In idle moments of high school, I learned the twelve digits of a certain transcendental number stored in my scientific calculator. Since then, whenever I saw the number online or on a T-shirt, I tried to add a digit or two, but didn't make much progress. I don't remember what prompted it, but not long ago I was trolling around for a memory training tool, maybe looking for inspiration for the long-neglected vocabulary project. I found some sites that let you test your skills with the number, but the interfaces were flawed -- you had to submit something to see if it was correct. It was obvious that it could be done better, and thirty minutes and thirty-five lines of Javascript later, it was done.

As usual, making the tool was more fun than using it. But despite my lack of motivation, within a week I was seeing the horizontal scroll bar, even on cold starts. It isn't hard at all to remember three to six digits; the trick is to review them a while later, before they fade away, like that memory guy. Thus did those Robert Palmer songs embed themselves so deeply into long term memory that they are still present a decade and a half later.

I've no plans to compete with the experts, but it's been fun to see how far I can get with simple mnemonic devices. Here's a block of digits and the story I use to recall it:

197169399375105820974944592307816406

In 1971, everyone was having mutual oral sex, which suggests the number 3993 for some reason. By 1975, it had reached 105 degrees, then by '82 everyone wanted to go back to 1974, when they were driving Porsche 944s, some even had a 959. Here comes the part with interesting numbers. 23 and 07 are nice primes. 81 is a square, so is 16, and so is 64...

After a while, the chunky flow of digits becomes automatic and I only use the story when I get stuck. If you're really committed, you might become proficient in a digit-to-letter mapping technique that encodes the same block into this concise doggerel:

ACe ToP CaT BaD SHaBBy MoB BoNe PuMa CLaw BuM weT SaLiVa BeeR NoSe PiCK BeLL RePaiReR BaDGe Law By NaMe BaG SaCK FooD BuFF CHaiR'S waSH

You have less freedom this way to build mnemonics on the first crazy ideas that come to mind (which are far easier to recall), but there's an advantage. The index words, ACe, BaD, BoNe, BuM, are suggested by the position in the chart, and those index words suggest the digit-encoding phrases.

It's been a while since I committed anything useful to memory, and I wouldn't mind being able to pull up something like The Rime of the Ancient Mariner on a whim. Probably I would get more benefit by focusing on vocabulary, but that seems like such drudgery.