Craps, phone numbers, SAMs and short term memory
Some researchers in Cambridge, Massechsetts came up with the concep that the short term memory can only hold seven items. They can be blocks and have a complex solution in language but there is a limit which for some forms seemed to be sixten but was later shown to be batches of seven. This would not be very important to me if I had not met some people who had just lost the AWACS proposal where Mitre,Corp was a consultant. I had just worked on a losing proposal where a Redeye missile was later proposed as a cheaper alternative. The Soviet version had a designator of SA-7. This led to a situation where I found I was unable to talk in person but only on a wire where the conversation was metered as to cost and maybe monitored as well. I could not formulate problems using short term memory and had to search out items in the library and other ready made forms until I had exceeded the depth of modern technology. It was several years before I came up with a concept for living normally. I thought about how a feed and grain office makes bills and I elplicitly began to look at what happens when you use both hands in an access mode. These are both strongman things and they can result in errors, lapses and injury, including cropping things. What I wanted was a very complete range of responses to load. think in terms of loading a truck at the freight office with one hundred pound bags of cement or fertilizer and then going in to the office to write up the bill for the merchandise and anthe associated tax. It is done all the time and has some relation to carpenters marking stock for cutting. The time of short term memory may expire in both cases. The number of items may exceed the seven boundary. What kinds of things I tried were I bought the smallest rubber stamp pad and changeable date stamp. I thought of it in my mind as the Tiffany date stamp since you have to touch the pad with the nose of the stap about as hard as the touch of a birds wing to avoid filling the stamp with ink and making blotches of worthless value. I had met something Southern Bell called dimension in an engineering environment where Buckingham's pi theorem and non-dimensional variables was the way to make matches. This of course was a conflict between a toll road and a freeway. Numbers as man uses them for weights and forces are all dimensioned and there is more than one system worldwide. Sometimes numbers are non-dimensional though. Here is an example from our freight office. Take 16 bags of Arcadian 12-12-12 fertilizer and load it into a station wagon and come in and write up the transaction and receice the payment. We have at first only four numbers. this should be easy if the walk to the car is not to far. Sixteen is just a count as we pick them up one at a time, hoist them onto our shoulders and carry them out and lower them onto the tail gate and slide them into the station wagon body. If we count them in our mind we will be able to remember that easy right? The researchers say we would lose count at 7 and have to go out and count them in the station wagon after and take that one thought as a sum back in memory to write it down on the bill. If the walk is not to ar we will succeed. Other wise we will have to get the bill and take it out to the station wagon and write the number down out there sort of messy on top of the sacks for backing. Now the 12-12-12 refers to percentages of nitrogen, ammonia and potash in the fertilizer. There is no dimension to this only the pure number converted to a percentage of the total contents of the bag from a ratio. Clever readers will note that 64 percent of the bag is then just inert. This is to give a product that will not burn certain crops. Picking the right numbers here is a job for the agricultural extension agent or the fertilizer company's representative and will not concern us. Now we have the bags loaded and wrtiten down and all that is left is to add the prices and the tax and come up with a total to be received. So we enter say $3.54 for each bag and... wait we could just multiply the 16 x $3.54 to get a subtotal sort of like some do with the @ form. Then with maybe $.04 per dollar sales tax on fertilizer as a non-food item we would be able to get our total. There was a time when I could do this in my head but I have lost it. I would do it like 16 x $3.00 is 48 and $0.50 x 16 is $8.00 so already we have $56.00 and only 16 x $.04 to do for the subtotal. That is $0.64 so all together we have $56.64 subtotal. Now our problem is to get $0.04 times that to add to it. For some reason I want to add $113.28 and $113.28 as $56.64 plus $56.64 twice and then divide by 100 to get the tax. That is $1.13 (28) and the (28) is less than (50) so drop it. BOOM! one bag hits the dusty rough wood floor. Now we have $56.64 and $1.13 to add and I get $57.77. Now I wonder why if I wanted to do all sevens, why did I do one five? That may be handedness which our wrench turning behavior can work out. Now most of the wrench turning does not involve numbers for force but does require a touch to find the hole and align the bolt or the nut and to make certain it is tight but not too tight. Some how the architechture of tools allows this to work out by size shape and how the hand uses leverage. But then we get into an overhead situation where the right hand just cannot reach the bolt or nut and put a hand on it with the body in any availabe space. this means the tool must go in the opposite hand and the wrench turning and hole finding and alignment tasks happen on that side. Here is where seven come in to bang us good. If we go throuhg say four things like pick up the tool, pickup the socket. put the socket on the wrench and then reach for the bolt and we find that acces is denied we have only three movements left to use the other hand before we must start over in short term memory. Swap the tool in hands, reach up, apply a force adaquate to fre the bolt without breaking it loose so forcefully that the fingers smash into nearby forms is two and make the first ratchet movement is three. Our bolt is still in there and may need twenty or thirty rachets in a close space to be completely backed out. Then the hand must remove the tool either before completing and get a finger grasp to get the bolt fully loose without dropping it or keep the bolt in the tool and remove the two together. As you can see our seven is really challenged and when we put down the tool or the bolt we may forget where we put them and have to search later. OK enough muscle collar stuff. Now some nefarious on the SAM. Suppose someone told you it weighed 110 pounds with launcher and you speculated that when it saw something hot it growled like a Sidewinder. Could you find anyone who had one? You might search among ballet lifters for live ones. You might search for the truly agile among ice skaters in pairs competition. Then you would see it as just an overload on the fertilizer sack and say anyone could do it. Until you actually saw one used it would not seem dangerous no matter how hard someone tried to convince you of your imminent peril while riding on airplanes. Your range of experience in direct use of objects of that balance and weight would not include it. So to speak you would not have it's numbers. Even if someone told you you could get one at 921-4330 you would laugh as that was your girl friends number. Then you would be ready for the artist. With your short term memory closed as she is not there and you have no need for telephone numbers you would close that thing which was not AUTOVON anyway. It would be sad but soon you would get some funny colored fluorescent color crayons in the black area of Washington D.C. and draw pictures of snakes and other abstracts that came to your mind. Gradually you would learn that it was easy to access deep memory and draw things not seen in a long time. The familiar world of an agricultural town and a gas station would all unfold. Any place that threat or force was currency would be at your finger tips. It would be years but a day would come when you would buy seven sets of dice and fourteen decks of cards and begin playing the game of meatloaf. All you have to do is shufffle the cards and then put them back in correct order in each suit by number and the different decks by lace back and put them in the boxes with the jokers and other filler and back to back or face to face as the specific deck was. Then roll straight sevens on a leather sleeve and you are done playing meatloaf. Gradually you could learn to draw on notepaper while watching TV so that the sound and video gave a pace to your memory drives as you made the art of the 40's, 50's, 60's, 70's and 80's. You could also learn to think with a weight in your hand by reading articles about metablolism chemistry in the Encyclopedia Britannica out loud outside sort of like the reader used to do in the cigar factories of Tampa years ago. You could even read the Wall Street Journal line by line including all the sales out loud. Just to see what you remembered and to give confidence in your own belief about what you remember. Three D modelling would be just down the road once again. Not line figures of single sequence this time but shades and almost photographic forms. You would find an odd fact. Weight numbers survive and other measures like time and speed and angle don't. When I say they don't survie I mean they don't define the number. If you decide to go 61 miles and hour in your car and want 61 to survive you must first maybe count out 61 cents. Now it is a weight in your hand. Unfortunately like short term memory it won't fit in your hand as all pennys as 61 has too much volume as well as no easy way to create seven piles to memorize. You can get sixty one pounds of rice if you really want to remember it but then the scales and the bags will throw you off as you measure it exactly to some accuracy. If you measure it later to some other accuracy the number will become ambiguous. So sixty-one pounds of rice may not be remembered as anything but a right of way violation compared to sixty-one pounds of flour or sand or salt where the finest division is smaller. You might even try to decide if you could count the grains of rice into piles like making five fence posts and crossing it and then filing a cup and cooking it and see if when counting to one million accurately you will complete the task or starve first.