as is often the case with ideas and prototypes, the fun quickly deteriorates into tedium as the magnitude of the task becomes clearer

i finished reading malcolm gladwell's the tipping point which is a collection of anecdotes about epidemics and what causes a certain trend to reach its tipping point and become a huge craze.

i don't really like anecdotal books (like schneier's secrets and lies) because the story changes so often and i usually want to know more about what's happening when the chapter ends and a new short story begins. also, if i'm reading a book like this on a specific subject, i want to learn about that specific subject from the author's viewpoint and not just read supportive stories about the subject and be left to draw my own conclusions. i got this book because i first got blink from the same author, which i am now reading and am hoping has more focus on cognitive theory.

anyway, the tipping point is a pretty good book and i particularly enjoyed the chapters about sesame street and how they formed and changed so many aspects of the show after doing research with children to learn how they respond to television.

there was one part in the book where the author is briefly talking about how a person in a family or other close-knit group relies on others in the group to retain knowledge, so he does not expend memory trying to retain the same information. it didn't really have much to do with the subject matter of the book, but as soon as i read that, i thought about how i retain newly learned material and how i remember references to things rather than the entire subject itself.

people constantly ask me things about my car, or how much money something cost me, or some technical question about how a programming library or system function works. in most of these cases, i never have the answers stored in my head (which admittedly makes me seem forgetful or stupid at times), but i immediately know how and where to find them. i keep meticulous notes about my cars, i wrote and use software to categorize and keep track of every penny of the 1,360 financial transactions i've made in the past 3 years, and when learning a new programming language or system, i first seek out adequate documentation and constantly reference it, rather than attempting to force myself to commit the details of so many different functions to memory and, usually, incorrectly recall it later.

this probably wasn't a great way of doing things when i was in school and was tested on useless things i was supposed to remember, but if something isn't practical for me to keep stored in my head, i'd rather dump it out on paper or a computer or something and just remember the reference to those notes. if i have to reference something enough, such as my credit card number or social security number, i'll probably commit it to memory just out of repetition, but i make absolutely no effort to remember phone numbers of people i call all the time that are stored in my phone, or dates of things stored in my calendar. i have too many ideas and thoughts and pictoral memories in my head that take up space to waste it remembering useless facts. i suppose it's like a kernel swapping memory out to disk. if it hasn't been accessed in a while, dump it to disk to make room for what has to be in memory now. when the old memory needs to be accessed, swap it in from disk. it takes longer to swap in and out but it increases the memory capacity greatly.

as i was writing that i just remembered that during my interrogation earlier this year, the lawyer kept asking me questions about certain facts that i had no (or incorrect) answers for, for questions like how long i've lived at my current house, or where the eff is based out of. not knowing the answers to these simple questions probably made me seem guilty or otherwise odd, but even thinking about them now i don't know the answers but i remember that when i was asked those questions, and again now, i immediately picture in my head a link to the house directory of my media page because i know i stored the date of when i moved there, and a "whois eff.org" line to see registrant information for the eff's domain name to see where they're based out of. although the image in my head of the house page is roughly of what that media page looks like, the date that i know is printed there keeps changing and cycling through different values that i ponder at that moment because i'm not sure what it is. i'm not sure why it's easier for me to store an image of the overall page than to remember two words printed on it, but i suppose because the memory of the image of the page can be fuzzy and not exact (like a lossy jpeg) and the words must be precise and exact in order to be useful.