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posted by cmn32480 on Wednesday November 11 2015, @07:43PM   Printer-friendly
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.


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  • (Score: 2) by isostatic on Thursday November 12 2015, @09:54AM

    by isostatic (365) on Thursday November 12 2015, @09:54AM (#262085) Journal

    I follow the law yet haven't type a ms product key since 1998

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 2) by engblom on Thursday November 12 2015, @11:09AM

    by engblom (556) on Thursday November 12 2015, @11:09AM (#262101)

    I follow the law yet haven't type a ms product key since 1998

    It depends on your occupation...

    I am working for a computer shop dealing mostly with business computers. Quite often I need to do a complete clean install (to make sure I do not have any pre-installed ad-wares, which some manufacturers are bundling in). I am talking about a real clean installed and not a system restore to factory defaults.

    Also, with some computers, you are not able to clone the computer to another one without changing the product key. If you do not manually change the product key, it will after some time claim it got a pirated version of windows installed.

    So if a someone wants 40 laptops (all same brand and model), I only install one and set it up with the programs the customer wants and all other customization. Then I create an image of the hard disk and drop the image to all the other. After this I manually type the key from under the laptop to make sure it will not complain later about pirate versions.

    It looks like a lot of this work will end with Win10 as Win10 will recognize if it has been earlier legally installed in the same computer.