Kamala Harris Kissing Fish or: How to Memorize a Deck of Cards

Do you think you can easily learn to memorize the order of a deck of cards in a few minutes? Well guess what, you can!

I’m sure I am far from the only person to read Moonwalking with Einstein and get inspired to try some memorization. It turned out to be pretty fun and eye-opening! One week after finishing the book I was able to memorize the order of a deck of cards in under 10 minutes.

In honor of len(deck), here are 52 thoughts/takes:

College Is Bad

Epistemic status: Very uncertain, I’m interested if others agree and if any other writing or research on this exists. Don't take too seriously. 

For most smart-ish upper-middle class-ish kids these days (well, maybe not *these* days; thanks covid), going to college means moving out of your house (and often your state) and into a dorm, doing schoolwork for a few hours a day, and spending the rest of your time hanging out with new friends, who will likely be very similar to you in their interests, political views, and smarts.

Gee that’s a lot of free time there...especially if you extend the trend to 2021 

Source: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w15954/w15954.pdf

The Fall of the Soviet Union

 

The country was pretty tall and very wide so it varied a lot but was generally on the cold side

Job Search Marathon

 After a year looking for a Data Science job, my quest has finally come to a successful end and I have some scattered thoughts. One per mile of the job finding marathon. 

Wealth of Nations

If you are reading this, you probably have the impression the US is among the richest countries in the world (per person), but not necessarily at the top and certainly not substantially ahead of everyone else. At least that was my impression from everything I’ve read and heard. If you look at GDP per capita statistics, which are usually what is cited in the media, this would seem to confirm that impression:

Source: Wikipedia [1]

Welcome

I guess I’m making a blog. The timing on this is quite unfortunate considering I haven’t had a job or school for the past 7 months and now I am starting a new job in January just as I get going here. But I’ve been writing way more in the last half-year than I ever have before and I figured I might as well start a blog. I have no idea how often I will post but once it’s out there hopefully I can commit myself to posting at least 5-10 times a year. 

What am I going to blog about? Well first of all I’m not very good at writing (imho) so I’ll try to stick to topics that I know well enough to make up for that (and hopefully my writing will improve along the way). I prefer to read writing styles that are very clear and to the point so that is what I will shoot for in my writing (edit (4/12/2021): https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/m57i1c/prose_is_bad/). Expect to see mostly sports, economics, and data stuff. I’ve become pretty interested in development economics in the last year so I am hoping to do a series about that once I feel like I’ve read enough to know what I’m talking about. 

Oh and I hope you like the name. I know it’s a bit of stretch and most research suggests stretching doesn’t really work but cut me some slack. I’m new here.

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