The Art of Memory, by Frances Yates
Day before yesterday I was busy pretty much all day working a case. While in town I stopped by the old Barnes and Noble and found an updated copy of a book I've often heard of, and wanted for a long time. The Art of Memory by Frances Yates. This book goes back to when I first read the Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci, mentioned above. It was the first time I heard of it.
In any case for a long time now I have personally experimented with the development of my own Memory Palace, which I later transformed into a Memory City (initially I based it upon Constantinople and ancient Alexandria, but later I added components form famous cities from all over the world and from various time periods, including buildings I designed myself), complete with laboratories (like Archimedes did), temples, churches, museums (as the Greeks meant it, as invention laboratories), modern museums (artifact repositories), hospitals, amphitheatres, industrial facilities, libraries, cafes, etc, etc all of which I use as either memory aids, concentration and contemplation aids, internal meditation chambers, or various other kinds of psychological, analytical, rhetorical, poetic, mental capability, problem solving, and/or invention aids.
I highly recommend the art of memory as it discusses in some detail, and even shows examples of various ancient and some more modern mnemonic techniques. I'll talk more about the enormous benefits of
mnemonic techniques in another thread.
Engineering an Empire - This series is a very good, quick overview of some of the more important developments within various important empires of different nations and states throughout history. Very useful television reference.
Odyssey of the West: From Athens to Rome and the Gospels - This lecture series, like all in the Odyssey of the West series is extremely good background information on the West and on ancient Western cultures and development. I also sue it to homeschool my kids, and they like it almost as much as me. 'Cept when they'd rather me outside than in (and who can blame em?) hearing a lecture, and then I can just take it out on a portable player with us. It's led by Tim Shutt, one of my favorite professors from Kenyon College, but features other guest lecturers.
The Mechanical Universe - Back when I was much younger and extremely interested in physics, still am, but back then I was visiting NASA and was ravenously so, I sued to watch this extremely good video lecture series all of the time. It's been coming on one of the university networks off my satellite feed. I highly recommend the series as it has been extremely helpful as a review and in helping me to develop my proto-scientific Wizard (I'm even thinking of developing formulae for my Wizard) for my setting and would be extremely useful for any modern or sci-fi game that is heavy on real science.
Well, I'll go to work on the mnemonics posting later. I spent pretty near all day yesterday cutting down and trimming trees with my new axe and chain saw. Made sure this axe was double-bladed so I didn't hag's sharpen it so much. But I'm still bushed, so to speak, and still got a bit of a torn back muscle (strangely enough though, all the chopping seems to have loosened up my back injury). So the other posts I had planned will hav'ta wait.
By the way, for those of you interested in modern military games, it's
Fleet Week. This year I've been watching from my web-cam.
