"Piloting London’s distinctive black cabs (taxis to everyone else) is no easy feat. To earn the privilege, drivers have to pass an intense intellectual ordeal, known charmingly as
The Knowledge. Ever since 1865, they’ve had to memorise the location of every street within six miles of Charing Cross – all 25,000 of the capital’s arteries, veins and capillaries. They also need to know the locations of 20,000 landmarks – museums, police stations, theatres, clubs, and more – and 320 routes that connect everything up." Acquiring
The Knowledge changes the brains of those who acquire it.
posted by vidur
on Dec 8, 2011 -
73 comments
To The Moon is a stunningly good game about death, love and memories. If you love games and you enjoy love stories, I highly urge you to download it and play it immediately.
Here's a review, but you shouldn't read it. You should just play it. Warning: Have kleenex handy.
posted by empath
on Nov 9, 2011 -
26 comments
Two Aussie psychologists studied the 66-year-old testimony of 70 German sailors rescued after their boat sank. The ship which sank it, the HMAS Sydney, also sank ... taking 645 sailors with it.
After analyzing the stories the shrinks - knowledgeable in the vagaries of storytelling - found that the Germans weren't lying. They crowdsourced the stories, sat down together with a map of the Indian Ocean and ...
posted by Twang
on Oct 1, 2011 -
21 comments
A year ago this August, 72 migrant workers -- 58 men and 14 women -- 'were on their way to the US border when they were
murdered by a drug gang at a ranch in northern Mexico, in circumstances that remain unexplained. Since then, a group of Mexican journalists and writers have created' a "Day of the Dead-style Virtual Altar" Spanish-language website,
72migrantes.com, to commemorate each of the victims, some of whom have never been identified. The New York Review of Books has
English translations of five of their profiles. [more inside]
posted by zarq
on Sep 7, 2011 -
7 comments
An Era in Ideas. "To mark the 10th anniversary of the September 11 attacks,
The Chronicle Review asked a group of influential thinkers to reflect on some of the themes that were raised by those events and to meditate on their meaning, then and now. The result is a portrait of the culture and ideas of a decade born in trauma, but also the beginning of a new century, with all its possibilities and problems."
[Via]
posted by homunculus
on Aug 13, 2011 -
11 comments
Magnetic core memory reborn is a project by Ben North and Oliver Nash implementing 32 bits of core memory using literal tiny core magnets on the
Arduino board. The history and operation of core memory is explained and diagrammed. The Arduino has over 4,250 times this amount of memory standard.
posted by odinsdream
on May 12, 2011 -
29 comments
According to
Science Daily a
New Study (done on mice) found drinking alcohol primes certain areas of our brain to learn and remember better. When we drink alcohol our subconscious is learning to consume more. But it doesn't stop there. We become more receptive to forming subsconscious memories and habits with respect to food, music, even people and social situations.
[more inside]
posted by Blake
on Apr 12, 2011 -
41 comments
In December 1966,
ABC 's Stage 67 broadcast a teleplay of
Truman Capote's beloved short story,
"A Christmas Memory." It won both an Emmy, and Peabody, and was narrated by
the author himself. Parts
1,
2,
3,
4,
5,
6.
posted by timsteil
on Dec 16, 2010 -
6 comments
Is Chillwave the Next Big Music Trend? -
Wiki: Chillwave is a debated genre of music where artists are often characterized by their heavy use of effects processing, synthesizers, looping, sampling, and heavily filtered vocals with simple melodic lines. Its musical predecessors are diverse and include the synthpop of the 1980s, shoegaze, ambient, musique concrète and various types of music outside of the Western World. In this case, nostalgia of 80s synthpop is filtered through a distorted lens, re-envisioning the era in a more vague and lo-fi sense. Just don't
call them that. You can always check in at the
Hipster Runoff (the birthplace of the term) for news about the vaguely new subgenre.
[more inside]
posted by Christ, what an asshole
on Dec 9, 2010 -
103 comments
Statsis: A short film by Christian Swegal In the future, an Ex-Soldier is placed in virtual exercises to cure his Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. In the simulations, he sees glimpses of a mysterious girl, presumably someone from his past. When a Stranger appears in his facility offering answers, the Soldier finds himself once again asked to kill, this time for her...
[more inside]
posted by clockworkjoe
on Sep 15, 2010 -
16 comments
Ten days ago, Slate Magazine conducted
an experiment modeled on the
Ministry of Truth in George Orwell's 1984: they asked readers to look at eight photographs of notable political moments from the past decade and share their memories about each. Over 5,000 people participated in the first three days, but what they didn’t know was that four of the pictures were significantly doctored, and one was totally fabricated.
[more inside]
posted by mondaygreens
on May 28, 2010 -
67 comments
Ghost shift ghost chips. A tale about a Chumby hardware developer with a keen investigative eye noticing some oddities about microSD FLASH cards from supposedly reputable suppliers.
posted by loquacious
on Feb 16, 2010 -
65 comments
Fatal Distraction. The lead story in this Sunday's Washington Post Magazine. "Forgetting a child in the back seat of a hot, parked car is a horrifying, inexcusable mistake. But is it a crime?". By Gene Weingarten.
[more inside]
posted by Ike_Arumba
on Mar 7, 2009 -
296 comments
Ecstasy's long-term effects revealed. "Enough time has finally elapsed to start asking if ecstasy damages health in the long term. According to
the biggest review ever undertaken, it causes slight memory difficulties and mild depression, but these rarely translate into problems in the real world. While smaller studies show that some individuals have bigger problems, including weakened immunity and larger memory deficits, so far, for most people, ecstasy seems to be nowhere near as harmful over time as you may have been led to believe."
[Via]
posted by homunculus
on Feb 12, 2009 -
94 comments
The
recent passing of Studs Terkel sparked a renewed interest in his interview projects, like
Working,
Race, and
Hard Times. But Studs was not just a broadcaster who liked people; he was a practitioner of
oral history, a method of gathering information about the past through preserving individual recollections. It's a
subfield of history, with its own
ethics,
techniques,
professional literature,
uses, and
limitations.
Learn how to
collect and share oral histories yourself, from
interviewing to
recording and getting
clearances to
preserving and disseminating. Oral histories have been preserved as
text transcripts for decades; now digital media is
reinvigorating the form, bringing new ease to recording and
wider opportunities for the public to
see and hear the content. Explore oral history projects on the web with stories of
veterans,
suffragists,
Tibetans,
jazz cats,
Nevada nuclear test site witnesses,
Basque Americans,
rodeo cowboys and cowgirls,
musicians,
Katrina survivors,
ACT UP activists,
Cambodians under the Khmer Rouge,
Native Americans,
women whose lives were affected by the Pill,
survivors of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire,
women in World War II,
Hawai'ians,
workers in Paterson, NJ....
posted by Miko
on Dec 11, 2008 -
20 comments
Dr. Joe Z. Tsien
has previously created a strain of mice unable to form memories, one with much improved memory - "Doogie"
mice - and can now erase single mouse memories. "Our work reveals a molecular mechanism of how that can be done quickly and without doing damage to brain cells."
Remembering to
forget....
posted by Kronos_to_Earth
on Oct 24, 2008 -
45 comments
So, you watched the movie Tron, and now you want to run your computerized guy off of the game grid and into the rest of the computer system? That's exactly what
Daniel Wellman did on his Apple IIgs.
posted by CrunchyFrog
on Oct 8, 2008 -
34 comments
Memory remembered. Does writing seek out words the better to stir and un-numb us to life—or does writing provide surrogate pleasures the better to numb us to experience?
[more inside]
posted by semmi
on Aug 13, 2008 -
15 comments
51-year-old
Brad Williams, a radio anchor in La Crosse, Wisconsin, can “recall the most trifling dates and details about his life….[n]ame a date from the last 40 years and, after a few moments, he can typically tell you what he did that day and what was in the news.” Brad has
Hyperthymesia, a condition where the affected person has incredible recall of the most trivial events in his/her life. Neuroscientist
James McGaugh and
others at the University of California, Irvine, are studying Williams for clues as to his remarkable abilities [
video]. Williams (aka '
Google Man' |
video)
vs. The Internet [video]. His brother, Eric, is working on a documentary about Brad –
Unforgettable [
trailer].
posted by ericb
on Mar 17, 2008 -
19 comments
Voice Thread Now the online world can lend support in your family argument about what
really happened on your fifth birthday.
posted by Miko
on Nov 5, 2007 -
6 comments
