date. Also,
you soon find that some lists are better quality than others, both in their subject selection and their
accuracy.
The following is a list of the various sources which I used, somewhat by order that I tried each one.
1 – www.scopesys.com
2 – www.history.com
3 – www.wikipedia.org
4 – http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/
5 - news.yahoo.com/s/ap/history
6 - http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/today/today.html
7 - http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/index.html
I purchased the book Today in History by the History Channel. My copy says 2003 so that must have
been about the time I got serious about recording events. Other similar books include:
The Teacher’s Calendar, apparently published each year, $20, 2007
On This Day, Over 2000 Years of Front Page History, an oversize book by Random House, 2004
On This Day in History, Leonard & Thelma Spinrad, $16, 1999
On This Day, Carl Windsor, $16, 2006
On This Day in America, John Wagman, 1990
CPE1704TKS and Passwords
War Games, a 1984 movie about computer control of our national defense system, became a classic.
The graphics set the standard for years to come. A sequel was produced 25 years later that also used
cutting edge technology effects. War Games still ranks in the top 25 list of my all-time favorite movies.
The Geeks quickly picked up on the 10 characters CPE1704TKS,
which was the code to launch the computer-controlled missiles.
When I first heard a new employee rattle off those 10 characters, it
served to reinforce my own memorization repertoire. So that is my
second lesson: pay attention to numbers in your life. Set your brain
on RECORD mode occasionally. Memorize a few useless strings of
characters. I realize now that I “see” numbers the way some people
“see” colors or “see” faces or “hear” notes.
But it also triggered an idea for computer passwords. At the time
passwords for home computers were not that prevalent, mainly
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because the Internet had “not yet been invented.” But at Dow we were up to our ears in passwords, and
the need to make them a certain length and to change them frequently.
So what makes for a good password? Let’s talk about some history. My first encounter with computers
dictated I use as an ID my last name, stripped of any vowels plus the initials of my first and middle
names, i.e., pprll. (One wonders what would happen in today’s world of hyphenated names. Even then,
an oriental name like Loo or Lei or Oh became a three character ID like ‘lll’ or ‘oll’, which was not
permitted.)
Next came the six character minimum passwords. This isn’t too hard to find. But once the requirement
was added to change it every 30 days, now you had to get creative. This was soon followed by no repeat
or similar passwords, so some of us had a list like: topgun, bigboy, hitman, aceone, and we cycled
through these four continuously. This also passed the test of no repeat letters.
The most elaborate password scheme I ever saw was devised by Sandy Currie, an IT specialists at Dow.
Those of us on support frequently had to enter passwords while the customer was watching us. We
also had to do this at 20+ sites, so there was a need to make each site unique, yet still be able to easily
remember each site. Fortunately, each location had a unique building number.
The password consisted of the building number plus the current hour. Only the building number, such
as “438”was typed on the next row down on the keyboard, as “rei”. The current hour was an letter
obtained from a clock-character conversion table. The conversion table was the 24 hours a day in a
string of characters, as in 00 01 02, etc, with the alphabet, written in reverse order underneath each
hour, centered with 12 (noon) on N. So the password at 438 Bd at 1:15 in the afternoon was ‘reim’ and
at 1305 Bd at 08:15 am was ‘qeptr’.
The computer clocks had to be correct, but that is no problem in a 24/7 operation. Memorizing the
clock conversion table was easy since most of our work was between 08:00 and 16:30. A support guy
would show up, look at his watch, think about 2 seconds, and then type in the password!
Here is my own list of potential passwords, ranked by number of characters required:
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
7 (favorite number)
42 (answer to everything)
ily or llp (obvious)
1816 (house number)
31-5-15 (locker comb.) or 57736 (man #)
008268 (lib #)
21jan61 (important date) or rosebud (memorable word)
05513068 (serial #) or larryp56 (common ID)
any social security number
CPE1704TKS (from War Games)
37OH55V-0773H (figure this one out)
Finally, an iron clad password should be 16 or more characters long, should contain upper and lower
characters, should contain one or more numbers and should contain one or more punctuation
characters. It should not contain family names or even any word in the dictionary. Such a password
can be obtained in one of two ways: (1) combine two or more from the above table, like Rozebud +
008628 + lib#, Rozebud008628lib#, or (2) Use a sentence or as it is known as a “pass phrase.”
Consider the sentence, “It is too damn cold in Michigan.” Now let’s convert that to our 16 password,
“It’s2#$%coldinMI”.
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How I Did It
Thoughts on memorizing 366 dates
Goal 1:
Goal 2:
Goal5:
Have one event for every day
Achieve 90% recall on all 366 days (this allows missing only 3 days/month)
Achieve 80% recall initially – Globetrotters mentality
Have a second event for every family date; many other dates also (1word-alt.xls)
Exclude family events as 2nd daily event.
Learn a number of multi-event days:
Apr 18:
Revere, Doolittle, Sumpter Apr 12:
Apr 15: Titanic, Kroc, Apple II
Aug 14:
Dec 26: tsunami, Kwanzaa
Feb 23:
Constantly update: DELL:C:\MyDocs\MyExcel\events-12mo-1word-alt.xls
Idea 0:
Idea 1:
Idea 2:
Idea 3:
Idea 4:
Idea 5:
Idea 6:
Idea 7:
Idea 8:
Idea 9:
Idea10:
Idea11:
Go thru year, day-by-day, as it occurs: email: History & Jest, History book, Wikipedia,
Learn 1st day of each month for 12 months; then 15th day, 30th,, 20th, 5th, 10th, 25th ;1,2,3
Learn top 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90, 100 days in history
Order of months memorized: Nov, Dec, Jan, Jul, Apr, May, Feb, Jun, Mar, Aug, Sep, Oct
Use of flash cards as an aid with 12 chapters for each year.
Need to review: daily, weekly, biweekly, monthly until learned
Color code at least one list by 12 classifications
Rank, 1-366, of all 366 dates
Add duplicate dates to 1-word spreadsheet
Memorize in swimming pool: 90 – 120 date 2nd 3rd 4th
6th
7th
21st 26th
Start adding single day to basic 7 days (90): 102 – 114 – 126 – 138 – 150 – 162 – 174
Work on 12 of same date; work on 2nd event as each day occurs. (4-20-10)
Goal 3:
Goal 3a:
Goal 4:
Rule 1:
Rule 2:
Rule 3:
Jest
Rule 4:
Confine dates to last ~150 years and somewhat U.S. related (1215, 1492, 1455, )
Cross-check a number of sources
References (by importance): Today in History (book),History Channel, Wiki,1-Click,Scopes,
Other references: my top 100+ days in history, my top sporting events, 2 calendars
Sequence of creating 366 dates:
1 - Family dates – 3% - orange
2 - Larry events – 3% - orange
3 – Top 100 Events in US – 35% - red
4 - SporTing events – 2% - green
5 – Disasters – 5% - yellow
6 – Holidays – 3% - black
Larry L. Piper
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7 – Wars and military – 10% - magenta
8 – Presidents – 4% - teal
9 – Supreme Court decisions – 2% - silver
10 – Scientific & Medical – 3% - brown
11 – caUses – 2% - purple
12 - Individual achievements – 2% - blue
DELL:I:\MyDocs\Events-rules.rtf; rev: Jan 22, 08; Feb 16, 2007; init 11-02-06; 4-21-10
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