Dans le Noir?

Dans le Noir is a restaurant in London and Paris where you eat in complete darkness. Here is the motivation for the concept from their website:

Sensory experience

Dans le Noir? allows you to completely re-evaluate the notion of taste.
Without sight, other senses are offered a new sensation and emotions.
Darkness leads to truthfulness about taste, kills preconceptions and let you face the realities of ingredients and cuisine. Our chef elaborates a refined and sensorial cuisine with fresh ingredients to help our senses to enjoy the “truth” taste of food.

True conviviality

Dining in the total darkness represents a very unusual social experience. How many times have you ever had the chance to talk to people without any preconception that sight implies?
At Dans le Noir? there is no more pressure of other people’s visual judgment. You talk more freely and spontaneously. The absence of vision changes completely the way you act and react, both emotionally and socially. That’s why Dans le Noir? is far more than just a restaurant: it offers a social and convivial experience. Dans le Noir ? raises some questions such as the role of sight in the way we relate to others.

Empathy

In the dark room, you are guided and served by our blind staff.
A magic switch between sighted and blind people happens. For once, blind people actually become your eyes.
This reversal of roles implies a transfer of trust from the sighted person to the blind guide because without him we are just lost. Who actually feels the most Dans le Noir??
The experience is emotionally strong and this empathy really encourages mutual trust and respect.

See restaurant website.

Want to Remember Everything You’ll Ever Learn? Surrender to This Algorithm

Wired an interesting article on a guy who, after a detailed study of how human memory works, has developed SuperMemo, a software program that will allow you to remember many more things than you currently can:

SuperMemo is based on the insight that there is an ideal moment to practice what you’ve learned. Practice too soon and you waste your time. Practice too late and you’ve forgotten the material and have to relearn it. The right time to practice is just at the moment you’re about to forget. Unfortunately, this moment is different for every person and each bit of information. Imagine a pile of thousands of flash cards. Somewhere in this pile are the ones you should be practicing right now. Which are they?

Fortunately, human forgetting follows a pattern. We forget exponentially. A graph of our likelihood of getting the correct answer on a quiz sweeps quickly downward over time and then levels off. This pattern has long been known to cognitive psychology, but it has been difficult to put to practical use. It’s too complex for us to employ with our naked brains.

Twenty years ago, Wozniak realized that computers could easily calculate the moment of forgetting if he could discover the right algorithm. SuperMemo is the result of his research. It predicts the future state of a person’s memory and schedules information reviews at the optimal time. The effect is striking. Users can seal huge quantities of vocabulary into their brains.

While initially I found myself tempted by the idea of trying this software, or at least the techniques used in it, I soon decided that in my current situation in life, I don’t really want to memorize anything so desperately. More generally, if I read something, and then I forget it later because I did not encounter it again in my readings soon enough, I believe that it was not important enough to remember in the first place. I only want to memorize the things that keep showing up in my readings.

Your mileage may vary. And even if it doesn’t, you should still read the full article. It’s rather long, but parts of it are quite interesting.