Monthly Archives: February 2012

Tried to do another Forty-Minute story this morning, but I realized halfway through that (for reasons I won’t get into) I wouldn’t be able to use it. My brain is too dead to attempt a twenty-minute story this morning.

Instead, please enjoy this video of the final launch of space shuttle Atlantis. It’s very well-done and one of the coolest things I’ve seen in a while.

Not just my favorite love poem, but one of my all-time favorite poems, full stop.

Love Is Not All
Edna St. Vincent Millay

Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink
Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain;
Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink
And rise and sink and rise and sink again;
Love cannot fill the thickened lung with breath,
Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;
Yet many a man is making friends with death
Even as I speak, for lack of love alone.
It well may be that in a difficult hour,
Pinned down by need and moaning for release,
Or nagged by want past resolution’s power,
I might be driven to sell your love for peace,
Or trade the memory of this night for food.
It well may be. I do not think I would.

What are your plans for Valentine’s Day? Me, I’ll be chillaxin’ with my sweetie, luxuriating in the sheer joy of not having any plans.

Back in college, I read Dante’s Divine Comedy – not just the Inferno, but all three parts, in a translation by Mark Musa. I remember that after Dante passes through Hell and Purgatory, he enters Heaven, Paradiso. In Dante’s universe, there is no distinction between “Heaven,” the realm of angels, and “the heavens,” the solar system and interstellar space. God lived, not up in the sky, but out among the stars.

As Dante the pilgrim travels outward from Earth, he passes the Moon, the Sun, and all the planets. And then – as his guide, Beatrice, prepares to lead him to the very edge of Creation – he turns around and looks all the way back home:

My vision travelled back through all the spheres,
through seven heavens, and then I saw our globe,
it made me smile, it looked so paltry there.

Fast forward over seven hundred years, to 1990. Carl Sagan, one of the preeminent astronomers of the modern era, had a request for NASA. He wanted them to reorient the camera on the Voyager 1 spacecraft, which had passed the planets and reached the edge of the solar system. He wanted our most distant pilgrim to turn around and look all the way back home.

The idea had little practical value in the strict sense of scientific research, but astronomers are nothing if not romantic. They took the picture.

Here’s what Earth looks like from three billion miles away, a single pixel floating in a ray of light:

This is the legendary Pale Blue Dot photo. As Sagan describes it:

We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.

As far as I know, neither Dr. Sagan nor anyone else made a conscious connection between what he had done and Dante’s epic poem. But the facts remain. In less than a thousand years, the human race took an idea that was – to a medieval writer – mere metaphysical fantasy, and built a robot to actually do it.

And that was twenty years ago. We didn’t even have the Web.

This is it, boys and girls. This is the future. We’ve arrived.

Because of my recent geography craze, and for other reasons too, I’m focusing a lot these days on memorization. And frankly, memorization is something I’m pretty damn good at. (I’m allowed to say that here – it’s my blog!)

Here are the best strategies I’ve found.

Memorizing Lists

A few years ago, for no particular very good reason, I memorized the first 500 digits of pi. Really. I could sit down and rattle them off, “3.14159265358979…” without looking at anything.

When you say “I memorized the first 500 digits of pi,” it sounds hard, and also insane. On the other hand, saying “I know the phone numbers of 50 friends” sounds a lot more reasonable (or at least it did, back before cell phones remembered it all for you). Yet it’s the same total number of digits, if you include area codes. Why are the phone numbers so much easier?

First, because you break it up into groups. Each phone number is a group of ten digits, and is  broken into three more subgroups in the format (nnn) nnn-nnnn.

The grouping helps. A lot. I split up the 500 digits into blocks of 100, and split those blocks into 10 lines of 10 digits each, and for each line, I broke it down into three or four little groups.

But grouping alone isn’t enough. I also created mental pictures and stories, which are a lot easier to handle than raw digits. For instance, if two lines in a row both began with 8, I’d imagine that the 8’s were round-bodied, big-headed people, and I’d call those two lines the Land of the Big-Heads. (Some people claim I live in that land myself.)

Then if one of the subgroups in those lines is “543,” I imagine it’s someone counting down to a bomb exploding, and now I’ve got a Big-Headed Terrorist. Another subgroup is “727,” which I imagine is like a smaller version of a 747 (I know nothing about planes), and…well, okay, terrorists and planes is turning into a sensitive subject – which I didn’t try for on purpose – but you know what? It’ll stick in your brain.

Anyway, you can see how this goes. Break into groups, create stories or pictures to tie it all together, repeat.

Memorizing Unfamiliar Terms

I made it all the way to the National Spelling Bee in seventh and eighth grade. The latter year, I placed ninth in the country. I was on ESPN and everything, in all my awkward geeky glory.

They give you a book for the spelling bee, a list of about 3,000 words. Almost all the words for the school, county, and regional bees come straight from that book. So to get to nationals, the strategy’s simple: memorize 3,000 words.

Some of the words were easy, but many (syzygy, teledu) were so obscure they might as well have been a foreign language. (The Firefox spellchecker doesn’t recognize them either, but trust me – they’re English!) How do you deal with gibberish like that?

To learn something unfamiliar, first, make it familiar.

There’s a lake in Russia called Lake Baikal. It’s the oldest and deepest lake in the world. I remember the name by thinking of it as Lake “Bi-Call,” that is, two calls: one call to tell someone it’s the oldest lake, another call to say it’s the deepest. Bam: I not only remember the name, I get some information too.

The capital of Kazakhstan is Astana. The biggest lake in Kazakhstan is Lake Balkash. So if I go to Kazakhstan, I’ll use my American baseball skills (HA!) to do a “ball-catch” (Balkash) and the locals will be “astonished” (Astana).

You can do this with pretty much any weird-sounding word.

Memorizing Anything

The theme in my examples above is that rote repetition is not enough. If you try to memorize hundreds of digits by just saying them again and again, you’ve got a long, hard road ahead of you.

The brain remembers things best when you use them in multiple ways. If you think about stuff from several angles (not just an 8 but a person, not just Balkash but ball-catch) the brain automatically decides it’s more important and remembers it better.

This works even if you don’t use any of the little games I mentioned above. For instance: the capital of Suriname is Paramaribo. I don’t have a trick for that one. But I went on Wikipedia and read about Paramaribo, and I learned it’s one of the most diverse cities in the world. It was formerly an English colony and a Dutch colony. From the pictures, it looks like a cool place to visit. Just those extra few minutes, turning Paramaribo from a nonsense word into a real place, makes it much easier to recall.

I should add that, although repetition alone isn’t enough, repetition is still crucial. Use the data in different ways, but also, use it a lot. Each iteration makes its hold on your brain a little firmer.

So, that’s me. What about you? What techniques have you found for memorizing things?

The more I learn about history and the rest of the world, the more I realize how absurdly, staggeringly lucky I am.

24 million people in North Korea live under the heel of an all-consuming, utterly repressive regime. 10 million people in Somalia face the opposite problem, with no functioning government at all, plagued by waves of lawless violence as a matter of course.

80% of the world – that’s over five billion people – lives on less than $10 a day, less than $4,000 a year.

Meanwhile, my main worries in life are the flat tire I got yesterday morning (which I switched for a donut but still need to replace), the pressures of my job, and what I’m going to post on the blog.

It’s crazy when you think about it. It’s crazy when you don’t.

The phrase “first world problems” evolved to describe exactly this situation. It’s partly a joke, and partly a real awareness of the place that some of us occupy in the world. It’s a way of saying, “Wow, your remote control is broken and you’re out of batteries? How sad for you.”

For me, the question has always been: what now? What am I supposed to do with the information that most of my problems are trivial compared to the rest of the planet? What am I supposed to think about myself? What should I do?

Here’s what I’ve found so far.

To start with: as with nearly all other aspects of life, worry doesn’t help. Neither does guilt. Stewing in anxiety is worse than useless. One of my favorite quotes from the Bible is “Whatever your hand findeth to do, do it with all your might.” If you’re worried, either do something about it or let it go.

With that in mind, there are two separate but parallel courses to take.

First: solve your own problems. Deal with your own life. The knowledge that your troubles are relatively minor for the most part, doesn’t actually make them disappear. Fix it. This one’s a no-brainer.

And second: if you really care about the larger issues out there, do something about it. Volunteer. Give to a group like Doctors Without Borders. Make a difference.

And if you have to feel something about that yawning gulf between yourself and everyone else? Feel gratitude, and feel compassion.

The world doesn’t need your pity, but it needs your help.

If I’m coming across as preachy right now, understand that I’m largely preaching to myself. Talking things over on the blog is my way of figuring them out. My brain still hasn’t figured out quite what to make of this world map hanging on my wall.

Do you ever think about this kind of stuff? Where have those thoughts taken you?

So my latest obsession is geography. As I write this, I have a giant world map sitting over my computer here at home, a beautiful first-anniversary present from my wife. (To be clear, it is not the map pictured above. I just thought that one looked cool, is all. I’m allowed.)

I’ve spent way too much time over the past four days learning the names of every little speck of land that Google or Wikipedia can tell me anything about. And of course, geography plus curiosity equals history, so there’s that, too.

Here’s the deal: the world is crazy. Did you know…

• Ethiopia and Liberia are the only two countries in Africa that were not formerly European colonies.
• Liberia (not to be confused with Libya) was actually run by ex-slaves from America for a while, with a government modeled after the U.S. government. Hence the capital, Monrovia, named after President James Monroe.
• Ethiopia, meanwhile, got invaded by Italians during the so-called Scramble For Africa in the late 19th century. The Ethiopians gave them the boot. By the way, Ethiopia – the most mountainous nation in Africa – was an early adopter of Christianity, and today remains as a pocket of Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity in a sea of Islam.
• Indonesia used to be a Dutch colony, which is not half as crazy as the fact that the Democratic Republic of the Congo used to be a Belgian colony. Where do these little countries get that much land?
• The tiny, mostly-uninhabited island of Bouvet, in the south Atlantic, belongs to Norway but actually has its own Internet Top-Level Domain: “.bv”. Nobody’s using it, which seems like a massive missed opportunity. Wikipedia also claims Bouvet is the most remote island in the world.
• A whole nation called Nauru sits entirely on a single island in the Pacific, occupying just 21 square kilometers and containing only about ten thousand people. I’m not sure which blows my mind more: that a country can be that small, or that it’s still only the third-smallest nation in the world, after the Vatican and Monaco.
• The Maldives, a tiny island chain off the coast of India, sit at an extremely low elevation above the sea, and are predicted to be the first country in the world eradicated by rising sea levels due to global warming. I mean, eradicated. Wow.

I’ve been trying to find good documentaries on some of these countries (the Maldives, for instance), and it’s harder than I expected. Anyone know any good websites for free (or cheap) documentaries, on this topic or any other?

Do you think I’m special?
Do you think I’m nice?
Am I bright enough to shine in your spaces?
-OneRepublic, “All the Right Moves”

I worry about what people think of me. I get a high from compliments, and really strong praise leaves me floating on air all day. Insults and criticisms can be devastating, their effects lingering sometimes for months, with aftershocks even years later.

Most everyone does worry, but I worry excessively. I guess a lot of writers do.

Worrying even has its advantages. For one thing, it makes you highly aware of people’s little cues, their tones and gestures and phrases that indicate slight pleasure or annoyance. That can be useful: as a writer, as a teacher, as a husband or a friend.

It also makes you listen carefully to people, give them the benefit of the doubt. Rarely is anyone so wrong that they don’t have at least a kernel of truth in their opinion, and focusing on that truth as a starting point makes debate and dialogue more fruitful.

And of course, there’s a basic rationality to caring what others think. If you believe something, and five other people believe you’re wrong, well, there’s a good chance that the problem is you, not them. That rationality is why evolution gave us the trait in the first place.

But this usefulness has its borders, and I’ve wandered beyond them most of my life. I care past the limits of rationality. I find myself happier with mediocre work that people praise, than excellent work that goes unnoticed.

Sometimes when you believe something, and five other people say you’re wrong, you’re still right. I can and do stick to my guns in situations like that. But I wish it didn’t make me feel like a lizard had crawled into my stomach and laid its eggs there.

Not long ago, I was telling all this to somebody, and as we talked, he did something really odd. He abbreviated it: What People Think, WPT.

I love this, because calling it WPT pulls it out of the fuzzy anxiety cloud and makes it a Thing, a noun, something to include in your strategies.

Something that can be defeated.

I haven’t conquered WPT yet, and maybe I never will. But by treating it as a known adversary, I can start to deal with it.

Are you bothered by WPT? What do you do about it?