Credits
About the Author
Ron Hale-Evans is a writer, thinker, and game designer who earns his daily sandwich with frequent gigs as a technical writer. He has a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Yale, with a minor in philosophy. Thinking a lot about thinking led him to create the Mentat Wiki (http://www.ludism.org/mentat), which led to this book. You can find his multinefarious [sic] other projects at his home page (http://ron.ludism.org), including his award-winning board games, a list of his Short-Duration Personal Saviors, and his blog. Ron’s next book will probably be about game systems, especially since his series of articles on that topic for the dear, departed Games Journal (http://www.thegamesjournal.com) has been relatively successful among both gamers and academics. If you want to email Ron the names of some gullible publishers, or you just want to bug him, you can reach him at [email protected] (rhymes with nudism and has nothing to do with Luddism).
About the Developmental Editor
Marty Hale-Evans lives halfway between Seattle and Tacoma, in a perpetually untidy apartment with Mr. Big-Shot Author and two basically useless (but adorable) old dogs. Her professional title is usually “technical editor,” under which she has done freelance and contract work for companies such as Microsoft, Boeing, WGBH Educational Foundation, and the University of Chicago Press. Between gigs, she spends her time designing and making jewelry; studying art, history, and Japanese; and reading and writing a lot of email (to and from [email protected]). She gets passionate about fat lib, feminism, and politics in general. She has an insatiable comedy jones and is usually reading about four books simultaneously. You can also find Marty playing a lot of board games, sharpening her Texas Hold ‘Em skills, singing along, joking around, idly fantasizing about organizing her life, and Trying To Figure It All Out.
Contributors
The following people contributed their hacks, writing, and inspiration to this book:
Vaughan Bell has just completed a doctoral course in neuropsychology and is now training as a clinical psychologist. When not trying to figure out what goes wrong with the mind and brain, he writes about human behavior and mental life for magazines, books, journals, and the Web.
Richard Brzustowicz has worked (in no particular order) as a psychotherapist, consulting librarian (information broker), contract writer and editor, emergency room social worker, teacher of English (in Taiwan and Japan), and minor (hopefully not petty) bureaucrat in the world of research administration. His long-standing interest in the byways of psychology led to his research and writing for George Csicsery’s film Hun gry for Monsters (http://www.zalafilms.com/films/hungryformonsters.html), about a family caught up in a storm of ritual abuse accusations.
James Crook is a software engineer who has worked on satellite operating systems, drug discovery, electrical network monitoring, and inside, above, and below TCP/IP stacks. He has a long-standing and deep interest in the mind.
Karl Erickson is a writer.
Meredith Hale is the education program manager at the Museum of Glass: International Center for Contemporary Art in Tacoma, Washington. When she’s not training docents, writing curricula, and teaching folks about glass and contemporary art, she’s working on her master’s degree in library and information science. Before committing herself to education, she was a local NPR reporter and a TV news producer, researching and writing stories for air. Although she has written many curricula, news broadcasts, articles for museum publications, and children’s book reviews, this is her first time contributing to a real-live book.
Lion Kimbro is famous for writing “How to Make a Complete Map of Every Thought You Think.” He is a Free Software and Free Culture activist, thinker, and programmer. He currently works on wiki and collaboration software.
Moses Klein’s principal passion has been mathematics for as long as he can remember. In 1985, he won a bronze medal at the International Mathematics Olympiad (IMO). More recently, he has graded papers for the IMO, taught mathematics at three colleges and universities, and translated two advanced math texts from French into English.
Mark Purtill has degrees in mathematics from Caltech (BS, 1984) and MIT (PhD, 1990) and taught at the college level for several years. Currently, he is a senior developer at The Software Revolution, Inc. In his spare time, he plays games and draws pictures of pigs (http://pigsand toasters.comicgenesis.com).
Mark Schnitzius has a degree in computer science, and he has been writing software ever since his father brought home a KIM-1 in 1977. Since then, he has worked at the Kennedy Space Center, the Pentagon, and an on-demand book printing business. He is a six-time winner of the International Obfuscated C Code Competition (http://www.ioccc.org) and currently resides in Melbourne, Australia, with his wife and dingo.
Tom Stafford likes finding things out and writing things down. Several years of doing this in the Department of Psychology at the University of Sheffield resulted in a PhD. Now sometimes he tells people he’s a computational cognitive neuroscientist and then talks excitedly about neural networks. Lately he’s begun talking excitedly about social networks, too. As well as doing academic research, he has worked as a freelancer, writing and working at the BBC as a documentary researcher. With Matt Webb, he is the author of O’Reilly’s Mind Hacks (http://www.mindhacks.com), a book about do-it-at-home demonstrations of how your brain works. He puts things he finds interesting on his web site at http://www.idiolect.org.uk.
Matt Webb engineers, designs, and works with technology and physical things at Schulze & Webb (http://www.schulzeandwebb.com), for clients and for fun. He is coauthor of O’Reilly’s Mind Hacks (http://www.mindhacks.com), a successful cognitive psychology book for a general audience. In the past, he has worked in R&D on social welfare at BBC Radio & Music Interactive on social software, built collaborative online toys, written IM bots, and run a fiction web site (archived at http://iam.upsideclown.com). He keeps his weblog, Interconnected, at http://interconnected.org/home. Matt reads a little too much, likes the word cyberspace, lives in London, and tells his mother he’s “in computers.”
Acknowledgments
First, thanks to the authors of Mind Hacks, Tom Stafford and Matt Webb, for laying the road and showing the way, and to all of those mnemonists and mental mathematicians out there, ditto.
Next, a hearty thanks to all of the contributors to this book. Man, you guys work hard! Particular thanks to Richard Brzustowicz, lead technical reviewer, and the Marks—Mark Purtill and Mark Schnitzius—who contributed many of the math hacks and tech reviewed the others.
The Mentat Wiki contributors must be mentioned. Thanks, folks, for all of your hard work. You were an inspiration. I would especially like to thank the mysterious StylusEpix for his contribution of the basis for “Count to a Million on Your Fingers” [Hack #40]. He has no known email address and never answered the Wiki messages I left, but maybe he’ll see this.
Thanks to Merlin Mann of 43 Folders and 5ives for reviewing the Mentat Wiki, pointing O’Reilly in my direction, and making me laugh so damn hard. Thanks also to Lion Kimbro for encouraging me to create the Mentat Wiki in the first place.
Thanks to my friends for putting up with my neglect while I was writing this book, and especially my board game group, Seattle Cosmic, for putting up with my many absences and foisting unfinished material on them at unforeseen moments. Thanks especially to John Braley for a chess example for the book, and for reminding me to keep my nose clean.
Of the O’Reilly team, thanks to Rael Dornfest and Lucas Carlson for the software I used to write this book, even though I grumbled about it. And a big thanks to my editor, Brian Sawyer. Brian, what can I say? Thank you for your editing, thank you for your gentle introduction to the O’Reilly way, thank you for sorting out rights issues early on, and thank you for your patience as I missed multiple deadlines. (Notice I didn’t write anything about thinking fast.)
Thanks to my family for encouragement: Mom, Dad, Pam, Eric, Tia, Gwenyth, Mer, Kisa, Mel, and Keith, and especially Darlene for unending positive vibes.
Last but first, this book would still be half a page of scribbled lines without my adorable wife and editor, Marty Hale-Evans, Jeeves to my Wooster, Miss Plimsoll to my Matthew Griswald, fount of gumption, expunger of doofusosity, guardian of good sense, beloved companion, and best friend. I mean, you have no idea.