Saturday, March 1, 2014

Life: Practicing Basic Math while Reading Random Blogs

Sometimes I just enjoy reading random blogs to see what people write about. When I do so, I also track how long they keep their blogs going.

One of things I also look for is the number of posts they blogged. Of course, I only record the ones that have the list of blogs that are countable (typically blogs with list of years with the number of blogs in the year). I count these in my head for my table of data.

While trying to do the math in my head, I have found that I can "see" the numbers quickly in my head... but it takes a while for me to recognize the number. What I mean by that is that it takes me a while to "say" the number especially if I had to carry a number. For example, 88 + 33 = 121. For some reason, I doubt myself even though I see "121" in my head so I double check that 80 + 30 = 110 then add 8 + 3 = 11, thus carry the 1 for the tens, thus 110 + 11 = 121. After warming up, I am able to just ignore the step where I have to read out the number and just type what I see.

I have also noticed that teens really mess how quickly I can calculate because see 14 and saying fourteen really throws my mind for a loop. I think I already have some problems with dyslexia-like memory. So seeing 1 while saying 4 then see 4 when saying teen, triggers my mind to triple check that I have the correct numbers in the correct places. But like above, I go much faster once I ignore the urge to say the numbers.

For some reason, my recall is in reverse order and I cannot really tell. The most common example is when someone gives me there phone numbers. First, I rarely can repeat 7 to 10 digit numbers. And in the rare cases that I can, I almost always repeat the last 4 digits backwards but not the first 3 to 6. Even when copying numbers from one spreadsheet to another. I have just gotten in the habit of double-checking which I notice that I do this quite often.


Reference
https://sites.google.com/site/douglastclee/sociology/numbers

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