ferrellweb

Hi boys and girls! Just a quick note here, to explain that, for all intents and purposes, the ferrellweb.com is on official hiatus. Developing and other projects while desperately trying to keep up with grad school is sapping all of my spare energy. This site is badly in need of an overhaul, anyway, not just because the design is so 2002, but the strings and wires behind it have become so tangled it will probably be best to torch everything and rise from the ashes, someday.

I’ll be dumping random stuff into a Tumblelog, so you may want to follow me there. See you around!

Here are a couple sites making the rounds that visualize name data. (Ooo. I love visualizing name data!) The first is the World Names Profiler. Punch your last name into the box, hit “search,” and you’ll see the distribution of folks who share your name all over the globe. Here’s mine:

There you go—quite a bit U.S.-heavy, with smatterings in Canada, the UK, France, Germany, and… Argentina?! Well, how about that.

The other is the Name Voyager. Punch in your first name (or somebody else’s) and instantly see a graph of the name’s popularity over the years. Again, here’s mine:

Wow. Looks like I peaked in the ’70’s, with no comeback in sight. Oh well. Anyway, go give ‘em a try yourself!

All the cool kids on teh Intarnets seem to be yearbooking themselves today, so I thought you guys might like to join in. All you need is a few minutes to waste, and a sort of “front view” picture of yourself to upload. The site will do the rest. If you’d like a preview, here are some of my pictures.

Check out this quiz: The 100 Most Common English Words. See how many you can name in five minutes. I got 36, and I’m not too proud of it.

I told some class I’d post this info.—I just don’t remember who. (3rd period, was that you?) Anyway, we were talking about memory techniques, and I mentioned one I’d seen for specifically memorizing numbers. Here’s the link I promised: The Red Table.

Like I said in class, the basic principle is that each number from 0-9 is assigned to a phonetic unit (not so much a letter, but a sound, this is important—it adds flexibility. Check out the table, you’ll see.) Once you’ve learned the table, you can encode and decode long numbers as words, which ought to be easier to remember.

If you find this interesting, you also might want to check out the tips for memorizing the table, and play with the online test. If you’re really into it, there’s even software you can download (PC only; sorry my Mac-ies) that will suggest words to go with numbers you enter, so you don’t have to think them up yourself.

If you’re still on a memorizing kick after that, you might want to check out the other method I mentioned, which is technically known as the “loci method” (loci is Latin for “place,” yes?), where you mentally attach items you need to remember to certain places. Here’s Wikipedia’s explanation, and evernerve.com has a description that emphasizes the startling and bizarre for even more recall power. Finally, our friends up at Maryville host a page with brief explanations of several memory-methods on it, including the loci method, and an interesting alphabet-grid method (at the bottom) that’s similar.

Remember, there’s no “magic” way to memorize stuff that doesn’t take, you know, some amount of work. You still have to memorize something. These methods (and others like them) are just ways to hack your brain to make the things your memorizing more…. memorable.