The Magic Sphere

According to Blogger's stats page, I've had absolutely oodles of pageviews in the last day or so, directed at the Hourman-themed post from last November. It makes me nervous when people read my blog like that. I don't really write these things in any kind of expectation that people will read them. What if it's a horde of American lawyers? Lots of people write that kind of thing about comics on the internet, and they often bandy about phrases like "brief excerpts for review purposes", which apparently makes everything okay, but I still worry. I'll just convince myself it's an invading horde of robots. Nobody's scared of robots.

It feels like a long time since the first one

I don't think I could calculate how long it's been, in fact. But the Mental Calculation World Cup is still going strong! Here's the invitation to compete, if you want to test your brains!

Mental calculators from all over the world are invited to the 8th Mental 

Calculation World Cup 2018!

The Mental Calculation World Cup 2018 will be held in Wolfsburg, Germany

========================================================================

Venue: Science Centre Phaeno (http://www.phaeno.de)

Date: 28-30 September 2018

Contest Details:

Calculators will have to solve tasks in different categories (addition, 

multiplication, extracting roots, day-of-the-week calculations) and 

various surprise tasks.

Only strict mental calculation (no tools, no writing down of 

intermediate results) is allowed.

Prizes:

There will be several titles and trophies for the best participants.

In particular, the MEMORIAD Association will sponsor free flights to the 

MEMORIAD 2020 competition (planned to be held in Dubai, USA) 

(http://www.memoriad.com) for the winners in the categories addition, 

multiplication, square roots and calendar calculation as well for the 

winner of the combination.

(does not apply for participants who are not allowed to enter MEMORIAD 

contests according to decisions of the MEMORIAD Association).

Registration:

The registration form can be found on the MCWC web site 

(http://www.recordholders.org/en/events/worldcup/2018/).

Calculators who already took part at a previous MCWC event are welcome 

to send the application form by e-mail to info@recordholders.org.

First-time participants please download the entry form on the MCWC web 

site. Please send it by airmail together with the documentation that is 

necessary for qualification to the address given in the form.

Please note that we have a tough qualification (with usually far more 

than 40 people registering). Calculators who took part in one of the 

previous years may want to send additional documentation about their 

recent results in the same way as the first-timers (by airmail with all 

the paperwork) in order to have better chances in the qualification.

Deadline for Registrations: 1 June 2018

You can help us with the organization if you register soon.

Qualification:

The number of participants is limited to 40. If more people register for 

the event, the organizer will select the participants who qualify. For 

this purpose, information about previous results at mental calculation 

events (achieved in the past ten years), other mental sports contests 

and verified achievements with the Memoriad software 

(http://memoriad.com/memoriadsoftware.asp) are taken into consideration.

The results achieved should be documented (category, number of correct 

answers, time) and sent together with the application form. These 

results must be confirmed by a witness with some background in mental 

calculation (for example a maths teacher or a university researcher who 

works in a field close to mathematics).

Organizational stuff:

There is no entry fee, but participants have to pay their travel 

expenses. We will publish hotel recommendations soon enough on the MCWC 

web site.

Please contact us soon enough if you need a formal invitation letter for 

visa purposes. Keep in mind that in some countries visa formalities can 

take a long time!

More information can be found on the web site:

http://www.recordholders.org/en/events/worldcup/2018/

Contacts:

If you have any questions on the MCWC, please contact me at 

info@recordholders.org.

I am looking forward to meet the world's best calculators in Wolfsburg!

Ralf Laue

I should get some kind of prize

I was just about to go to bed for an early night, when I remembered I hadn't written a blog entry, and if I did that, then I'd break all kinds of world records for keeping new year's resolutions. So now I've accomplished a whole week of daily uninspired short paragraphs, I can rest easy and not write anything more for whole months at a time if I feel like it.

This looks like a job for...

There's a news story doing the rounds that someone involved with one of Stan Lee's charities has stolen hundreds of thousands of dollars from The Man himself by means of forged cheques, and really, I don't think they've thought it through. Everyone knows that Stan Lee created all the cool superheroes, but of course Spider-Man and all his amazing friends are basically nice people, and just have bad guys locked up in jail - what people forget is how many cool superVILLAINS there are out there who owe Stan Lee a favour for bringing them into existence! You don't want to steal money from a guy who can just phone up Doctor Octopus and say "Hi, Otto, it's Stan. Remember how I created you and gave you those cool mechanical tentacles and all? I need someone to teach a thief a little lesson..."

There's some people you just don't want to mess with.

Lucky numbers

I'm happy to report I'm now through to the last 65,536 in the Fantasy Premier League Cup (I know you were all fascinated when I mentioned it last). This is a lucky number for elderly users of Excel spreadsheets, and I'm sure that just saying "65536" gives all the old-fashioned number-crunchers out there a happy nostalgic glow. The rest of you will be left in the dark, but don't worry, you're not missing much.

The munchies

I haven't got any sweeties in the house. It's not even as if I'm hungry, I've already had my dinner and there's the materials to make some more if I wanted. But I have a particular craving for those rocky road bites they sell at Tesco, and I might have to venture out into the night just to buy a snack. Does that make me some kind of stereotypical American-TV drug addict?

Also, why isn't "the munchies" a thing for British-TV drug addicts? I feel like there could be some kind of universal truth revealed if I unravelled the answer to that mystery, but maybe that's just the drugs talking...

Memory Leaguing

The new online memory league championship is well underway, and I think I'm going to see if I can make a real effort to go to the actual real live competition in Sweden in April. I keep saying I'll go to memory competitions in Sweden if I can, and then never actually getting there for one reason or another. I definitely owe Gothenburg another visit!

Telling it like it is

If there's one thing that's always been missing from memory competitions, it's high-quality animated cartoons about what it's like to compete in them! But this has been well and truly remedied in the last few months by Joo Sang Jo on Facebook - there really should be some kind of website hosting them, but I think all I can do is urge you to join the World Memory Championships group and see them there.

If you've ever been to a memory competition, you'll know all about the feeling of sitting between two super-fast memorisers at speed cards, or the purgatory of waiting through 550 spoken digits before you can write down the paltry few you managed to memorise... it's genius, it really is.

A new year again

It's getting silly now; before we know it, it'll be 2020, and that's a year that's unquestionably the future. The Machine Man comics that were backup strips in Transformers in 1985 were set in 2020, and in another couple of years they'll be historical documents set in the past.

Anyway, I really should make a resolution to post more regular blog updates. Quantity is, in every case, better than quality, so I'm going to make an effort to post something every night, until I next forget or simply can't be bothered. Look forward to it!

Keep on running, keep on hiding

At the risk of sounding like a stuck record (by the Spencer Davis Group), I really really love the new Runaways comic from Marvel, and I urge you all to go out and start buying it, if you didn't do that a couple of months ago when I told you to. Long-time readers of my blog (or else readers who know how to read my old posts or type things in the Search box) will remember that eleven years ago I was always saying how great I thought Runaways was and how terrible it was that the Brian K Vaughan / Adrian Alphona era was coming to an end. Well, now under Rainbow Rowell and Kris Anka, it's essentially back! And better than ever!

Seriously, it's as if the glory days of Runaways are here again - not achieved by resetting the whole thing and ignoring everything that's happened to the characters since 2007, but by showing that their many experiences (some of them really badly written and not recommended at all) have changed them, and building on the whole thing in perfectly in-character and fascinating and entertaining ways. They've grown and developed (and died and come back to life a few times each, as is the way with superheroes) and now they're moving on in exactly the way they should. I love it.

Played by the dexterous, understood by the poindexters

I play Fantasy Premier League, in a not very serious kind of way - I'm not even in a league or anything, so I'm basically just competing against myself. But they do a thing every year called the Cup, in which random players are paired off against each other in a knockout competition over the last 22 weeks of the season, and I'm on a real cup run this year.

Through an unprecedented series of pairings against people who just picked a team at the start of the season and forgot about it, my heroic and well-thought-out squad selections have got to round five (the last 262,144!), so I'm starting to dream of holding aloft the imaginary trophy at the end of the season. Trouble is, this time I'm up against somebody who still is actively participating too, so it's going to be tricky.

What do you think? Should I go for some less obvious choices? I feel like I'm being too boring here. I should pick someone who's never played in their life, but is just waiting for the moment when the rest of the team drop dead unexpectedly to come into the squad and take the world by storm. And should I ditch Wayne Rooney? He's only going to call in sick again so he can enjoy his new year holiday...


Incidentally, if you do want to post a comment here, you'll have to have a registered account now. Sorry, but it seems that the robots of the world have learned how to tick the box and say they're a human without exploding from the contradiction. Darn those robots, they're getting too clever.

Deep and crisp and even

Proper snow out there today! Keep it up, and I can be snowed in all winter - as long as people keep delivering food to me periodically, and the internet connection stays solid, I'd be fine with that.

The Augmented Memory Championship

So, I was in Lancaster University, giving a keynote speech on "A Mnemonist's Perspective on Memory" at a memory-themed workshop last week. I mumbled my way through a five-minute talk directed at an audience of science people (all of them with PhDs and probably loads of the extra special secret kind of qualifications you get after a PhD if you're really clever) and then resigned myself to two days of being bewildered by clever science-people ideas about memory that would mean nothing to me at all. But as it turned out, we spent the second afternoon making things with pipe-cleaners, coloured paper and other primary-school craft supplies, so they'd obviously geared the whole thing to my own level of intellectual development.

But while there, I found out that the Creative Arts building has two 'pods' outside it in the scenic woodland across the footpath from the main building (which is itself very scenic, with a wooden bridge over a moat to get to the front door, and lots of ducks). The pods (used as meeting rooms) are circular domes, little things just able to accommodate a central round table with seating around it for maybe six people at a squeeze. There's two round windows in each one and a circular skylight on top. Oh, wow, I said, this is just such the perfect location for the next UK Memory League Championship! Imagine the video footage we could put on YouTube of the two pairs of competitors walking through the woods to their Isolation Pods, with squirrels, ducks and who knows what else happily wishing them good luck on their way!

(When I mentioned this to Nelson, he said "Sounds great, did you take pictures?" and I said "Oh yes, I could have done that, couldn't I? I mean, I did have a smart-phone in my pocket and everything. But I'm still unused to the idea of mobile phones, so it never occurred to me." I might have to go back there and take pictures I can show to you all. Or maybe find them on the internet.)

So I mentioned this to the university people, and they said it would be great to have the competition there - especially if we could do it in conjunction with the other event we spent that afternoon discussing!

See, the main theme of this workshop was how technology could assist human memory. And a great way to promote and develop this idea for the future would be to have an Augmented Memory Championship! It would work like this - teams, consisting of a memoriser and their 'pit crew' of scientists and technologians, would compete against each other in disciplines that would combine human memory skills with the best assistance technology could provide.

In some disciplines, the technology would be used in the memorisation process, followed by an unassisted human memoriser recalling by themself. So for example, we could do speed cards in which (we're projecting into the future now, rather than anything available today) the memoriser picks up the cards, drops them into a hopper which the computer immediately reads and converts into an image (with sounds and any other sensations the memoriser might want) according to the memoriser's specifications, and plays it on the memoriser's VR headset. The whole process takes five seconds, and the memoriser has seen/heard/felt everything they need in order to know exactly what the sequence of cards was.

Then there's the disciplines where the memorisation is technology-free, but then the memoriser is able to use technology to prompt their recall - displaying the appropriate images to fill in the gaps in recall, pointing out pre-programmed instances of possible confusion, things like that.

And then there's the forgetting competition (because technology to help people forget is a goal as well as to help people remember), in which one team tries to memorise and the other tries to use as many technological means as they can to make the memoriser forget. All sorts of possible strategies there, and it might just hit on something that has a universal application...

And a team memorising competition, where people and technology (for example) watch a video and prepare to answer questions about what they've seen. Technology can be programmed to pick up certain details, the humans can co-ordinate with it to make sure everything's been covered by someone or some thing.

This is something that needs to happen - who would be interested in taking part? Memorisers seeking scientists and scientists seeking memorisers would be matched together by some sort of academic dating agency, and all the academics at the workshop were very confident that the whole event could get: 1) Funding, that all-important thing in the academic world; 2) The possibility of a really good academic paper about it; and 3) Genuine possibility that a spin-off from this competition could turn into a genuine new development that could really improve human life in general. I love it!

Amazing Alex Mullen

He did indeed blow away the rest of the world's greatest memorisers, finishing with a new world record 15.612 seconds (because these new-fangled devices record it to the thousandth of a second instead of the hundredth) in speed cards! It was a sensational kind of competition, and the live-streaming was a million times cooler than any memory competition ever before! Multiple cameras, zooms in to the competitors as they fleetingly glanced at the cards before stopping the clock, it was really fun to watch! Maybe there's hope for a televised World Memory Championship yet!

And people are even praising the prize ceremony for pronouncing people's names right, giving the right medals to the right people, knowing what the scores were, not going on until the small hours of the morning, and so on! What am I going to make fun of on my glorious return next year, if this keeps up? Great work from Yudi, Andy and everybody else involved!

Wonder Twin powers activate!

The World Memory Championship is happening in Jakarta, Indonesia! I'm not there, I'm currently on my way back from Lancaster, where I've also been doing very interesting things related to memory competitions that I will tell you about once I think people have stopped paying attention to Indonesia and might want to look at me again.

But the first day gave us the usual bumper haul of mind-bogglingly enormous scores! Well, is mind-boggling really the word now? After all these years, we positively expect people to do better than the years before, and can maybe even predict the degree to which the previous records will be beaten... but that still doesn't make us blasé about the whole thing. If nothing else, it proves what people have always been saying, that we haven't yet reached the limit of memory sport potential, and it all hinges on knowing what previous record-breakers have achieved.

In any case, binary digits gave us a mind-boggling (if not quite a world record) 5730 from Munkhshur and 5325 from Enkhshur - they really do call themselves the Wonder Twins, so I'm entirely justified in thinking of Zan and Jayna every time I mention them. Reigning champion Alex was just behind with 5235, and Lkhagvadulam and Marwin also did what used to be my exclusive thing, with scores over 4000.

Names and faces did give us a world record, with Yanjaa Wintersoul (as she's officially credited nowadays) beating her own score and racking up 212 points. Simon's 186 was second, and Sri (as usual) made the top three with 147. Enkhshur and Alex weren't far behind that.

Then in hour numbers, Alex flexed his mental muscles with a new world record 3238! Munkhshur also topped the 3000 mark (which in my day, ten years or so ago, seemed a long way off ever being done) and Enkhshur was third with 2770, just ahead of Marwin's 2740. Yanjaa had a very strong 2420 for fifth place too, and since the website's listing her as Mongolian this year, they have a good lead in the team competition!

Top ten after the first day:

1 Alex Mullen 2674
2 Munkhshur Narmandakh 2622
3 Enkhshur Narmandakh 2577
4 Yanjaa Wintersoul 2217
5 Marwin Wallonius 2148
6 Lkhagvadulam Enkhtuya 1990
7 Simon Reinhard 1912
8 Johannes Mallow 1893
9 Uyanga Munkhbayar 1683
10 Zou Lujian 1580

Alex narrowly leads, on course to what would be an almost-unprecedented third consecutive win (a "post-Dominic era" first? I can't think of a good way to describe it). Winning three in a row takes a certain kind of mental dedication; doing the same thing three years in a row gives you (or at least gave me) a real challenge of overcoming the been-there-done-that effect. Perhaps the new exciting novelty of this being the first IAM WMC makes a difference? Or perhaps Alex is just awesome.

But he hasn't won yet! The Mongolian team are closely behind him, as are the Swedish team in the form of Marwin and maybe partly Yanjaa, and the entirely German team of Simon and Johannes, and the Chinese team in the person of Zou Lujian in contention too. Everything to play for! Results can be seen here.

There really needs to be a British team giving all these foreigners a run for their money, but I still think there's a good chance I'll be there next year (albeit possibly not in the top ten unless I really get a lot better), and we're gradually building up a strong army of memorisers on these shores, after years in the wilderness...

I would be really good at this, too

I got this email today:

Yes, I've got a profile on StarNow, the website for people who really want to be actors. I created it years ago, and a while back (drunkenly) reactivated it.

Anyway, I've been saying for years that as soon as my beard's gone entirely white, I'll be all ready to make a living being Santa at Christmas time. I'm not quite there yet, but Great Grottos at least seem to think I am. I'd love to take them up on it, but I've got to work in my day job. Maybe next year...

Happy various!

Happy Thanksgiving to anybody who's American and reading this today. And Happy Dr Who Anniversary day to anybody who just likes it when it's the anniversary of the first episode of Dr Who.

Also, for tomorrow, Happy Silver Sonic Twosday! Remember all the excitement of 25 years ago, when Sonic 2 came out on the Mega Drive? It feels like only yesterday. Everyone needs to get out their old Mega Drives and Sonic 2 cartridges (what? I can't be the only one who's still got them, can I?) and play it - don't forget that if you play songs 1,9,9,2,1,1,2,4 on the level select screen, you activate the debug mode.

Rest in peace Panthro

It's very sad that Earle Hyman has died, but then 91 is a good age, and at least most of the internet articles about him remember that he was one of the heroic six voice actors who between them did every character on Thundercats.

I think the high point of his Thunder-career was Nemex, owner of the eponymous jail in the episode "The Astral Prison". He has a brilliantly over-the-top voice, and I urge you all to get out your DVDs and video tapes and watch it again right now! "Brave words... FEEBLE FOOL!"

An Impossible Challenge

Dagnabbit. I've had an email from a Chinese TV show, "Impossible Challenge" - they want to fly me out to Beijing to compete in a speed cards* contest against Zou Lujian (who's much better than me) in what would be a really cool and epic kind of TV experience. I'm still apparently a popular household name in China** and to lose to the top Chinese competitor would give the whole memory sport scene over there a huge boost.

Trouble is, they want me to be over there from the 14th to the 19th of December, and I really can't take that time off work. Our holiday year at work runs from January-December, and I've just taken a week off, specifically because I had five days left to use and didn't think I'd be getting any particular reason to save them up! And the company shuts down for the year from the 22nd onwards! So this invitation is exactly one week too early. If they could just accommodate me the week after, it'd be great! I could go to Beijing, fail to remember a pack of cards, and go up to Harbin to see my brother*** for Christmas!

Actually, the real problem is that if I asked my bosses to give me the time off work, they'd probably say yes (judging by last year, there won't be very much work gets done there the week before the shutdown), but I really don't want that to happen. It makes me think they think it doesn't matter if I'm in the office or not, and although I myself think that, I like to delude myself into believing that the higher-ups consider me indispensable.

It's possible I'm over-thinking the whole thing. I do that.



*Actually, the email (which has presumably been through an online translator) describes it as a "shorthand poker" contest, but I'm fairly sure from the context that it's speed cards. The Chinese call a pack of cards a "poker", you know. That's basically the entirety of my knowledge about China.

**Just on Friday I was told by a young woman that she'd seen me on "The Brain" and thought I was great, and she was interested in memory competitions and things. Of course, when I told her that there are a lot of memory people in China, she replied (sounding only slightly offended) that she's Chinese-Malaysian and just happened to see the Chinese TV show, but I still take this as proof that people in the general area of China know who I am.

***Who doubtless has already made his arrangements to spend Christmas with other people, and really wouldn't appreciate me flying five thousand miles**** to turn up on his doorstep unexpectedly.

****I actually have no idea how many miles it is from here to Harbin. For all I know, it might be next door and the airlines are just playing a big practical joke on people.

This is my new out-of-office auto-reply