mikey-ashman

So, it turns out I got more excited about this book than most people usually get about books like this where the author is useless/average at some particular thing and so embarks on a mission of self-improvement in an attempt to become very good at the thing they were previously useless/average at. In Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer, it’s memory.

The guy below holds the world record for the greatest number of toothpicks in a beard with 3,500.

And then we have

This guy above holds the world record for the tallest hat and the pic below is the world record for the biggest ping-pong bat.

People often ask on Reddit or Quora,

“What would aliens say if they came to Earth?”

Looking at these three photos I can only assume they say we look bored.

Are these world records a product of our endless quest to push the boundaries of what we’re capable of regardless of the boundary attempting to be pushed? Or are we just a bunch of bored, shaved apes trapped on a celestial prison?

Moonwalking with Einstein chronicles Joshua Foer’s journey from average nobody who, like all of us, forgets where he put his car keys eleven seconds after setting them down. To entering the US memory championship only twelve months later. But this isn’t some boring, “First I did this” followed shortly by, “And then I did that”. Joshua delves into the science behind memory, the history of memory and how we have used or ignored it over the years.

Our author highlights the depleting level of reliance we have placed on our memory over the years. There was a time before the written word exploded onto manuscripts, when mankind had no choice but to use only their memories to pass on wisdom and/or stories. Now we have the internet, mobile phones and diaries, there’s almost no need to remember anything. We have instant recall external memory at our fingertips so why bother improving ours?

Mr Foer waxes philosophical about how our memories define who we are. We use what we remember to conceptualise the world around us and so absolute reliance on the internet or diaries to remember 100% of our knowledge and experiences could potentially create a less wise vessel as we travel through life.

The science of memory is also brought up with quite touching chapters written from Joshua meeting a savant who had suffered brain damage, leaving him with a super memory but at a severe cost and a man who was unable to create new memories but who’s blissful ignorance kept him as happy as could be.

As we’re taken on this journey, we are brought back to Joshua’s friendships with a collection of elite memory contestants who love nothing more than getting shitfaced drunk and daring each other to kiss women while playing chess blindfolded and they have a club. Of course, they have a club.

The book is a very short read (under 200 pages) and it’s extremely fun. I learnt a hell of a lot and now have a new skill that I can take with me for the rest of my life. And by the time Joshua reached the US memory finals I was quite invested in his journey which made taking the journey with him all the more enjoyable.

It is incredibly simple to memorise ridiculous amounts of information once you understand the trick. I literally memorised 50 random words and relayed them back to my partner in order after only looking at the list for a couple of minutes and honestly…. should you choose to read the book, you’ll realise it’s not that hard. I’ve no intention of attempting to become a memory champion because it would still require a level of dedication on par with our friends from the start of the blog; but it would be criminal of me to read this book, learn this memory trick and not use it to assist me in life somehow.

If you are at school, college, university or any other form of education then this book is an absolute must-read. The raw power of being able to turn a year’s worth of studying into a long list of statements and then turn that long list of statements into images for your memory palace will have you scoring straight A’s without a doubt.

This link will take you to my master blog where previous entries have been split into genres for your viewing pleasure!

https://coil.com/p/Mikey_Ashman/MASTER-BLOG/YNg8pAwFn

Be excellent to each other and vote for tomorrow!

I don’t want to take up much of your time but I also want to explain vote for tomorrow in enough detail that the idea is easy to understand so I will try to relay the idea in a ridiculously exaggerated story.

Once upon a time I sat at my desk and sipped at the idea of having a coffee. I couldn’t decide whether to take it black or white. Black like the tortured never-beating heart of a soul with whom but a moment spent could unleash a psychological pain so intense that just the concept of it’s happening would be enough to extinguish the brightest of flames in a world of darkness purified. Or white like some really white chalk. Not just normal white chalk but like, really, REALLY white chalk.

Suddenly an idea fell upon my mind. At first it fell upon me like when on the crispest of winter mornings, the most delicate of buttercups relinquishes its loving embrace of a single drop of morning dew, allowing it to drop to the ever-waiting Earth below. And as that delicate drop became a trickle, became a flood, became a tsunami, the lightbulb exploded and I finally decided to have white coffee because black coffee tastes grim and I’m not sure why I had spent so much time thinking about it.

Ok let’s jump straight into the idea of vote for tomorrow (V4T).

The premise at the core of the V4T is that members of a community provide ideas to make their community a better place. Does the local library need more ramped access? Or more books? Or does the local cricket club need new nets? Does someone in the community want to plant 100 trees and the list goes on. Very simple.

Next is that everyone in that community gets to vote for which project they would like to initiate. The winning idea from that calendar month that can afforded to be done based on donations gets done. Again, very simple. We all know how voting works.

Third are the donations. I don’t want V4T relying on donations of money or goods, I would like the donated funds to be acquired through providing a service to people in that community. One idea is a batch cooking service where you are offered 30 different lunch and dinner dishes and you choose 10 (2 meals Mon-Fri). Chefs then cook and portion your 10 meals (600 calories per portion) with an optional 300 calorie dessert add-on per day with as much produce as possible being locally sourced. That way local farmers cut out the middle man, local residents no longer need to shop or spend time preparing food, cooking it or washing up as all of this is taken care of and everyone gets chef cooked, fresh food delivered to their doorstep every Sunday night for extremely cheap. Any profits from the project go back into the core V4T wallet where the money is used for the months elected projects.

The meal idea sells itself because it saves people time and money and they see the money they pay going directly back into the local community instead of some greedy millionaire wannabes bank account. I have a few other ideas that will be locally based and easy to replicate at any scale and all of this is ready to go if XRP ever breaks $0.30 LOL.

I also have a website ready to go once everything is ready to go and there are a few more things I will likely blog about in preparation for this. Mostly about further concepts and some of the logistics behind it all. I had this idea almost ten years ago so I’ve had time to ruminate and develop a fuller flavour.

This link will take you to my master blog where previous entries have been split into genres for your viewing pleasure!

https://coil.com/p/Mikey_Ashman/MASTER-BLOG/YNg8pAwFn

Be excellent to each other and vote for tomorrow!

Your eyes twinkle like a star as viewed from Earth. Given the devastatingly powerful nature of a star it would be reckless of me to compare your eyes to a massive nuclear fusion reactor held in place by it's mass and capable of obliterating retinas from 93 million miles away so yeah, perspective is important.

Your bottom is firm and round like a football that has been adequately inflated to it's manufacturer's predefined PSI level.

You also have ten toes which is a good number of toes to have.

So recapping your physical attributes. Everything is good and appropriately numbered meaning I can genuinely state I love you from head to toes.

Just like Donald Trump being elected US president, love can be almost impossible to understand.

But being with you has made love seem like the actual man Donald Trump. Extremely simple.

Will you still love me when the skin which houses my testicles drops so low that I trip over them just walking to the kitchen to get some porridge?

Will you still love me when my penis looks like half a grape desperately clinging to a miserable flap of skin that resembles the sleeve of a jumper that's been thrown on the floor to be washed?

Will you still love me when I'm sat in my old-guy chair doing a crossword, but still love me when senility's wrath means I have no bloody clue what a crossword is and I'm probably sat in an old-guy nappy that needs changing?

We have so much to look forward to my love.

This link will take you to my master blog where previous entries have been split into genres for your viewing pleasure!

https://coil.com/p/Mikey_Ashman/MASTER-BLOG/YNg8pAwFn

Be excellent to each other and vote for tomorrow!

Bill Gates listed 15 books everyone should read which I am currently working my way through with “Where good ideas come from: The natural history of innovation” – Steven Johnson, coming in first on the list.

If I were to sum it up, I would say we are just fancy-pants primordial soup with arms and legs thrown in for good measure but that would be simplifying everything. This book is a really incredible journey of the concept of a good idea from the first good idea which was that the twenty-two essential amino acids should be created by chaotically bashing the common elements against one another in the primordial soup that was Earth before we invented reality TV shows. To the more recent ideas like Darwin’s theory of evolution, Babbage’s computer and the internet.

The takeaway is that we are always standing on the shoulder of giants. That an idea is almost never a single person imagining something revolutionary on their own, that it’s a gradual process from sitting on an idea formed a decade ago to creating an incubator in developing countries out of car parts (incredible story). Actually, I have to quickly tell the story about the incubator. The western world couldn’t donate incubators to developing countries because they couldn’t afford the maintenance and they couldn’t teach engineers the maintenance because the manuals were written in English so they created an incubator from spare car parts. Because developing countries had many cars and mechanics, they were able to maintain the incubators by being skilled enough to change a car part. Of all medical breakthroughs, this car-part incubator had the most profound effect on mankind’s life expectancy of all inventions because it was saving a full life as premature baby deaths were drastically cut in developing countries.

We are introduced to the concept of “the adjacent other”. So, imagine you are in a room (what we currently know) with 4 doors, each of those doors is a eureka moment waiting to happen. Once we achieve a breakthrough, we move into a new room with 3 new doors and the process continues in perpetuity. We can only move one room at a time, Babbage inventing the computer in the early 19th century was too soon because the rest of the world didn’t have the technology to create what he envisioned for almost another century. Babbage was so far ahead of his time that he exceeded the adjacent other and the computer had to wait for a number of rooms to be explored and conquered before the rest of the world caught up.

This book was an absolutely wonderful read. It’s put together well and uses a number of advances from human history to hammer home the points being made with 9/11 being a very sobering example of the state of the FBIs archaic internal communication system needing an adjacent other success. I am very much looking forward to reading the remaining 14 books and writing reviews on those too!

This book only has 246 pages before the appendix and it doesn’t have many big words so you only need a few days to absorb it.

This link will take you to my master blog where previous entries have been split into genres for your viewing pleasure!

https://coil.com/p/Mikey_Ashman/MASTER-BLOG/YNg8pAwFn

Be excellent to each other and vote for tomorrow!

Are you sick and tired of being happy?

Do you dream of being as disappointed as my wife is after sex?

Well buddy, Breaking Bad El Camino is the movie for you.

We all remember the unforgettable, genius TV series that was Breaking Bad where Heisenberg was the one who knocked. Writing so flawless that we were able to eventually feel sorry for Skyler, one of the most punchable characters in TV history. Acting so flawless that we could fully believe Hanks switch from the least funny human on the planet to an absolute legend with a constitution of granite. And who could forget Gale singing the periodic table?

Now watch as Vince Gilligan and Netflix turn a sixty-two episode masterpiece with an incredible finale into a sixty-three episode masterpiece with an ending so boring you’ll wonder how much money he was offered to put his name to this snooze-fest.

Do you like nail-biting storyline twists with subtle character development? Or how about gun fights, explosions and breath-taking car chases through packed and winding streets? Well strap yourselves in for 122 minutes of television that has none of it.

This movie is watching Jesse drive from scene to scene as we say, “oh hey I remember that guy from the TV series”. It’s kind of a slimy way to tug on people’s nostalgia in an effort to get them to like something, rather than getting people to like something by putting effort in.

Most of the characters were already developed during the TV series which means anybody who watches this without having seen the TV series is going to wonder why they aren’t being told anything about them. In fact, I would go so far as to say that watching this would probably put you off watching the TV show which is a tragedy in its own right because it was so freaking amazing.

The problem is that if you have already watched the TV series then you have to watch El Camino because it’s now the new ending to Breaking Bad. It’s basically a double length episode that forces you to spend over two hours waiting for something to happen before delivering an ending nowhere near as satisfying as the original.

Anyhoo, I’m sure Mr Gilligan had his reasons and that some will appreciate it. Personally, it seems 2019 was the year of ruining the endings of great masterpieces.

Not looking at anyone in particular.

Dan and Dave.

PS – If this was suppose to take place directly after the final episode of Breaking Bad….how the hell did Jesse and Todd suddenly get so fat? Even more impressive is that Todd somehow got fat in the flashback to when he was thin in the TV series.

I guess being stuck on the USS Callister took its toll or something.

This link will take you to my master blog where previous entries have been split into genres for your viewing pleasure!

https://coil.com/p/Mikey_Ashman/MASTER-BLOG/YNg8pAwFn

Be excellent to each other and vote for tomorrow!

Just give me five minutes of your time and I will change your world.

The average person remembers seven things which isn’t great if a mobile phone number has eleven digits or your shopping list has twenty items but I am going to teach you right now, completely effortlessly how to remember twenty random words. Right now!

This will be the first part of a multi part blog where I’m going to show my progress of remembering countries and their capitals as well as a whole host of other facts so you can play along and be THE ABSOLUTE BOSS of games like trivial pursuit or the absolute winner winner chicken dinner of pub quizzes.

Below is a list of 20 random items/objects. I would like you to read them for 60 seconds and remember as many as you can, in order then close the page and try to write as many of those words as you can, in order.

Baby

Egg

Phone

Plate

Grass

Cat

Nappy

Fridge

Car

Dog

Hammer

Pillow

Trolley

Hair

Ring

Bath

Shoes

TV

Book

Cup

So how well/badly did you do? Did you get seven? Did you make it to nine? I’m guessing you didn’t make it to twenty lol.

If you would be so kind, I would like you to read the following blurb while occasionally looking back at the list for reference.

Imagine you are stood outside the door of your house or flat. And I mean really imagine it like you are stood there in your mind’s eye. We’re going to be taking a walk through your house/flat and we’re going to see some weird stuff!

You look down and see a baby sat outside your front door, balancing an egg on its head while talking to someone on a mobile phone. Really imagine that weird site. Close your eyes and imagine how you would feel seeing something so weird outside your front door. A baby balancing an egg on its head AND talking on a phone!

You step over the baby and walk through your front door and you see a plate with some grass growing on it. That’s weird you think to yourself.

You walk through the first door you come to whether it’s on the left or right and it doesn’t matter whether it leads to a toilet, garage or bedroom. After you walk through the door you see a cat wearing a nappy and taking a poo. Imagine the cat has curled his back and lifted its tail but it’s wearing a nappy and imagine it’s puffing its cheeks out and struggling to get that turd out its butt. That’s almost as weird as the talking baby with an egg on its head. Once again try to think how you would feel seeing all these things in your house.

You walk to the kitchen fridge and open it but there’s no food in there, just a car with a dog sat in the front seat looking at you and he’s holding a hammer. The dog looks angry. On top of the car there is a pillow with your secret crush lying on it. Again, take the time to really imagine seeing this.

You close the fridge and look down to see a supermarket trolley full of wigs made from real horse hair! Instead of using a coin to unlock the trolley, somebody has used a ring. You decide to push the trolley to the bathroom and leave it in the bath which is full of shoes.

You look out the bathroom window and there’s a TV floating outside which is weird so you close the window and turn around to leave the bathroom. The door has turned into a giant book and when you reach for the handle you see that it has turned into a cup.

Ok so we have finished our bizarre little journey around your home. I would like you to read the list of twenty items again and read through the story to see where they are. I would also like you to really close your eyes and think how you would feel seeing these unbelievably strange things in your house.

Once you’re ready. Write those twenty items.

Kind of cool, right?

I tried this for the first time a few days ago and managed to get 14/15 items correct (said table instead of door). The following day my partner wrote down fifty items (I was confident lol) and the only mistake I made was that I got the final two items the wrong way around!

I really hope you got most of those twenty and in the right order because this has just made learning random stuff a whole lot more fun!

This link will take you to my master blog where previous entries have been split into genres for your viewing pleasure!

https://coil.com/p/Mikey_Ashman/MASTER-BLOG/YNg8pAwFn

Be excellent to each other and vote for tomorrow!

Ah that first kiss. The moment you push your lips into somebody else’s. End up a little bit dizzy? That first sip of alcohol. The moment you push your lips to the ice-cold glass and end up dizzy again? Never thought of it like that before. Being kissed and being drunk as the same thing. Memories are weird sometimes.

It’s not often you get to sit alone on the beach with your thoughts and nothing but the wind and seagulls to keep you company. I’m surrounded by people but alone, just like on a train, or at work or like a lot of time spent in life. I glance over at the guy next to me and think about his memories, his dreams.

I remember the birth of my daughter like it was yesterday. The most perfect little thing I ever saw and the most perfect little thing I ever did with my life. She’s only two now but she’s three soon! Struggling to speak but can fill the room with grunts, squeals, laughs and cries with the best of them. She’s with her Mum at the moment.

Has the sunrise turned the sea red?

I’m still young but I have given a lot of thought to life. Asked myself how many children I should have. What career lies ahead after the children? What career lies ahead for my children? How much gardening will I have to look forward to? Actually, not many of us think about gardening in our twenties but we all assume we’re going to grow old that’s for sure.

I love my wife’s scent. Always have from the moment we met. You would think it’s weird that I could spend hours just resting my nose and lips on her hair but that’s just what I did. She would get fed up because it made her hair greasy but these little arguments are part of the rich tapestry of life I suppose.

I miss my daughter.

How can the sun be so strong and yet I feel so cold? The seagulls have gone, nothing left for them here except guests for the vultures and Valkyries.

We were supposed to grow old.

I miss my daughter.

This link will take you to my master blog where previous entries have been split into genres for your viewing pleasure!

https://coil.com/p/Mikey_Ashman/MASTER-BLOG/YNg8pAwFn

Be excellent to each other and remember to vote for tomorrow!