If you wanted to pinpoint the most absurdly geeky event in the world calendar, it would be difficult to beat the binary numbers challenge at the World Memory Championships. In it, a bevy of trained memory masters fight it out over 30 minutes to memorise as many 1s and 0s in order as they possibly can.
Back when this was my idea of a good time, I was able to "do" more than 2,000 1s and 0s in the half-hour. My then arch-rival, Dr Gunther Karsten of Germany, was not afraid to tell me this level of performance was "really quite lame". He could do 3,200. The current world record is over 4,000: more than two 1s and 0s every second.
Dig past the mystery of such feats, and you discover a set of techniques and an approach to learning that is full of strikingly simple wisdom and fun. Even if, quite sensibly, you've no interest in learning to recite computer code, the memory techniques that enable such performance are a treasure trove of insight into how to motivate and direct the learning brain.
(Score: 2) by Covalent on Thursday November 12 2015, @12:22AM
I thought maybe the way to do it would be to memorize the ASCII table and translate your 4000 bits into 4000/8 = 500 letters and symbols. Those letters might be more easily memorized. Or maybe take them 8 at a time and turn them into decimal and remember the decimal. Or hex maybe?
Seems like the ascii table memorization would be easier (only 256 things for permanent memory and many are in an obvious order).
You can't rationally argue somebody out of a position they didn't rationally get into.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 12 2015, @02:55AM
Steve Roberts pedaled around on a recumbent bike in the 1980s with 4 buttons on each hand grip. He typed "chorded ascii" into a TRS-80 Model 100 while pedaling. iirc, he also had some ham radio way to send and receive text while on the road.
http://teknomadics.com/2011/10/the-original-technomad/ [teknomadics.com]
I met him at an event, he said it wasn't very hard to learn this "keyboard" -- has any one here tried this (for regular typing)?