When people talk about odds. I was reading another thread about the chances that Obama will win and couldn’t even understand a couple of the responses.
I can’t get scoring for tennis. I guess I could if I tried, but I don’t care enough. Why can’t they just say 1 to 1, 2 to 1? Why all this 15 20 30 love stuff? And the sets? (Not really asking–please don’t explain.)
…and now I have to go practice tying my shoes…
I can’t get cricket. I just don’t understand it. The sport has been explained to me at least 6 times by various people. I’ve read about it. I’ve seen it. And it still makes no sense to me. I have a baseball obsession, and I think that’s messing me up somehow.
Don’t feel too bad about the Rubik’s Cube example. Although there are however many “illion” possible states, there is a solution that will return the cube to its start position in very few moves. When I say “very few” I mean ten or less, IIRC. When the Cube was first introduced in the 1980s, the inevitable solution books appeared soon afterward. I purchased one of these books and learned the solution, but I regret to say now I can’t remember a single move.
Still, the cuber mentioned in the OP must have had extroardinary powers of visual memory.
Have you ever listened to something you got on tape years previously and said to yourself, “how the hell did I do that?” Just over a week ago that happened to me when I ran into the drummer of this rockabilly band I was in about 19 years ago and more. A few days later he emailed me .mp4s of some recording we’d done on tape. Besides the fact that the recording quality had been remarkably improved, the band in general and my own playing in particular sounded a lot better than I remembered. There are passages on there which I know I played, without now being able to remember how I played them.
That’s awesome. That makes me feel less stupid than…lazy, like, why am I not designing stuff and having it 3-D printed? I’ve bookmarked Shapeways and already have Blender. I’m thinking about vague ideas for next year’s Christmas presents.
Nah. What makes me feel stupid is listening to certain people talking about old school analog synthesizers, and start discussing patches and envelopes and subtractive and additive filters and that’s about where my eyes start to glaze over. When I turn this knob, the sound does this, and when I move that slider, the sound changes like that, and for all I really understand, it’s freakin’ magic, OK? Whereas these experts pretty much know how each knob is going to affect the sound and why.
I appreciate your comment.
The point of standard (also known as book) chess openings is that they are tried and tested.
However there is a wide choice of book openings, depending on your style (and even what you think your opponent likes / dislikes.)
For example, some players like gambits, as by sacrificing a pawn they put their opponent on the defensive.
Other players like closed positions, leading to careful manouevring.
And chosing a less popular opening avoids your opponent’s opening preparation.
For example:
Try this explanation written by and for Americans, from a baseball point of view.
I suspect it isn’t really more extraordinary than playing a piano piece from memory. Once you get the cube back to a starting position, then it is more a matter of muscle memory.
Part of the advantage of using standard openings is to save time. If you can get through the opening faster then you have more time to analyze your position in the middle game. Part of the point of making a move your opponent didn’t anticipate is make him use up more of his clock.
I’ve also read that this chunking going on in Chess. Instead of remembering the positions of individual pieces, a section of the board will be remembered as one chunk. This gives you an advantage analogous to remembering a number in decimal instead of binary.
The difficulty of memorizing things is vastly overstated. This in best exemplified in the book, Moonwalking With Einstein. The author went from untrained journalist to US memory champion in less than a year. It’s pretty easy to remember non-random, contextually familiar things if you practice the skill.
I studied some memory techniques many decades ago and they do work, but they don’t really fall under any definition of easy that I’m familiar with. In real life memorizing things usually falls under the heading of a party trick. In real life, it is more useful to learn how to rapidly look things up. Of course, now my google-fu has become so powerful, that my ability to use conventional reference tools has almost atrophied.
Nearly every post in this thread made me feel stupid. I’m a fairly intelligent guy, but there are a lot of things that I should be able to “get” that I just “don’t get.”
In college, I had to take Statistics three times to pass it:
I failed my first attempt.
I made an “incomplete” on my second attempt.
With tutoring, I managed to make a “C” on my third attempt.
On a weekly basis, the Sunday NY Times Crossword Puzzle makes me feel stupid. Usually, I’m lucky to get over half of it filled in-- and I’m pretty good at crosswords!
Automobile mechanics. I understand that cars need air, water/coolant, oil, gasoline, brake & transmission fluids, and that it makes a difference which goes where. Other than that, I’m lost.
Computer programming. I’ve already said more than I know about this.
There are other things, but this short list has already made me feel stupider than I felt 10 minutes ago.
There are three kinds of people in this world: those who can do math, and those who cannot. :smack:
Ha! No, I do not feel stupid, thank you. One of the few actual advantages of being left-handed in this world. The natural way that we tie a shoe results in the strong form of the knot.
Words With Friends.
I recently started playing this game and lose most of them.
I do crossword puzzles daily, and I feel like I have a pretty good vocabulary.
Must learn new strategies.
For me it is Economics. As an undergrad, a Humanities elective was required for all science and engineering majors. While casting around for something simple to fill this requirement some of my business major friends suggested that an ECON 101 class would be pretty easy since - and these were their *exact *words - it was just like Calculus. Since I had already completed Calc I,II,and III with high marks, I signed up. Bastards lied to me. What I found was that, apart from some simple integration, it was more like black magic and it made little or no sense to me at all. I ended up with a low B and I still try to look happy when someone tells me they are thinking about returning to school get an MBA. That they award a Nobel Prize for Economics is a complete mystery to me.
My friend’s son. He works at Cern. She’s very proud of him (natch) and tweets dawn till dusk about what he’s doing, and sharing some of the technobabble…
whaaa?