I just learned the mind palace technique to memorize stuff and wanna put it to use.
The NATO phonetic alphabet. It comes in handy in so many situations.
Came here to say this. Instead of pronouncing your name on the phone, just read the NATO alphabets that constitute your name.
My wife always gives me shit for trying to use this. Any job that involves communicating things like names or worse, random strings of letters, should train their staff to use it. Remember that part of the design was specifically to make it easier for people with English as a second language(or not at all) to still recognize the letters over potentially unreliable radio.
It can definitely come in handy speaking on the phone in all sorts of situations.
At a job once, I was on the phone with a customer and was spelling something or giving a string of letters (can’t remember what exactly), and I was having trouble thinking of good words to use. “D as in… duck” not realizing that could’ve sounded like B as in buck or T as in tuck. “F as in…” (don’t say fuck don’t say-) “fu… fun.” “V as in… Vin Diesel.”
Customer was laughing, so I think it went well.
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For the rubix cube one, besides showing off, it’s also fun to learn how to solve it and practicing to get faster and faster at solving it. It’s worth it.
I got down to about a minute and then realized it would take a lot more time to get lower than that.
The litany against fear
The mneumonic major system. Once I learned it by heart, it helped me memorize all kinds of numbers: cards, IDs, passwords, addresses…
That sounds a lot more complicated than just memorizing the number itself. How long did it take before you felt comfortable with this?
To give an extreme example:
“I solemnly swear that I am up to no good.” vs. “053250411391271”
But to be fair, I never end up with nice sentences. It’s more like “Thank you, rainbow. Clock firework” and I imagine myself thanking a rainbow and telling it to “clock firework”, whatever that means…
As to how long, I think it could’ve been a couple of months doing a dozen or so conversions. In total it’s a very small investment of time, assuming you space it out and don’t cram. It really helps to use the Wikipedia mnemonics (like how 4 is kinda like a mirrored R).
Thank you. I’ll give it a shot, since the example you gave is awesome.
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’ve got Sir Mixalot’s “I like big butts” on lock
I once chose Paradise By The Dashboard Light for karaoke and that was the only time I’ve ever done karaoke because I’m still embarrassed ten years later at how awful a choice it was. Great song, terrible for karaoke.
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.
How to pronounce names in different cultures.
Subnets
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.
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.
If you drive, the 3-4-8 second tailgating rule
The metric system.
The Ballad of Sam McGee.
Harlow is in the fireplace, Adobo is in the window, and Sesqua is on the couch.
For some reason, I used the memory palace to remember that several years ago when I first heard about it and I still remember it.
