Otaku No Zoku

I want to test something out. I want you to remember these six faces, and I want you to remember the order in which they appeared.

Don’t spend too much time on studying them.

There will be a test later.

A large part of the human brain is dedicated to vision, and quite a large proportion of that area is dedicated to recognizing faces.

So my proposition is that you can use our brain’s facial recognition ability to remember long strings of numbers or other important information by associating elements of the information, e.g. individual digits, with a picture of a particular person’s face.

So now scroll the browser window so that the sequence faces above are no longer visible, and pick out the original six images from the following four dozen mug shots, and place them in the order that you first saw them.

How well did you do?

Every time I’ve tried it, with a selection list of hundreds of images of people, with sequences of images easily 30 images long, I’ve been able to get it right 100% of the time. And every person I’ve tried this out on is able to achieve the same results too. I’ve found that people on the second or third test only need a few seconds to learn a sequence of images 10 or 20 images long.

So the elevators in the building where I have my office now sport LCD panels that play adverts on a continuous loop.

I’m curious, in the future, will elevator operators claim that if we don’t watch the ads that we’re stealing elevator rides from them? Just like the TV execs do today when you record a TV show with your PVR and then skip through the ads. Will there be a camera placed in each elevator to ensure you watch at least your fair share of the ads? The only thing that a TV showing ads in an elevator guarantees is that it won’t kill the conversation. There never is any! Mundanes riding elevators never talk to each other, even if they know everybody around them, haven’t seen them in a long time, have some really important news to tell – like the building is collapsing – or they were having a conversation about some really deep subject just prior to stepping on the elevator.

Put a few mundanes in the stairwell of the same building and they’ll start talking to each other as they take the stairs up to their office – or at least they will for the first few floors, then the huffing and puffing starts and the conversation starts coming in gasped bursts.

What if we were to create a traditional disposable razor that could vibrate the head by a small amount, in an up and down motion?

The amount of movement would only have to be small. Your shave would then be more effective as the same area is covered multiple times by micromovements.

Why aren’t tattoos made of an ink that can be dissolved by laser light? There are various inks out there that turn either transparent or break down when subjected to low-intensity laser light and the human skin is very good at ejecting any foreign matter that manages to get below the surface, e.g. a splinter.