The Daily Achievement

On hiatus

Wed, 01 May 2013 19:07:24 +0100

I’m taking a break from blogging for May. Marit’s here, and we want to spend as much time together as we can, so apart from possible sporadic entries, I’ll pick this up again in June. I’ve blogged something daily for the last six months, something I only hoped to sustain for November, so I think that’s a pretty good Phase One.

Thanks for reading.

Dabbling in mnemotechny

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 17:26:00 +0100

Yesterday, in ten minutes, I did something for the first time that I would have previously judged to be very difficult to accomplish in an hour: memorising the sequence of reds and blacks in a shuffled deck of playing cards and recalling them with 100% accuracy.

I was prompted to do this by an audiobook I’m reading, Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer, a journalist drawn into the world of competitive memorisation while writing an article on its characters and competitions. It’s a fascinating work of narrative non-fiction, and to me it revealed the existence of a body of knowledge that I didn’t know existed, but which is 2500 years old—’the art of memory’ was the centre of a classical education in Ancient Greece or Rome.

There is, of course, a trick to the red/black thing. But competitive mnemonicists use many tricks, and claim that anyone who learns them can repeat the same feats (Foer’s experience backs this up, as he went from no prior experience to competing on a national level after about a year of practice). These champions say their memories are only average, but they’ve mastered techniques to convert meaningless data into memorable mental imagery, things we remember badly into things we remember easily. Their special skill, if anything, is not in a superhuman memory but in the ability to code meaningless data into unforgettable surrealism on the fly.

Here’s the simple system for committing card colours to memory. It relies on spatial and visual memory being much better than abstract memory, and codes every six cards to two letters of the alphabet. You then have to come up with a vivid mental image that will help you recall these two letters in this order, and visualise it in a particular place in a room you’re familiar with. This is called the method of loci, and the mental space is somewhat pompously known as a memory palace.

For example, my ‘memory palace’ was my living room, and the seventh locus was my kitchenette sink. If the corresponding cards in the deck had been: ‘red, red, black, black, red, black’, that would code to ‘Bottom, Outer’ or BO. So I could try to imagine Barack Obama sitting in my sink, water overflowing everywhere: certainly a much more easily recalled image than ‘red, red, black, black, red, black’, and one which comes to mind immediately when I mentally turn to the sink in my memory palace, but one which unpacks unambiguously to the exact sequence of six card colours.

If you do this repeatedly, in a specific, logical order around the room (e.g. clockwise) that you can easily reconstruct, you’ll have a mental image of a room full of bizarre people and objects, and if they’re vivid enough they’ll stick in your mind long enough to unpack them back to letters and then to cards.

Joshua Foer’s TED talk is a great introduction to this field, and the book is highly recommended; it’s thoroughly fascinating.

The next step for me: trying to remember suits and values!

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Mon, 29 Apr 2013 17:40:19 +0100

I Finally Played: Cargo Commander

Sun, 28 Apr 2013 15:53:50 +0100

There’s a real gem in the current Indie Royale bundle (available for another four-and-a-bit days). And it shows that the real value of these indie bundles is not always in their savings, but in their discovery.

I’d never heard of Cargo Commander. I’d never seen it in the Steam store, and missed the post where RPS gave it its only mention. If not for the bundle I would be unaware of its existence.

Which would have been a shame, because it’s excellent fun, with challenging play, nice social features and a just-one-more-game feel.

You’re a guy working and sleeping on a little spaceship, making a living collecting salvage by magnetising your hull and pulling in great hulks of container that come crashing into your own. It’s 3d-looking but 2d-playing, a bit Metroidvania, but it’s kept interesting with three mechanics.

Firstly: stuff’s destructible. You can drill through walls and make your own routes to the cargo you’re collecting, and blow stuff up. But you have to hurry—if you take too much time, it’ll all fly off into hard vacuum.

Secondly: each of these space hulks that come crashing into your ship in great pileups has independent gravity, and there’s no fixed ‘up’ to the camera: it rotates so down is always ‘down’. Some containers have malfunctioning gravity that slowly (or quickly) rolls 360 degrees, and some don’t have gravity at all. Stepping from one vessel into another can cause some disorientation, but it’s smoothly executed, and I’ve not been hung up on a wall yet, or any other implementation irritation.

Thirdly: the game is procedural, but the names of star systems are used as seeds. Therefore, one star system will provide identical waves of identical environments populated with identical enemies and salvage. Leaderboards show the top players in your friends list and in the world. This leads to excellent replay value as you seek to maximise your gains in a level guaranteed identical each time. Because there’s a time limit on each wave, you’re essentially being trained to speedrun individual levels picked from an infinite space. And because you can type in seeds, you can also share them with friends and challenge them to beat your score.

For me, Cargo Commander’s already justified the price of admission for the bundle. I’ve played it for more hours this weekend than I care to admit. See you in Procyon and Fomalhaut, defending my high scores.

If you live in the UK and don’t own at least one Ordnance...

Sat, 27 Apr 2013 10:08:18 +0100

If you live in the UK and don’t own at least one Ordnance Survey map, that’s certainly your prerogative. But I think you should know that it might be a sign of some misguided decisions in your life.

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Fri, 26 Apr 2013 18:13:13 +0100

Thursday Themed Thrivia: From the Mind of Stan Lee

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 17:51:59 +0100

This quiz comes to you from the Marvel universe, which every couple of years I fall into in a big way. 700 free issues from Comixology has a way of doing that to a guy.

Below is a list of the real names of ten characters created by Stan Lee. What are their superhero/villain alter egos?

Peter Parker
Dr. Bruce Banner
Ben Grimm
Scott Summers
Matt Murdock
Clint Barton
Max Eisenhardt
Wanda Maximoff
Warren Worthington III
Curt Connors

Answers below.

Spider-Man
Hulk
The Thing
Cyclops
Daredevil
Hawkeye
Magneto
Scarlet Witch
(Arch)Angel
Lizard

Saucy beef dofu/tofu

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 17:16:00 +0100

A word of caution. If a recipe calls for fresh tofu, but you don’t have any, don’t make the recipe. And if you happen to have a jar of preserved fermented tofu in the cupboard, leave it there.

Do not think you can get away with the substitution. And definitely do not ruin an expensive piece of fillet steak by rendering it almost inedible this way.

This was one of the worst things I’ve ever cooked. The overwhelming unpleasant yeastiness tasted like athletes’ foot must. I suspect the intense flavour of preserved bean curd means it is supposed to be used very sparingly. I put 200g in.

This is no reflection on the recipe at all, just on my terrible, terrible substitution. I offer the story as proof to anyone who ever compliments my cooking that I can be truly lousy at it. I have to make this properly sometime to replace the memory of it with a better one.

Took a walk to Codnor Castle on Sunday morning. It’s seen...

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 20:20:39 +0100

Took a walk to Codnor Castle on Sunday morning. It’s seen better days.

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Mon, 22 Apr 2013 17:45:03 +0100

I Finally Played: Minecraft + Feed The Beast

Sun, 21 Apr 2013 16:33:35 +0100

A few months ago I felt like I’d played out Minecraft—if you can play an infinite, actively developed game to exhaustion. This week past, I’ve probably played it more than in any other.

I’ve been figuring out (or failing to figure out) uranium, rubber, bees, backpacks, engines, quicksand, wisps, cogs, blue sparkly trees, and linking books.

I have Feed the Beast to thank for this, a Minecraft patcher/launcher that provides an easy experience for several well-curated and tested packs of mutually compatible mods.

Supply the FTB launcher with your Minecraft username and password, and for each modpack you try, it’ll download the appropriate Minecraft (different modpacks have different version requirements) and all the individual mods into a modpack-specific directory. Modpacks are auto-updated when they change, and there are server bundles for many of the packs.

I’ve been running the Ultimate FTB modpack (which incorporates and unifies 45 different mods) in singleplayer, and running a private server for FTB Lite (26 mods) to play with Marit.

It didn’t take long after firing up these modpacks for the first time to encounter unfamiliar blocks and objects. The game is turned once again into a huge arena of exploration, discovery and surprise, with continual novelties that make the game fascinating again, even if you’re highly familiar with vanilla Minecraft.

I love the multi-scale automap and radar and the ability to add named waypoints that show up in the HUD. I love the one-click sort for inventory and chests. But my favourite added feature is the inventory and crafting reference from the Not Enough Items mod, which shows, for any block or item, how to create it and all the things you can make with it. Since it supports the hundreds of new items from other installed mods, it’s an indispensable way to navigate through this mass of new content, which otherwise would be overwhelming.

FTB is a very easy way in to the world of Minecraft mods and has made the game feel new again. Just got to be careful how much free time I feed it, because it’ll devour all that and more…

Amazing what you can find when you tunnel into ROM sites in...

Sat, 20 Apr 2013 12:11:00 +0100

Amazing what you can find when you tunnel into ROM sites in alternate universes.

(Our version is better though.)

In a surreal turn of events, the Ottawa Citizen once reprinted...

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 19:36:00 +0100

In a surreal turn of events, the Ottawa Citizen once reprinted this piece I wrote for a humour e-zine around 1997-98. Not knowing the first thing about bargaining or being a writer (I still don’t), I asked for £50 and two copies of the paper in exchange for the reprint rights, to which they agreed.

I think it appeared on page 3 of the Saturday supplement.

Thursday Themed Thrivia: Either Ore

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 17:17:00 +0100

It’s a gorgeous day here in Derbyshire. Spring has finally arrived, the sun is warm, and the birds on the canal are building their nests. But who has time for outdoor frivolousness when there’s a quiz to do? Priorities must prevail.

I’m going to give you a list of ten ore minerals. For each, give me the element for which they are an important ore.

Hematite
Galena
Bauxite
Chromite
Cassiterite
Kunzite
Cinnabar
Chalcopyrite
Stibnite
Pyrolusite

Answers after the cut.

Iron
Lead
Aluminium
Chromium
Tin
Lithium
Mercury
Copper
Antimony
Manganese

Yesterday I asked, given a photo of a particular phase of the moon, how many weeks would pass before...

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 19:02:07 +0100

Yesterday I asked, given a photo of a particular phase of the moon, how many weeks would pass before the next full moon?

You probably know that a lunar month is about 28 days, or four weeks. And perhaps you know that the lunar terminator (the line separating the light and dark halves of the moon) sweeps from right to left in the Northern Hemisphere. And so when we see a right hand half moon, it is waxing, and will be full in a week.

But you also needed to recognise (from lunar features, or just clicking through to Flickr) that the photo in the post was taken in the Southern Hemisphere, which means that from the Northern Hemisphere perspective most of us have, everything is upside down: the terminator sweeps from left to right, so this moon is waning; in one week it will be a new moon, and in another two it will be full.

So the answer: 3 weeks.

Today: a simple question. You look up at night, and see this moon: How many weeks (to the nearest...

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 17:00:11 +0100

Today: a simple question.

You look up at night, and see this moon:

How many weeks (to the nearest round number) will pass before the next full moon?

I’ll post the answer tomorrow.

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Mon, 15 Apr 2013 20:19:33 +0100

I Finally Played: Thirty Flights of Loving

Sun, 14 Apr 2013 09:01:53 +0100

The worst reaction you can have to an artwork is not to hate it, to consider it a complete waste of time, to wish it had never been created. Nor is the worst reaction you can have to an artwork to love it unconditionally, even… blind to its flaws, adoring it without subtlety of opinion or judgment.

No, the most dreaded reaction you can have to an artwork is to fail to understand it; to know there’s something there, but not be able to see that which it seems everyone else can. To be shut out of the club.

My first playthrough of Thirty Flights of Loving felt this way. By the end of its scarcely quarter-hour of running time, I had no idea what I’d just witnessed, and wondered if the game’s critical adoration was a joke I wasn’t in on. The story was impenetrable, the Quake 2-era graphics a barrier to comprehension, the post-credits coda disconnected and extraneous.

But I read about it some more, and tried a second time, slower and more observantly, and played through the creator commentary mode, and by then the mindset was right. I started to realise how well executed it was, how perfectly suited the music is, what a brilliant device the smash cuts are, and the economy with which it told story and conjured mood.

I’m still not clear on the story’s chronology, and the relation of the Bernoulli principle section to the rest of the game is still unknown to me. But I eventually appreciated this short little game/movie, though it took a big mindset adjustment, and some effort, to get there. It’s not that I was denied entrance to the club; the door just took some finding.

Completists

Sat, 13 Apr 2013 18:16:11 +0100

Completists:

There’s something inspirational about people who undertake projects to work through a defined list of something. I think I find them compelling because projects like these are often a little bit arbitrary and crazy, but the endpoint is well-defined. When a project’s goal is to complete everything on the list, there’s no ambiguity about finishing. It appeals to both my senses of logic and whimsy.

Whether they’re climbing every Munro, visiting every Tube station, cooking every recipe in a cookbook, or drawing 700 hoboes, I’ve started a Tumblr to celebrate these wonderful completists. I’ll add stories as I find them, but submissions are extremely welcome.

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Fri, 12 Apr 2013 18:08:46 +0100