Memorization
Over the past few weeks I’ve been working on memorizing every country on the planet and all the capitals. It took me a little less than 3 days (probably an hour a day) of working on the countries with the help of this game, though it leaves out a few of the occupied territories and such. However, learning the capitals is a little bit tricky. I’ve yet to find a game or program that helps learn the capitals in an efficient manner.
It is not the most useful of skills, I know. It was more to keep my brain on its toes. I won’t say that I haven’t been actively learning during my travels and poker days, but unfortunately my book smarts still need some work. My brain is really good at hearing something and then forgetting about it the next moment, unless I’m actually focusing on said information; fortunately when I do concentrate and really work on something (and it can be for a short time), it stays with me. Basically anything that helps me concentrate more on the information I am attempting to stuff into my brain is usually visual.
Learning straight from a book can be a bit tricky for me, especially when it comes to history. Part of reading history is understanding the movements of the people you are studying, and the area in which this all takes place. Unfortunately a good portion of the world has undergone various name changes and require you to have knowledge of not just the current names of the countries, but also the past names. This leaves me constantly flipping to the back of the book where the maps are and then back to what I was reading. Fortunately my office has plenty of copiers and I can just copy all the maps and then have them next to me. Another major learning tool for the Reformation era is, well the Bible. Understanding what these people actually believed in.
Catholic, Calvinist, Protestant, Anabaptist and then in the middle all the other religions that aren’t Christian based. Understanding how religion played a role and helped shape Europe into what it is today is quite fascinating; especially since all the major religions are, like I said, Christian based. I’ve made my feelings about religion (Christianity especially) known quite often since I left St. Joseph. I have in fact taken a lighter feeling towards them, almost to the point of giving Christianity an actual retry in my life; not in the devoting my life to God or anything of that nature, but more in an observation role. However, I also opened up to a lot of other religions and may approach a few others this way. Richard Dawkins has said many times that to say you are 100% sure on any of the unknowable factors in life is ridiculous. No one can claim that there isn’t a God with 100% certainty and vice versa. I am going off base a bit, as I usually do when I blog, and I will probably blog about my current views of religion in a much nicer post then usual (in context to religion).
The main point of the above paragraph was just to shed some light on the period of time I am focusing on. It is honestly one of the strangest eras in the sense that everyone held a fairly similar faith, yet their faiths were used for war and control. I’ll concede the point that religion was in fact a disguise for real intentions in some of the cases.
I’ve gotten so far off topic that I’m just going to end it here. Give the game a try and see how many countries you can get. I can get all 195 in about 10 minutes. I’ve memorized a little over half the Capitals of the World, but they are taking me much longer due to lack of a solid visual aide.
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