I just learned the mind palace technique to memorize stuff and wanna put it to use.
Not necessarily the part for calculating the day of the week for any arbitrary day centuries ago, that’s just a useless party trick, but for the current year so you don’t need to pull out your phone to check. Knowing that 1/3 (or 1/4 on a leap year), the last day of February, 3/14, 4/4, 5/9, 6/6, 7/11, 8/8, 9/5, 10/10, 11/7, and 12/12 are all the same day of the week, that this year they’re all Tuesdays, and next year they’re all Thursdays, is mostly easy to remember and very frequently useful.
How to pronounce names in different cultures.
Do you remember the Fibonacci sequence? You can use it to convert miles to kilometers .
2 mi ~= 3km
5mi ~= 8km
8mi ~= 13km
13mi ~= 21km
And so on.
That’s awesome thanks !
That’s brilliant.
Wait, is this true until its not or is it true forever as you go higher in the sequence?
It’s always true because the ratio of miles to km is really close to the golden ratio.
If you do it for a zillion miles you’ll be off by a lot of km, but proportionally the same amount as for 1 mile
The mneumonic major system. Once I learned it by heart, it helped me memorize all kinds of numbers: cards, IDs, passwords, addresses…
Simple recipe formulas that are scalable
The NATO phonetic alphabet. It comes in handy in so many situations.
Learn some alphabets of foreign languages. Russian is fun because some of the characters looks like English letters but have completely different sounds. Korean is also cool because it looks crazy complex but it’s actually extremely simple.
I don’t know any Korean, but the Korean alphabet is by far the best writing system I’ve seen.
The characters make the shape your mouth makes while annunciating that letter. It’s ingenious.
A crowd pleasing karaoke song!
I’ve never seen these flop at kareoke (if done with average competency):
Jump around - cypress hill gang
I will survive - Gloria Gaynor
Bohemian Rhapsody - Queen
Billy Jean - Michael Jackson (many other covers)
Shake it off - Taylor Swift
Pick 1 of the above plus a Beatles song and you’re good for impromptu Kareoke.
If you have a few days notice and a friend to plan with the options expand…
I tried Bohemian Rhapsody once at karaoke, realized quick that I did not have the range for that song.
For day-to-day purposes, if you are used to Fahrenheit but not Celsius or vice versa, and all you want to do is get a rough sense of how warm or cold it is outside without having to do arithmetic involving fractions in your head, then remember that there are two temperatures in Celsius that are roughly the same in Fahrenheit but with their digits transposed: 16° C ~ 61° F, and 28° C ~ 82° F. You can then roughly interpolate/extrapolate by about 2° F for every 1° C.
Also freezing is 0 in Celsius, so 32f is 0c. That one always helps me. Not as useful for converting c to f.
A completely random ordering of a deck of cards. You can have a deck pre-stacked in this order, learn some false shuffles, have someone pick a card and place it back anywhere they want without marking its location in any way, and when you inspect the deck you know exactly what their card is. And they’ll never guess that the way you did it was memorizing the order of every card in the deck.
I’m sure there are a lot more advanced ways to take advantage of this, just a handy ability to have in your back pocket (literally).
If you’re going to memorise a deck of cards, you’re better off learning something like the Mnemonica Stack as you can use it as the basis for a whole load of card tricks.
