Recently, I’ve been thinking about things that I should know, but do not. Like all 50 state capitals, all the U.S. presidents, world capitals, metric/non metric conversion factors, etc. Basically, things that it would be handy to have memorized.

So I got thinking about what would be the best way to do that. It seems for remembering that kind of info permanently, you really need to be forced to recall it multiple times over time. So it might be interesting to do some sort of software to do just that.

Which then gets morphed into doing it as a website. You could set it up so people could choose what they want to memorize, and then randomly send them email/im/textmessage/phonemessages/etc asking them to recall part of the info. You could setup a blog that would ask “Whats the capital of Wyoming?” or “Whats cosine equal to?” or whatever people want to burn into there brain.

You could provide various canned memory techniques (mnemonics, pegging, memory palaces, etc) as well.

You would have canned sets of things people want to memorize (the above mentioned capitals for example) and could allow people to add there own lists. You could allow people to customize the way they want to be quizzed.

You could get all buzz-wordy and allow people to add associations to info (aka, tag it). You could use said info to attempt to automagically build trees of associations to help people remember stuff. That would probably never actually, work, alas.