Monday, April 16, 2007

Speed

I did a pack of cards in 25.98 seconds today, which I think is possibly a new personal best. That I can't remember for certain whether it is or not bothers me a little. You'd think I'd keep track of this kind of thing, seeing as memorising cards as quickly as possible is basically my sole purpose in life. Still, I'm sure I've never beaten 25 seconds before, and I'd really like to achieve that some time. Or maybe I should be focussing on finally beating 30 seconds in a competition, so that that stops being the holy grail of card-memorising? But then what would we do without a nice round number of seconds to aim towards. I suppose we could all start aiming for 25 seconds, but that's not as catchy as exactly half a minute, somehow.

7 comments:

Jimbo said...

Congratulations Ben - another personal milestone for you!

James Kemp said...

Nice on Ben!

I'm sure you'll go under 30 seconds in competition this year.

Anonymous said...

Great!

I suggest keeping a diary with your personal bests (I do it, including date and time)

I am crossing my fingers for you to achieve below 25 seconds, also in competitions.

Best,

Itay.

Zoomy said...

Thanks, guys!

I do write down my times whenever I practice cards, and 25.98 is definitely the best time I've done since I started a new bit of paper earlier this year. I'm fairly certain my best till now was 26.20. But I just have this nagging feeling that I might maybe have beaten 26 seconds once before. I think I need to improve my memory...

Anonymous said...

Thats madness, sheer madness I tell you! I'm loving these memory blogs...especially when i'm asking the same question on both....question being, have you tried the same incredible speed for a full 10 minutes with no reviews...what happens? What if you did 10 packs in 5 mins and then reviewed them then? There must be a way around this reviewing lark!

Zoomy said...

You need to start a blog too, Jimmy! Same goes for the rest of you too - I love reading memory blogs too, and it's less fun when one of them is your own...

As for the question, sorry, I don't think there's any way around reviewing. For one thing, I just can't physically keep that speed up for more than one pack, I always slow down when I'm on to the second pack. For another, one pack seems to be the limit that I can blitz through once and still have a good chance of recalling everything. If I try to go that fast for two or three packs, I have too many gaps in the memory that I just can't fill in.

When it comes to ten minutes, even going through each pack twice isn't usually enough for me, if I'm going at top speed. I need three looks if I'm going to get them all right - so I can do six packs pretty comfortably, but no more.

Anonymous said...

Just keep posting any potential records to your blog and your army of internet fanboys will no doubt be able to point out which are particular milestones.