Tag: short-and-straight

Best way to remember names

Akshat RathiLeave a comment

Associate names with a powerful visual image. Reagan with ray guns. Lincoln with chain links. Manmohan with a smiling brain. It can be more powerful if you place this image in your mind at the place you came to know about their name.

Now read on to know why this technique works. Here is the Baker-baker paradox which helped develop the best way of remembering names:

A researcher shows two people the same photograph of a face and tells one of them that the guy is a baker and the other that his last name is Baker. A couple days later, the researcher shows the same two guys the same photograph and asks for the accompanying word. The person who was told the man’s profession is much more likely to remember it than the person who was given his surname.

This happens because:

When you hear that the man in the photo is a baker, that fact gets embedded in a whole network of ideas about what it means to be a baker: He cooks bread, he wears a big white hat, he smells good when he comes home from work. The name Baker, on the other hand, is tethered only to a memory of the person’s face. That link is tenuous, and should it dissolve, the name will float off irretrievably into the netherworld of lost memories. 

From Joshua Foer’s Moonwalking with Einstein

The largest human migration occurs annually

Akshat RathiLeave a comment

Captured in the 2009 documentary The Last Train Home by Lixin Fan:

Ever year tens of millions of migrant workers go home to see their families for the New Year holidays. For most, the cheapest and the fastest route home is by train, but the impossible crowds strain the system past the breaking point. Police use bullhorns, batons, verbal abuse—whatever means necessary—to keep the vast mob under control. Many migrants camp at the railway station for weeks, waiting to by tickets. Others give up in despair, crippled by exhuastion. Those who get a ticket often have to climb through a window to get on the train, for a ride that can last up to three days but seems much longer. Many have to stand day and night, for lack of space on the floor to sit. Some wear diapers to avoid using the lavatory, and struggle to keep their sanity during the ride.

In 2009, an estimated 130 million people made the holiday journey—but each year the numbers were growing by double digits, like so much in China.

Taken from Ruchir Sharma’s Breakout Nations

My PhD described using the 1000 most used words

Akshat RathiLeave a comment

Challenge set by XKCD’s Up Goer Five:

At the big boys’ school I worked on making really, really tiny things that can help many people not be sick. To do that we spent days reading books and learning how to add smaller bits together, one by one, to make the whole tiny thing. All the things around us are made of these tiny bits held together in different ways. But because these bits can not be held in hands, or seen by eyes, we had to do work with them in ways that would allow us to understand if we were doing it right.

The tiny thing I was making was hard to make. So I had two other people working on it with me. We talked and helped each other to come up with a way to make the tiny thing after three years of trying very hard. We made most of it, but some bits remain on which one person is still working.

After my work was done I wrote a book on it. Now the big boys have read the book and they will ask me hard questions. If I answer them then they will give me a note which will help me go out in the world and get a job that will pay me money and let me do what I want to do.