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from the I-forgot-what-I-was-going-to-write dept.
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: 1) by devnulljapan on Thursday November 12 2015, @08:43AM
Can't take seriously anyone who suggests that cell structure is boring. Really, anyone who says "all these intensely boring-sounding concepts such as cytoplasm, centrioles, mitochondria or, more encouragingly, the “golgi apparatus" is a fuckwit. I don't care how many 1s and 0s he can memorise. He's a moron.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Reziac on Thursday November 12 2015, @02:23PM
A crude approximation, but I kinda agree: this describes someone who needs everything to be structured, ordered, and defined, and is stressed out by stuff that defies pigeonholing; biology tends to slop around the edges in not-so-predictable ways and is therefore (in their worldview) to be avoided.
Or, why there are a great many of these pathologically-orderly types in the fields of math, physics, and programming, but not so in the fields of biology.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.