Mind Tricks: Ancient and Modern
My new favorite little book. It’s got all kinds of helpful funny things. One of the ideas is to map letters to numbers, then make up nonsense sentences to remember strings of numbers (combination lock?). Of course I used a unix command to come up with the most frequent initial letters in the english language. Then I massaged the results a little.
cut -c1 /usr/share/dict/words | tr "[:upper:]" "[:lower:]" | uniq -c | sort -nr
Here is the resulting map … let’s go memorize some long strings of numbers!!! oh wait … we have cell phones, nobody needs to remember anything any more :-)
0 s ero 1 u on 2 t wo 3 r ee 4 d oor 5 a live 6 m ix 7 h eaven 8 b ait 9 p ine
93 68 59 79 45 47
please remember milk, bread, and please help piggy drain all drinks hai!
Author Steven Saunders has an eccentric little consulting company but I found this paper ABOUT EMERGENCE an interesting Sunday read.
Filed under: all talk, books, inspiration, lifehacking · 1 Comment
I think ‘u’ is over-represented in that dictionary due to all the words that start with ‘un’. Similarly with the letter ‘i’. I nominate ‘e’ for the number 1 instead, to be remembered by the word ‘eon.’