Apparently someone looked at this old post that I'd forgotten about, but I still think is a fun comparison of cool sports with the coolest sport (memory).
And it was a sequel to this one-day-older post in which I express a hope that "the 2010s will be the decade when the World Memory Championships has a consistent set of rules from one year to the next, and nobody complains!" - which, well, memory sports didn't quite achieve, but never mind.
And Boris speculated "Will there be an mental athlete in every town in 2100, who can memorize a deck of cards in 30s?" - and I think we've pretty much reached that point now in 2024, so we're well ahead of schedule. I miss the days when I was the only one who could do that.
[There really was a brief period when I was the only one who had demonstrated the ability to memorize a deck of cards in under thirty seconds in universally-acknowledged controlled conditions, so shush, you pedants.]
