Reader Challenge!

Seeing as I haven't posted one of these in a while, I'd like to give some viewers a chance to make some deductions without offering any assistance or ideas of my own. In order to do that, I've posted a (slightly embarrassing) picture of myself for you all to practice on.

Challenge: Tell me as much as you can about what is going on in this picture. Use any and all tricks and techniques at your disposal.

If we don't get enough responses, I may ask a few leading questions to keep it going.

Happy deducing!

P.S. If you happened to be there at the time this picture was taken (obviously someone was), then please either refrain from commenting, OR be extra careful to support what might be considered unfairly obtained information.

Deduction #8

My interests have been piqued, and I'm excited to present a new deduction for you all.

First, a few more obvious things:

• College student, age consistent with what appears to be my primary demographic
• Lives in North America (light sockets are wonderful things)
• Dorm resident (I have eyes)

Statistically speaking, our student is a freshman (dorm resident), but I think this hypothesis is supported by their general lack of "stuff," as well as the presence of brand-new 120 page notebooks.

Using time-stamps on the picture and the submission website, I can be reasonably certain that our subject resides in the Eastern Time Zone. So far, the area that appears most likely (but only slightly) is near Virginia, as the company whose name appears on the purple and white item on the desk has their headquarters there.

It appears our subject is also interested in Sociology or is at least enrolled in a class on the subject. It's hard to Google the name "Ritzer," without finding the associated books, one of which is "Essentials of Sociology," which this one appears to be. Based on the complexity of the material, I'd say the book is consistent with our freshman theory.

Let's talk about the chargers in the power strip. There's an apple charger there, which I believe is likely to belong to someone other than the subject of the picture, as the picture itself was taken with an Android Phone (metadata) and the laptop appears to be a windows machine.

Okay, time for the desk. Right-handed, tea-not-coffee, weirdness with the green lightbulb in the desk lamp. Subject went out for breakfast prior to taking the picture (breakfast sandwhich?). Right-handed based on mouse and fork. I am interested in the choice of the large mouse-pad, which suggests our subject utilizes the computer for a task for which precise mouse-movement is useful (Photoshop, online gaming, etc.). Key ring has three keys on it, one of which is for the dorm-room door. Of the remaining two, one looks fairly mailboxey, and the other might very well be to an externally facing door, although it's a little unclear. Also, is that a bottle-opener on the other end of that keychain? Finally, I should mention that I'm incredibly flattered by this particular deduction photo, as our subject appears to be perusing my blog whilst taking the picture.

A few more miscellaneous notes - the computer's shape makes me think gaming PC, as does the cord which appears to facilitate a headset that has an attached microphone. Our subject is fairly neat. The bed is made, the shoes are lined up, and the books/notebooks are stacked. That, plus the blanket on the bed and Christmas lights shifts the balance of probability slightly in the female direction, but then we have the gaming PC, the minimalist key-chain, the shoe size compared to national average (barring any scaling mistakes I made), and the type of shoe shifting it slightly in the male direction. I confess to not being comfortable making a for-sure gender distinction, as the evidence here has more to do with how our subject prefers their room than their gender.

This brings up an interesting point about this science. Utilizing averages to determine probabilistically who a subject is (gender-wise or otherwise) will work ON AVERAGE. But simply knowing that the average male foot is slightly larger will not tell you who a person is, or even that they are male if all you are going on is their shoe-size. It will only tell you where someone lies on a bell-curve, once we decide which bell curve we are on. So be very careful with these types of conclusions. The solution (almost always) is get more data. After all, we cannot make bricks without clay.

I'm very interested to see others' opinions on this one, and I can't wait for someone to point out something I may have missed. Happy sleuthing!

A Word About Abduction

Abductive reasoning is something that you may not have heard of, but rest assured, of the modes of thought responsible for Sherlock Holmes' brilliance, it is the most important. It combines rigid logical connections of deduction with the fluidity of induction.

Simply put, abductive reasoning is what Holmes uses to do his thing.

Holmes is famous for the line, "Once you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable must be the truth." Strictly speaking, this is true. When one has a set of n possible options, eliminating (n-1) of these options will result in one option remaining. What this phrase fails to take into account is how one actually generates this list of n possible options.

The fact is, you CAN'T just make up a list of all of the possible options. Any list of possibilities you can come up with will be incomplete. You can always add things like, "OR, aliens could have abducted him, probed him, then staged his murder to make it LOOK like he was poisoned." There's NO WAY that's what happened, but speaking deductively, you also can't 100% rule it out. That's where abductive reasoning comes in.

It allows you to gauge possibility in a slightly less rigid way, while still keeping most of the logical progressions we love about deduction. This mode of thought is what allows Sherlock Holmes to generate his list of possible explanations for how the crime may have occurred, after which point he can apply his rigorous logic and his brilliant detective skills to narrow the possibilities down to a single solitary solution.

How does one apply this reasoning to one's own {cases, life, questions} you ask? Two things above all else benefit a detective in this endeavor - a formidable memory and an abundance of imagination.

Sherlock Holmes manages to generate possible scenarios so quickly partly due to his vast knowledge of crimes already committed. As he is so fond of saying, "There is nothing new under the sun." Thus, he is able to extrapolate possible means, motives, and even weapons - from crimes of a similar nature which have already happened. When he is not able to find a suitable comparison, his mind searches for new and unexpected ways in which events could have transpired. An excellent way to inspire such strokes of investigatory brilliance is to ask one's self, "What if it didn't happen that way?" or "How could this have been possible given X and Y?" or even "If I were the killer...?"

Long story short, the abductive way to find the answer is to create a set of possible options, one of which HAS to be the answer, and keep eliminating things until one reaches a solution. It's certainly not glamorous, but damn if it isn't Holmes.

Deduction #7

Another College Student!

This one was fun. Right off the bat, we have a female subject. Evidently she is quite the bookworm based on the stack of Young Adult novels on the right side of the desk. Next we have her name, Annie, which is written on several of the pieces of paper on the bulletin board running the length of the desk. We could talk about her affinity for horses, or the fact that she seems to be a Vikings fan, or the operating system of her computer (Windows 7 I think), but I think I've found something more interesting. A closer inspection of the lanyards hanging just behind the lamp reveal the logo of UST, a Catholic College in St. Paul, Minnesota. That by itself is not a ton to go on. However, once we add the brand-new student ID (still in sleeve) and what appears to be a welcome packet on the desk, I feel quite safe in assuming that you are an incoming Freshman at the school.

Now that we know a little about the who, let's talk about where. Given previous information, we should answer the question of whether this picture was taken in a dorm room. I'm confident it was not. The layout of the room (lamp reflection) suggest single-occupant bedroom. Not only that, but this picture was sent to me about a month ago, a full 10 days before you could have moved in. Based on a few quick statistics from UST's website, I conclude that you most likely are staying in a dorm the first year.

Now for the fun part. The picture was taken with an Apple Device (Ipad) which, as we know from previous deductions, has a nasty habit of encoding GPS data into its pictures. Without going into too much detail, I was able to get a pretty good lock on your location at the time the picture was taken. This type of information would allow someone to, oh I don't know, find the Facebook page for the incoming freshman class of UST, search for the name "Annie," and narrow the search by hometown. Upon doing that, one would discover that you ARE in fact staying in a dorm (the exact one will not be mentioned), and that you were at one point engaged in the process of searching for a flatmate in true Sherlockian fashion. If the cup in your room (reflection in picture frame) is any indication, you must be quite happy about the number and proximity of Arby's at your new location in the dorms.

Happy sleuthing!

10,000

We did it! Ladies an gentlemen, the blogger version of my blog (the original, pre-Tumblr version) has reached over 10,000 views! This is a huge milestone for me, and it has renewed my motivation to continue the experiment and help others improve their deduction/induction/memory skills.

Thanks to everyone who has commented, submitted pictures for practice, and suggested ideas for posts, and practiced along with me! Keep it up!

Deduction #6

Another two-for-one!

Number one - how do we know that these were taken by the same person? Just in case the lighting, decor, and wall coloring were not enough to convince you, we also have the metadata from the picture to confirm that the photos were taken at approximately the same time by the same phone (which by the way was an Iphone 5s) (See a fun little computer trick).

Another interesting thing about this picture's metadata is that it contains some very specific GPS data which supposedly marks the location the picture was taken. Unfortunately, plugging in the data verbatim yields a location somewhere is Kazakhstan, which worried me greatly as there was nothing in the pictures to suggest that as a viable location. In fact, the many English book titles along with the dollar bill attached to your desk might seem to suggest that you live in America. Further exploration of the metadata shows us that the pictures were taken at approximately 11:25 am, but submitted to Padlet about 3 hours prior at about 8:35. If we assume it took about 10 minutes for you to upload the pictures (which I feel is a reasonable assumption given all the data), then via this method we can safely say that you fall into the Eastern Time Zone.

Needless to say I was quite confused about your location. Especially after I noticed that the bottom left corner of your mathematics textbook on the desk. "Chapitre 3." Not a phrase you'd expect on the East Coast of the United States. But it did give me something to go on. Either the girl to whom this room belongs is home-schooled by french parents OR the language of the area in which she lives is French. If we assume the second, then certain parts of Canada meet 2 of the 3 location stipulations - must be in Eastern Time Zone, and must speak French and English fairly commonly. The only outlier seems to be the GPS coordinates. After considering the options, I decided that the balance of probability rested with the notion that somehow the GPS data must be wrong. So I set out to find out HOW wrong.

As it turns out, when Iphone pictures are transferred, either through certain apps or image editing software, the GPS data is altered, resulting in the + and - signs being cut off the front. For those of you unfamiliar with latitude and longitude measurements, the signs allows the reader to ascertain which hemisphere will be used. Without them, the numbers in the GPS field could refer to exactly 4 locations in the world. (++, --, +-, -+). After looking at the possible locations, I found that one of them is a house in Montreal.

https://www.google.com/maps/@45.5,-73.8,10z

In the interest of not giving away this person's address, I've truncated the data so as not to deliver such a precise location.

Now onto the fun stuff.

Tentatively, I'm going to say we have a fairly well-rounded, bi-lingual, christian, right-handed female near her early teens with medium to long hair, living in an upper middle class household.

Well rounded based on the piano, soccer ball and packaged assumption that she's either a fan or a player (admittedly weak), and all of the books with titles in two languages (bi-lingual). The religious pictures on the top left part of the book shelf (combined with an over 80% Christian population in Montreal) says Christian. Right-handed because the notebook and pen are placed to the right of the textbook, and all of the writing utensils on the desk are to the right side. Female should be a pretty easy one at this point. We've got the shoe and dress on the desk shelf, various figurines on the bookshelf, and a hair clip on the desk top. Speaking of the hair clip - we can eliminate excessively short hair cuts as our subject would have little use for this type of clip. Upper middle class household based partly on the style of the bookshelves, the price of the matching sets of the various book series, and the local neighborhood property values (easier to find when you have the subject's location).

The only one I'm not super comfortable with is the age of the subject. I managed to find that textbook online, and it appears to be for cycle 1 of the secondary education program in Canada, which I believe equates to upper middle school/ early high school in the USA. In addition, the books on the shelf (the ones I recognize) are young adult titles (Ex: Hunger Games, Caster Chronicles). But something seems off. Either this room has been recently cleaned, the age of the subject is actually higher than I suspected, or this is one organized teenager.

My big question is this - "What is written on that dollar bill?"

If you have any questions, critiques, or violent disagreements, please comment or send me a message. If these are your pictures, please respond and let me know how I did, and be sure to clear up any mistakes I may have made.

Mind Palace - Organization

Hey guys. Since my last post, I've been hard at work tweaking my mind palace so that it functions at its maximum potential. in light of that, I'm going to do some more posts on how to organize and maximize the efficiency of your mind palace.

For those of you looking for an update, I've now permanently stored the following data in my memory palace:

• The order of the U.S. Presidents (and some of the vice presidents... still in progress)
• Rudyard Kipling's poem, "If"
• An excerpt from "Hunting Season" by Beau Taplin
• The name and year of every movie to win an Academy Award for Best Picture
• A few debit card numbers (mine, that is)
• The order of a specific deck of playing cards (used for magic tricks)
• All of the locations of the above data relative to my mind palace

If the last bullet point seems a little circular, rest assured that it's not. It IS, however, what I would like to discuss with you today.

(Warning: Meta-Thinking Paragraph Ahead)
You see, having a lot of knowledge and being able to utilize it are two completely different concepts. While having a functional memory palace in which to store specific types of information can be / is incredibly useful, it's only useful insofar as you remember where you put everything. In other words, you can know that you know who the 19th president was, but until you actually go into your palace and pull Rutherford B. Hayes out, you don't actually know who the 19th president was. If someone came up to you and asked what data you've put away in your mind palace, how would you go about answering their question? In short, while it is very easy to know things, soon one discovers that the harder problem is actually to know what you know.

This is one of the main problems with utilizing the memory palace method to permanently store lots of information - no doubt something Sherlock Holmes would have had to deal with fairly early on in his exploits. Rest assured, there is a solution. For the purposes of this post, we're going to refer to it as The Index. Thus far, I have experimented with 2 variations which we'll call web and map indexing.

What is an index?

If you've ever been to a library, you should know the answer to this question. An index is a system of organization, usually taking the form of a list (often alphabetized). How does this apply to us? The short version is this - we're going to make a mind palace containing everything we know, AND where to find it.

The Web:
In experimenting with the web index, I created a small room (think elementary school classroom) and painted the walls all different colors and lined them with bookshelves of different kinds and various decorations so that no two walls were even remotely similar. On the bookshelves, I placed tiny trinkets - things that would remind me of the specific information stored within them - as well as a reminder of the location where the information was stored. (Ex: A picture of President Obama standing in front of my old home would tell me that the U.S. presidents were stored in that home.) I had one trinket for every chunk of information I had logged away. One problem I ran into with this method was that it quickly became difficult to store information, especially literature, on the bookshelf with other similar data. In order to fix this issue, I would recommend creating tiny rooms hidden behind the bookshelves to serve as the set of loci (Latin word for locations) rather than the bookshelf itself. The method functions like a web in that while there are no expressly visualized pathways to your various mind palaces, they ARE connected through your trinkets, making each trinket a vital link to the information you want to remember.

The Map:
The thing about map indexing is that it doesn't actually exist. Sure, I gave a name to the concept, but the essential bit here is that we're just making a bigger mind palace. Rather, we are combining all of our existing mind palaces into one gigantic cobbled together neighborhood of mind palaces. For a more in-depth look at this idea, check out "The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci" by Johnathan D. Spence. Old-school mnemonists used to use city blocks, or whole cities, as mind palaces, making the amount of information you can store as large as the city in which you stored it. Then, we can rename houses, blocks, or even streets to segment the data you are storing (Ex: The "head trauma" room in the "Emergency Medicine" house on "Science Street"). The tricky thing about this method is that in order to effectively use such a large area, one must be either very familiar with the area or very willing to make up a lot of the missing details on their own. One more difficulty is that even if you use a neighborhood you know well, odds are that you don't know the layouts of all the houses. But really, there's no reason to use those houses, is there? One could simply use the layout of an old neighborhood and plant all of the houses one has known or lived in to create a new neighborhood full of memory storage space.