ferrellweb

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.

All right, we’re serious this time. (I think.) Forget emailing papers to yourself due to “can I open this at school” compatibility fears. Forget the cut-and-paste dance with Google Docs to preserve formatting, proper margins, and other stuff pesky teachers require.

Behold, the majesty of Buzzword, Adobe’s brand-spankin’-new Flash-based online word processor:



This is the new champion, kids. It’s got a beautiful, smooth interface, and will do everything you need for school: headers and footers, automatic page numbers, double-spacing, adjustable margins… there’s a word-count and spell-checker. It has a small but elegant collection of basic fonts to choose from, and looks like it handles inserting pictures and tables simply and well. As with other online writers, you can invite collaborators and leave comments.

Buzzword will open .rtf files and Microsoft Word documents (.doc files) from your hard drive, if you’ve got stuff you’ve been working on and want to import. It saves automatically as you’re working, and an icon in the corner shows if you’ve made changes since the last save.

The best bit, of course, is that your work is saved online: start a paper at home, go to school, log in to Buzzword, finish it up, and print it out. No worries about disks, drives, emails, etc.

All you need to do is pick a username and plug in an email address and password, and you’re ready to go. Go check it out!