Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is changing our minds for the better

I am currently reading this book, written by Clive Thompson (who also wrote 'Coders' that I wrote about a month ago¹). I've only got as far as the second chapter and already I have something to write about. The topic is memory and how computers act as auxiliary memories; Thompson is writing about people who document everything (automatically, using cameras and similar devices) but notes that the problem is not finding something in that memory but rather remembering that there is something to find.

I started thinking about how this blog serves as my auxiliary memory and immediately hit the problem: I was sure that I'd written about a previous book by Clive Thompson, but I was equally sure that I hadn't created a tag for his name. Fortunately I was able to locate the blog entry under the tag 'non-fiction books, and now I have added a tag for Clive so that I will be able to find his books more easily.

I want to quote the following: Wegener thought it would be fun to do the same thing with check-ins—show people what they’d been doing on a day in their past. In one hectic weekend of programming, he created a service playfully called FoursquareAnd7YearsAgo. Each day, the service logged into your Foursquare account, found your check-ins from one year back (as well as any “shout” status statements you made), and e-mailed a summary to you. Users quickly found the daily e-mail would stimulate powerful, unexpected bouts of reminiscence.  

I'm already doing this in my blog manager program: the feature is called 'This day in history', a title that is very presumptuous. A better title would be 'This day in my blog history' or the very mundane 'Previous blog entries for this day'. I quickly found the blog entry² where I announced this function, but sadly I didn't write why I was adding this. But that quoted paragraph does give the reason: I like to see what I was doing one, two or even fourteen years ago on this date.

I wonder what other gems await me in this book.

Internal links
[1] 1850
[2] 1543

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
114	15/12/2007	Uncle no longer	Uncle
115	15/12/2007	Sleep, part three	Apnea, Migraine
435	15/12/2011	Front end program for converting HTML to PDF	Programming, Delphi, ERP