Spencer Davis

Introducing Spencer Davis, our Vice-President of Technology. Just to be clear, while Spencer is an admirer of such hits as "I'm a man" and "Gimme Some Loving", he is not their author. And while the guitarist of The Spencer Davis Group (who is still going strong at 70) also shares the nickname 'The professor' with our Spencer, he has little else in common with Memrise's resident 18 year-old programming prodigy.

In From Dawn Till Decadence, Jacques Barzun insisted that his survey of the last 500 years of Western Culture be about men and women, as might be expected, but also about teenagers and children. In our ageist society, he pointed out, we tend to forget or disdain the accomplishments of the young, assuming them incapable of serious merit. But an even glance at history furnishes us with a hundred examples of teenagers whose deeds rank at the very summit of human achievement.

To take just a handful of examples: Joan of Arc was supreme commander of her national armies at 17; Mendelssohn and Saint-Saens wrote their greatest compositions before their nineteenth birthdays; Evariste Galois, before he died in a duel at the age of 20, had already founded a major branch of abstract algebra; Arthur Rimbaud wrote some of the greatest poems in the French language as a teen; and though I say so myself... oh forget it.

Spencer -schoolboy winner of a Google coding contest, fluent in seven programming languages, an informational aesthete who savors the subtleties of Django and Lisp while scorning the clumsier offerings of Objective-C- belongs in just this company.

And while the similarities with, say, Mendelssohn at a similar age are incontrovertible, Spencer is not the type to peak too early: he won't waste his maturity on anything so inept as an Elijah. The depth of his intellectual resources is too great, the texture of his insight too fine, for his talents to be so easily exhausted. As with Mozart, it will be between the ages of 25 and 35, one senses, that the masterpieces will really begin to flow from his fingers.

By that time, who knows what Spencer will be doing, where he'll be? Will he even have the time patiently to click 'reject' to each of Mark Zuckerberg's torrent of friend-requests, or to accede to Andy Bechtolsheim's plea for a reference? We cannot say. For the moment, though, what an honour it is that it should be at Memrise that Spencer has elected to grow his talents, refine his craft and compose his first authentic masterpiece of code.

Having just re-orchestrated the whole code-base so that it positively rings with Mozartian poise and harmony, Spencer is now turning his talents to the exciting new features whose praises our users will soon, no doubt, be singing.

Mems & Puns - an Introduction

As you know, mems are ways of linking words to vivid images to make the word more memorable. Mems work because we remember seeing things much more strongly than we remember thinking things. A vivid image comes into your brain much more readily than the meaning of a word.

But the ears are important, too: the reason that 'feel his teats' is a good hint to the meaning of 'felicitate' is that they sound the same. In effect, mems are puns - so I thought I'd write a little about puns.

Puns involve changing a word in a sentence for one that sounds the same but that has a different meaning. (Why was ten scared? Because seven ate nine). Puns are about the simplest form of joke and people love them or hate them.

The English playwright William Shakespeare loved puns: there are around three thousand in his plays, including this by Mercutio, who knows he is about to die and go to his grave: "If you look for me tomorrow you will find I am a grave man". (btw 'grave' means 'serious'. Hilarious.)

The English writer Samuel Johnson loved words (he compiled one of the first English Dictionaries pretty much by himself) but hated puns: he called them 'the lowest form of humour'.

Whether you love them or hate them they are everywhere. Hairdressers love them especially - the below are all real:

Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow

Crops and Bobbers

Thairapy Salon

The Hairport

Puns cause a strong reaction in our brains, either towards laughing or groaning - one way to test a child for autism is to see whether he or she reacts to a pun. Either a laugh or a groan is normal; no reaction is an indicator of the disorder. And it's this strong reaction, coupled with the power of our visual memories, that make mems work.

I finish with a spectacular pun from Richard Whately, Archbishop of Dublin in the 19th Century:

“Why can a man never starve in the Great Desert? Because he can eat the sand which is there. But what brought the sandwiches there? Why, Noah sent Ham, and his descendants mustered and bred.”

What is an etymology?

Hello! I’m Katrina and I’m in charge of researching the etymologies of English words here at Memrise.

Etymologies are the histories of words: the stories of where they come from, and how they came to mean what they now do.

Etymologies are a great tool for learning words, because they have intrinsic value and the same etymology often accounts for several words. Take for example the word 'right'.

Right means good, correct, and can also, of course, mean the side of your body that points east if you are turned northwards.

The right hand has in very many cultures come to symbolize what is good, skillful and right in human life. The poor left hand, meanwhile, has historically signified the opposite. It is extraordinary now to think that people were once accused of witch-craft and burned at the stake on account of left-handedness; that till very recently it was common for them to have their left hand tied under their school desks to deter them from using it. Even today, left-handers are still routinely excluded from psychology experiments.

Knowledge of this preposterous prejudice is not only interesting in itself, but it helps decipher many words in our language- the word sinister for example.

You might know from studying languages such as Latin or French, or from using Memrise, that sinister in Latin means left.

Because left is associated with the bad, the definition of sinister in English is giving the impression that something harmful or evil is happening or will happen.

Ambidextrous, meanwhile, comes from the Latin, ‘ambi’ meaning both sides, and ‘dexter’ meaning right-handed, so ambidextrous means skillful: able to use both hands equally well, like two right hands.

‘Levous’, meanwhile, means left-handed, so ambilevous means clumsy, able to use both hands equally unwell, like two left hands. It’s an excellent word to use in an insult, and one we frequently apply to our competitors.

Unfortunately, etymologies aren’t always so interesting, and most of the time it is much more enjoyable to remember the meaning of a word with an arresting mem that links the word's form to its meaning by witty fiction, not historical fact.

But there are nonetheless plenty of interesting etymologies out there. Here is one of my favorites, for the word assassinate.

Around the time of the Crusaders, a branch of Ismaili Muslims were principally known for doing one thing—killing lots of people, an activity that they liked to warm up for by smoking a lot of hash.

Amazingly, 1000 years later, their legacy lives on in the word assassinate. In Arabic, haisisi, or hashish eater, gives us the root of assassinate, to murder for political or religious reasons.

Mem of the Day: Sunday, November 8th 2009

Hello - my name's Jonny and I head up the team that is creating mems for the site.

If you are new here, mems are the individual mental images that help you remember a specific word by tying it to something memorable. Each word you learn has a number of mems to choose from, or you can create your own. The best mems take the word, turn it inside out, scrape out its innards and blow it up like a Macy's Day Parade balloon.

So this is the first in a series of posts about mems themselves: a behind-the-scenes feature that showcases particularly effective mems and explains why they work. First up:

Felicitate
n. Congratulate
Imagine you congratulate a football player and feel his teats

'Felicitate' itself doesn't sound very interesting - it doesn't spark any images in my brain, as I don't know a Felicity - so I have to tie it to something interesting. The first step is to think of things that 'felicitate' sounds like, because words are strongly tied to other words that sound the same. So:

Felix ate
Felix eight
Felicity ate
Felicity eight
Flicks it eight
Flick sissy taint
Feel his teats

Three things always produce vivid images: sex, violence and the unusual. So 'feel his teats' is a good start because it is sexy and unusual. Now we need a setting for the image.

How about football? That is violent, and also the idea of feeling a macho male footballer's teats is particularly unusual.

So we have an image - someone feeling someone's teats. We have a setting - football. We need to tie the image to the meaning of the word, so the person feeling the teats has to be congratulating the person as well. By a simple process the mem becomes:

Imagine you congratulate a football player and feel his teats

What's a mem?

Mems are little ways of remembering things. You'll already know and use lots of them, without perhaps being aware of the fact: I'm talking about little phrases like "30 days has September, April, June and November".

Mems, I should of course note, are also known as mnemonics. Excellently, the word 'mnemonic' is so difficult to remember that it rather requires one of itself- a mnemonic- to help one remember it. Which is, let's face it, pretty silly. We much prefer the word 'mem'.

Mems are astoundingly effective for learning things: words, facts, relationships. Their effectiveness has been demonstrated empirically- and in two distinct ways. Through Science, in countless psychology experiments; but also through the interesting empirical device of the Memory Competition.

So psychology has demonstrated 3x increases in retention where mems are used to assist learning. But perhaps just as persuasively, and very interestingly, competitive memory competitions have also demonstrated the utter indispensability of the mem for the speediest of learning- and in a very original way.

In a memory competition, whatever works, works. That's to say, if you have a better technique than the next person, you'll likely win. Quickly in a competitive environment, the best techniques out. Much more quickly than in Science- because the goal is much simpler.

As a result, the World Memory Championships, which have been going on for 19 years (during which World Records for memory have risen almost by a factor of ten), have served as a brilliant filtering mechanism for what works and what doesn't in the realm of memory-technique. I'll blog about this more in the future, but, in a nutshell, mems are one of about three constants across all the serious competitors- they're part of the basic toolkit of someone who wishes to super-power their learning. There won't be a single person who's made it to the competition taking place in London later this month who doesn't make liberal use of mems. People who don't can't compete effectively, no matter how gifted they are. The championships have served as a research program: and what's been found out is that mems are gold.

That is: it's turned out that if you want to remember stuff quickly and effectively and robustly, you should use mems.

We will soon be discussing in great detail on the blog the ins and out of mems: why they work, how they work, when they can be put to work.

Sean Emmer

Sean "The Memmer" Emmer was surely destined to work with Memrise; and he has made diverse contributions to our evolution. He played a vital role in the early development of our interface, and has been a source of impressive guidance on matters of taste- most notably, he astutely insisted in the early days that Greg should not record choral interludes to be played after each correct answer in the learning cave.

Sean's our go-to man for the front end of the website, which he codes (in "code") in what has come to be known round the office as the "Horizontal Emmer". This is a posture where the knees are held exactly parallel to the chest, and orthogonal to gravity: it thus resembles a cardboard cutout which has been chopped at the knee, with the rest of its body flopping back and horizontally propped upon, for instance, a chair. In this configuration, Sean's mac rests on his chest. He cranes his neck to be able to sight his screen as he codes, resembling one of those collapsed accordion-players you see in French town squares who insists on playing on, despite the inebriation.

Sean's a student at Princeton -the Almer Mater of that homicidal Vice-President Aaron Burr- and he spends his time somewhere within the obscure corridors of the alpha-rho-epsilon-gamma-beta-zeta-eta-theta-omicron fraternity, when not studying economics and such like.

Greg and I, ever mindful of our employees' welfare, at one point went to visit Sean at a party at said phratry. Everybody was dressed in tank-tops and shorts, wading in beer. In our tweeds, we stuck out. Unfortunately, not just because of our clothes: we disgraced ourselves and the evening ended with an altercation over the "proper interpretation of beer-pong". That was the last time we saw Sean.

He subsequently left off to "investigate the cultural traditions of Asia". The only evidence we have for his continued existence are his user stats- he's been learning 300 Thai words a day- and the photo you see.

Sean- we have some new features we want to implement- please come back!

The Mem Team

Down in the engine-room, we have a formidable team who have been producing a wealth of entertaining content for our SAT word learning game. It is high time they were introduced.

First, though, it is worth explaining how there are two strands to the content we are generating. On the one hand, we are creating a database of mnemonics, or Mems, to help our users learn words; secondly, we are researching where words come, their roots or etymologies, to provide an alternative pathway of discovery and memorization.

We'll begin here with the mem-creation

To work well, mems have to be pithy, vigorous and elevated by their wit. But as with romantic text-messages, the effort that goes into their composition must be invisible. They have to evoke emotion, please the ear and amuse- while retaining their naturalness.

Was it not Thoreau who said "whenever a sentence will bear to be read twice, we may be sure it was thought twice"?

Jonny Lowndes has dizzily ascended from being a staff-writer to the position of mem-creator in chief. Formerly a student of Russian, English and Film Studies, he makes use of Memrise's policy of 50% time to pen travel-narratives, short stories and film-scripts during his afternoons.

In the mornings, though, he writes mems and leads a disparate team of mem-creators, guiding them on matters of style and conception. In this capacity, he has overseen the creation of a database of almost 10,000 mems.

His interest in the literary form of the mem, and its peculiar stylistic demands, derives from its similarity to the aphorism, and from the demands it places on concision, elegance and invention. His collected mems will, we hope, one day be published in a series that will also comprise some of the other foci for his wit: among them, his collected text-messages and the various ways in which he has named wifi networks, to the delight and curiosity of unseen neighbors.

Katrina Devaney, meanwhile, has been directing our etymological research. She's been finding out where words come from, and thinking about ways of using this knowledge to help people learn better. She's also been working on our live user-testing protocol.

We're (quite) proud of how cosmopolitan we are at Memrise, though we still have some work to do before we can call ourselves a world start-up. Katrina is our leading cosmopolitenne: she has lived in Australia, Texas, Indonesia, the West Indies, Africa and South Georgia. She has an interest in modern and classical languages, in symbolic systems and in world cuisine. With her 50% time, she is investigating the ins and outs of Indian food.