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How Many Xs Can You Name In Y Minutes?

Published on Sunday, March 16, 2008 in , , , ,

Timed QuizzesOne internet meme that seems to have taken off is quizzes where you have to name as many of something as you can in a certain amount of time (found on websites like Sporcle). The farthest back I can trace it is to this post on Ironic Sans. The original version is here, and the vastly improved version by Erik Wannebo is here.

Now it seems that everywhere you turn, you can find just such a quiz. I figured it was time to see just how far this has gone, and compile a complete a list as I could. The result is a list which now contains over 3,000 quizzes! If you know of any such quizzes I've missed, let me know in the comments or by e-mail (click the Contact Me tab at the top of this page), and I'll add them as I get the chance.

The major sources of timed quizzes I currently track on this site are:
Can You Name?
Grey Matters
JetPunk
LCD Love
Mental Floss
One Plus You (formerly Just Say Hi)
Quizicon (formerly Codebox Software)
Scott's Puzzles
Sporcle
TimedQuiz

How To Use The Droplist Filter (The icon): With over 3,000 quizzes, finding the one you want by just looking through the list itself can be challenging. To narrow your search, you can use the Droplist Filter (courtesy of joshuachan.ca):

1) Simply click the magnifying glass icon to the right of the subject heading of your choice.
2) Enter the term for which you wish to search.
3) Either click the magnifying glass icon, or hit return, and your search term will now appear as the header (in place of Select A Quiz...).
4) Open the droplist menu, and it will now consist solely of quizzes that contain your search term!

To perform a new search, simply click on the magnifying glass icon again, and search as above. To return to the full list, click the magnifying glass icon on the right again, and click the reset icon (), and the full list will be restored.

Among other great sources of timed quizzes that aren't listed here are:
Listkiller: General timed quizzes, with registration and Flash required.
ListStuff: A site that lets your create and play your own quizzes, play those of others, and keep track of your scores in comparison to others. Instead of a time limit, the games here have a clock that counts up.
PurposeGames: This site is similar to ListStuff, but offers better graphic capabilities, such as the use of maps and diagrams.
Yardbarker Quizzes: Sports-themed timed quizzes, including team-specific statistics questions.

To keep up on the latest timed quizzes, you can use these free goodies:
Timed Quizzes RSS Feed
Timed Quizzes Blog Widget
Timed Quizzes Dashboard Widget (OS X 10.4.3 or later required)
Timed Quizzes Google Gadget

Want to create your own quiz and get it linked here? Create one with the Grey Matters Timed Quiz Generator, and let me know about it! The basics of the Timed Quiz Generator are covered in this tutorial, with additional features taught here. You can even get inspiration from the quizzes on this list, or the comments from this post.

NOTE: This list is no longer being regularly updated. However, you can still keep up with the latest timed quizzes via the new Timed Quizzes RSS feed. Please see the update post for further details.

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Grey Matter's 3rd Blogiversary!

Published on Friday, March 14, 2008 in , , , , , , ,

Pi DayHas it really been 3 full years since I first started Grey Matters?!? It seems hard to believe, but it's true!

I couldn't even imagine back when I started this that Grey Matters would grow as big as it has, and get as many visitors on a regular basis as it has been getting!

I chose today to start the blog because it's Pi Day (3/14)! Pi Day was first celebrated at San Francisco's Exploratorium back in 1988, and it caught on very quickly. Let's kick off this celebration by checking out the Exploratorium's plans for Pi Day 2008, which includes ideas you can try at home.

Even though, as we've discussed in the past year, you'll never realistically need more than 40 digits of Pi, the challenge of refining Pi to more and more digits is often too much to resist. It's why we do things like memorize hundreds of digits of Pi, and even calculate it out to more than 1.2 trillion digits (1,241,100,000,000 decimal digits of Pi, to be exact)! If you want to explore the digits, you can download pre-calculated digits, or have your computer calculate the digits in real time (Mac OS X version and Windows version).

As fun as pure lists of Pi digits can be, it's much better to get an understanding by putting them in context, as in my aforementioned Visualizing Pi post. You can use Wolfram's new Mathematica Player to examine Pi in context. First, you can easily examine the distribution of digits in the first 10,000 digits of Pi, even in numerous bases. This is great for seeing how long before, say, a 0 appears, or finding the Feynman point. If you've ever wondered why Pi is the value it is, try out this demonstration to see how various shapes relate to their respective circumferences.

However, we're here to celebrate and have fun! Here's an unusual pi-themed Sudoku puzzle to challenge your brain. Instead of a standard 9 by 9 Sudoku using the numbers 1-9, this is a 12 by 12 Sudoku in which each row, column and region (most of which aren't rectangular) must contain the first 12 digits of Pi (3.14159265358). The three 5s two 3s and two 1s add a new dimension of challenge to this puzzle. For a little more passive fun on Mac OS X 10.4 or greater, check out the Pi Viewer and Pi Clock Dashboard widgets. For some more passive Pi fun on any platform, how about the now-classic Hard n Phirm Pi song:



If you're not looking for just the digits, you can go to this video or this website.

Don't forget! It's also Einstein's birthday today! If you'd like to celebrate Einstein's life and have some fun, learn a little bit about his relativity theory over at Al's Relatavistic Adventures and EinsteinLight.

Don't forget to look around Grey Matters and explore all it has to offer, such as the all the Pi posts I've made. Maybe you'll find an entirely new section of the site you didn't know about before! I've enjoyed these three years, and I hope you've enjoyed the ideas and posts I present. Here's to another year of Grey Matters!

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Finding Better Mnemonic Images

Published on Sunday, March 09, 2008 in ,

BrainThere are times when it's not easy to come up with an effective image for a particular mnemonic. You may not realize it, but you have a great tool right in front of you for finding them.

As an example of what I'm talking about, let's say you're trying to learn a foreign language. As I mentioned in my foreign language post just under a year ago, I've found these language-learning techniques to be quite effective. However, as written in the article, they aren't perfect.

Read through to the town language mnemonic section. Nouns, adjectives, verbs, and even genders and other languages are covered. This seems to be a complete system.

Even though adverbs aren't mentioned, it's easy to see how the system could be adapted. Perhaps images for adverbs could be placed in the parking lot of the stadium where verb images are kept.

Just to catch you up on this system so far, let's say you're learning Spanish. You're trying to remember that the Spanish word for turtle is tortuga. You might picture a turtle torturing Gillian Anderson (torturing GA = tortuga) in the downtown area. When remembering that slow is lento, you could use that same image of a turtle covered in lint, but because it's in the city park where all the adjective images are kept, you know that it means slow, instead of turtle. When you see that same turtle in the stadium parking lot, you'll realize that this image refers to slowly. Since many Spanish adverbs end in the suffix -mente, you may want to add mentos into the image, so that a turtle covered in lint and mentos in a stadium parking lot will help you remember that Spanish for slowly is lentamente.

I'm about to poke a big hole in this seemingly-thorough system. Don't worry, though, as I'll fill it right up.

Moving onto the next section of the article, we get a handy list of the most commonly-used words. Notice how few words on this list fall into the category of nouns, adjectives, verbs and adverbs. Most of them are conjunctions, articles, prepositions, pronouns, and other equally hard-to-picture forms of speech.

What kind of image could you possibly use for a, an, because, if or for (or, for that matter, or)? I've actually given you some subtle clues already.

You could search for ideas for words like a, an, or the on search engines like Google or Yahoo ideas, but so many pages contain these words that, when these search engines don't discard them all together, the results won't always be helpful. What to do then?

In this case, Wikipedia is actually a better resource. Search engines are focused on web page content in general, while Wikipedia is focused more on specific facts. Most often, you can take advantage of Wikipedia's diambiguation feature. Check out the diambiguation pages for a, an, because, for and or, for example. Notice especially that the last two even suggest similar-sound words (four for for, and ore and oar for or).

Once you've decided on an image for a particular word, then the search engines and other great websites start being helpful. Let's say you're looking for an image for the word because, and thanks to Wikipedia's disambiguation page for because, you've decided to use the image of the Beatles singing for it. If you're not immediately familiar with it, or even because you are, you might want to search for a video of that song, and watch that video to strengthen your image for it!

Another advantage in using Wikipedia is that you can find images for even the toughest words in over 100 different languages!

Even if you're trying to find an image for a word that doesn't have a disambiguation page, such as also, you're still given plenty of alternatives. Maybe you'll chose Also sprach Zarathustra and related images from 2001: A Space Odyssey for it. Alternatively, you might choose images from The Sun Also Rises or even something unfamiliar such as the Russian Alsos.

Now, in the Town Language Mnemonic, I tend to keep smaller words like this in a library and/or a bookstore. That way, I know I'm dealing with the smaller, picture-less words. The purpose of this post, however, isn't really to help you to learn a new language, but rather to help you see how the internet can be used as a great tool to expand your library of mnemonic images. I hope you've found this useful.

Quick note: Instead of posting this Thursday, as I normally would, I'm going to post on Friday instead. Friday is 3/14, which is Pi Day, Einstein's birthday and Grey Matters' blogiversary!

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21: The Movie

Published on Thursday, March 06, 2008 in , , , ,

21: The MovieThere's a new movie coming out at the end of this month, about the MIT Blackjack Team. Check out the trailer for 21.

The movie concerns a team of MIT students who learn basic strategy, card counting, money management, and other techniques that allow them to develop an edge when playing blackjack. The team was a reformation the original MIT Blackjack Team from the 1970's, but with the new '90s version being run as a business called Strategic Investments. The movie is largely based on the book Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six MIT Students Who Took Vegas for Millions, by Ben Mezrich (whose character becomes Ben Campbell in the movie).

Documentaries have been made about the team, including a BBC documentary called Making Millions The Easy Way. The program itself isn't available online, but the BBC has provided an excellent program summary, question and answer column, and even a complete transcript of the documentary.

The History Channel's documentary on the topic was called Breaking Vegas, which was popular enough to be developed into a short series about people who tried to beat the casinos (both legitimately and otherwise). This special is shown here (complete with commercials):



From the look of the movie trailer and the official site, it looks like it's going to be a stylized version of the story, but adding some drama to it should be good for the storytelling. I like this kind of story not just because of the mathematical hero, but also the basic little-guy-vs.-big-guy aspect of the story. It's also a great story of people beating the odds by using their brains, but without the brains coming off as superhuman. As you'll see in the movie, documentaries or book, they still have to face their emotional sides, too.

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Yet Still More Quick Snippets

Published on Sunday, March 02, 2008 in , , , , , , , ,

LinksNow that it's March 2nd, it's time to march forth with today's snippets:

* There's a great commercial flashcard program for Mac OS X, called Mental Case. It ordinarily costs $29, but if you go to this page in cool OS X apps before 7:30 AM PST/10:30 AM EST on March 3rd, you can save 45% on it! Just scroll down and click on the Buy For ONLY $15.95 button to get the discount! This is a great deal, especially considering that their educational discounts only get you $10 off.

* If you enjoy the classic 15 puzzle, check out Puzzlet Factory! They have over 10,000 picture sliding puzzles for you to solve. You can create your own, as well. If you enjoy this site, but want your puzzles on the go, try Puzzlet Factory's new iPhone gallery.

* If you've mastered the Knight's Tour, I've got another variation for you. This one is called Knight Switch (Flash required). On a 3 by 3 chessboard, all you have to do is switch the position of the gold knights with the blue knights. Both the timer and the small chessboard make this trickier than it sounds.

* You've probably heard about the song chart meme. The idea is to take a popular song, and convert it into some form of chart, such as a graph or a flow chart, that displays the song. There have been many of these here and there, but now there's a great Song Chart Flickr Pool. Among my favorites are the American Pie Chart, the chart of countries that should and shouldn't cry for me, things I would do for love, and the Luftballoon chart.

* Earlier this year, Neatorama posted a great look at The Wonderful World of Early Computing. It's an amazing look at the devices we've created to deal with our numeric needs. This is a sort of physical equivalent of BetterExplained's A Quirky Introduction To Number Systems. If you're interested in a great history of the early digital computer scene ('70s and '80s), check out Atari Archives, especially The Best of Creative Computing, volumes one, two and three. One of my favorite article here is The World In Your Own Notebook, in which a 1970's computer user theorizes about the future possibilities of a personal notebook-sized computer. It makes me want to grab a MacBook Air and hop into a time machine.

That's all for now. Don't forget, in less than two weeks, it will be Pi Day, Einstein's birthday and Grey Matters' 3rd blogiversary!

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