A camera obscura is a darkened room with a small hole or lens at one side through which an image is projected onto a wall or table opposite the hole. The image of lensless camera obscuras is also referred to as "pinhole image".
Athanasius Kircher was a German Jesuit scholar and polymath who published around 40 major works of comparative religion, geology, and medicine. Kircher has been compared to fellow Jesuit Roger Joseph Boscovich and to Leonardo da Vinci for his vast range of interests, and has been honoured with the title "Master of a Hundred Arts". He taught for more than 40 years at the Roman College, where he set up a wunderkammer. A resurgence of interest in Kircher has occurred within the scholarly community in recent decades.
The Royal Society Science Books Prize is an annual £25,000 prize awarded by the Royal Society to celebrate outstanding popular science books from around the world. It is open to authors of science books written for a non-specialist audience, and since it was established in 1988 has championed writers such as Stephen Hawking, Jared Diamond, Stephen Jay Gould and Bill Bryson. In 2015 The Guardian described the prize as "the most prestigious science book prize in Britain".
Jonathan Safran Foer is an American novelist. He is known for his novels Everything Is Illuminated (2002), Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (2005), Here I Am (2016), and for his non-fiction works Eating Animals (2009) and We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast (2019). He teaches creative writing at New York University.
Georgetown Day School (GDS) is an independent coeducational PK-12 school located in Washington, D.C. The school educates 1,075 elementary, middle, and high school students in northwestern Washington, D.C. Russell Shaw is the current Head of School.
Daniel Tammet is an English writer and savant. His memoir, Born on a Blue Day (2006), is about his early life with Asperger syndrome and savant syndrome, and was named a "Best Book for Young Adults" in 2008 by the American Library Association's Young Adult Library Services magazine. His second book, Embracing the Wide Sky, was one of France's best-selling books of 2009. His third book, Thinking in Numbers, was published in 2012 by Hodder & Stoughton in the United Kingdom and in 2013 by Little, Brown and Company in the United States and Canada. His books have been published in over 20 languages.
Franklin Foer is a staff writer at The Atlantic and former editor of The New Republic, commenting on contemporary issues from a liberal perspective.
Shem HaMephorash, meaning "the explicit name," is originally a Tannaitic term describing the Tetragrammaton. In Kabbalah, it may refer to a name of God composed of either 4, 12, 22, 42, or 72 letters, the latter version being the most common.
John Edward Fletcher was a British-Australian scholar best known for his research and publications on Athanasius Kircher as well as several other Germans who had lived in and/or influenced Australia.
Edward "Ed" Cooke is a British entrepreneur and author of Remember, Remember: Learn the Stuff You Thought You Never Could. He is also a Grand Master of Memory and the co-founder of Memrise, a freemium online educational platform that uses memory techniques to optimise learning. He grew up in Oxfordshire.
The plateau effect is a phenomenon that lessens the effectiveness of once effective measures over time. An example of the plateau effect is when someone's exercise fails to be as effective as in the past, similar to the concept of diminishing returns. A person enters into a period where there is no improvement or a decrease in performance.
Eidetic memory, also known as photographic memory and total recall, is the ability to recall an image from memory with high precision—at least for a brief period of time—after seeing it only once and without using a mnemonic device.
In New York folklore, the Hudson River Monster or "Kipsy"—the latter being a pet name presumed to have derived from Poughkeepsie—is a reputed lake monster living in the Hudson River. In 2016, Atlas Obscura ranked "Kipsy" at #17 in its list of "Lake Monsters of the United States, 'Nessies.'"
Sukkah City was an architectural design competition and work of installation art planned in partnership with the Union Square Partnership for New York City's Union Square Park in September 2010.
Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything is a nonfiction book by Joshua Foer, first published in 2011. Moonwalking with Einstein debuted at number 3 on the New York Times bestseller list and stayed on the list for 8 weeks.
A Man of Misconceptions: The Life of an Eccentric in an Age of Change is a biography written by John Glassie about Athanasius Kircher, a 17th-century German Jesuit scholar, scientist, author, and inventor. Published by Riverhead Books in 2012, it is regarded by The New York Times as the first general-interest biography of Kircher, who has experienced a resurgence of academic attention in recent decades.
The USA Memory Championship is an annual competition that took place every spring in New York City until 2016, and is currently held in Orlando, Florida, after an online qualifier. It was founded by Tony Dottino, President of Dottino Consulting Group, Inc., and Marshall Tarley in 1997. Designed to test the limits of the human brain, the USA Memory Championship is an organized competition in which Memory Athletes (MAs) attempt to memorize as much information as possible in events such as Names and Faces, Cards, Random Numbers, Images, and guest information at a fictional "Tea Party". Since 2018, there is also often an event called Long-Term Memory in which the MAs are given reams of data a month in advance about a wide variety of subjects such as the Periodic Table of the Elements, Space Shuttle missions, NFL Hall-of-Famers, etc. Participation is open to US citizens who are at least 12 years of age. The competition currently consists of 9 total events, 5 of which are online qualifying events, while the last four events are held at a live event to determine the champion.
External memory is memory that uses cues from the environment to aid remembrance of ideas and sensations. When a person uses something beside one's own internal memory tricks, traits, or talents to help them remember certain events, facts, or even things to do, they are using an external memory aid. External memory aids are used every day. A large part of these aids come from technology; people use their smartphones to remind them when they have meetings and Facebook reminds people of their friends' birthdays. These aids also include taking notes in class, carrying a grocery list to the supermarket, or jotting down dates on a planner. Even people, or prompters, can be used as external memory aids.
Atlas Obscura is an American-based online magazine and travel company. It was founded in 2009 by author Joshua Foer and documentary filmmaker/author Dylan Thuras. It catalogs unusual and obscure travel destinations via user-generated content. The articles on the website cover a number of topics including history, science, food, and obscure places.
Sefaria is an online open source, free content, digital library of Jewish texts. It was founded in 2011 by former Google project manager Brett Lockspeiser and journalist-author Joshua Foer. Promoted as a "living library of Jewish texts", Sefaria relies partially upon volunteers to add texts and translations. The site provides cross-references and interconnections between various texts. Hebrew, Aramaic, and Judeo-Arabic texts are provided under a free license in the original and in translation. The website also provides a tool for creating source sheets.
