Paul Miller wrote:
>> On Sun, 21 Nov 1999 07:29:21 -0500, "Alan Roth" <alan42 at mindspring.com> wrote:
>> >> When I
> >> recite the first 200 decimal places of pi, I do it musically: I rely
> >> on the sounds and (predominantly) tones of the Cantonese pronunciation
> >> of the 10 digits. So, I can't recite them if I try to do it in
> >> Mandarin or English.
>> >I have a musical background but had not thought of using it this way,
> >(and I certainly can't recite pi to 200 decimal places with sheer
> >memorization).
>> You certainly could if you put the effort into it. Actors memorize entire
> plays, and Homeric poets memorized epics. Surely 200 words is not too much to
> memorize? Some soliloquies in Shakespeare run longer than this!
A 200-word speech has semantic content. A string of 200 occurrences of
10 different words has no semantic content. (Unless, of course, you
*calculate* the value of pi each time you recite its digits.)
Off-the-shelf memory can handle lists of "five plus or minus two"
unrelated items.
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim at worldnet.att.net
