Monday, May 28, 2007

Mass mouse murder

Sniffles is dead. In fact, there turned out to be two of them, but Deutero-Sniffles is also dead. Thanks for all the advice on how to humanely get rid of mice, but in the end, killing the little blighters turned out to be easier and not particularly troubling to the conscience. But today I banged my foot on my scanner and hurt my toe tremendously, which I assume is my punishment for being so evil.

Anyway, it must be roughly a week since I decided not to post anything here that sounded remotely boastful. I got 4320 in a 30-minute binary practice the other day, which I'm fairly certain is a personal best. Which raises an interesting thing about the way I memorise - with binary digits, I look at them twice. I go through a full journey (780 digits), revise it, then move onto the next, and keep going that way until I run out of time. Doing it my new, slightly-slower-but-much-better-recall way, I get up to about 5000 digits, a bit short of seven journeys' worth.

With decimal numbers, though, I go through a journey rather quicker - I see the image immediately when I look at the three digits, whereas with binary it takes longer, I can't see a group of ten in one glance. But this also seems to hinder my memorising, and if I try to do a 30-minute numbers only looking at them twice, it just doesn't work. I can do 8 and a bit journeys in 30 minutes, but have a huge number of gaps in the recall. I need to look at everything three times to recall it properly.

All of which is just fascinating, of course, but it doesn't really give me any pointers on how to get better. I suppose I'll just go on doing things the way I always have, making it up as I go along.

3 comments:

  1. 1) Have them stuffed in an upright position.(preferably waving or saluting)

    2) Sew their tiny feet to each shoulder of a fine suit jacket.

    3) Wear suit jacket on plane to Bahrain.

    4) Inadvertently start international fashion wave.

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  2. What is this mystery method for despatching rodents? Dammit you cannot leave us hanging like that!

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  3. One of them fell foul of the trap, the other I sneaked up on (I suspect he was feeling a big groggy from eating all the poison) and hit with my shoe.

    I'm not proud of myself.

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