My grandmother[1] was a political prisoner and her favourite pastime while in prison was poetry. Since the inmates weren't allowed to have any possessions, not even a strip of paper, she composed poems in her head. She later published them in a poetry collection and I know people who memorized the entire collection. She herself had a phenomenal memory for poetry. Her friends would often call and ask for her to tell them the lyrics of old songs and poems, and even in her late 70s she never failed to answer their request without consulting her library. My mum once challenged her and asked her to recite the 50 minute-long Máj[2]. If she weren't interrupted after 10 minutes, she probably would have recited the entire thing. She was able to memorize a poem after hearing it just once and it seemed that she retained poems indefinitely. I don't know whether this talent was the result of 6 years in an environment where memory is the only means to persist information, but it seems likely that it played a role.
Another less impressive anecdatum is my own experience of about a year with a phone that couldn't remember phone numbers. In the beginning I memorized numbers out of necessity. By the end of the year I had a mental address book of about 30 numbers and new numbers could be added effortlessly. The bewildered looks of people giving me their number without me pulling out a phone to write it down were priceless.
In ancient Indian mathematics, people would compose poetry based on tables of numbers, so that things such as sine tables, and the value of pi up to certain number of decimal places, were easier to remember [1]. A delightful example given in the site is "Milk is best for breakfast, when it is morning, it should be stirred. But Gopālan says there is no milk - the number of days of English months in order.", which in the appropriate alphabet, represents the number of days in the months of the Gregorian calendar.
When you memorized numbers that way, did you "see" the numbers in your mind's eye? And when you went to recall it, did you basically read it from that impression? I sometimes memorize numbers and other strings that way.
If anybody wants to play chess in their minds, Lichess has a option to turn the pieces invisible [1]. It's not quite as hard as playing by voice as you have the move list you can refer to but it's a start.
This is really going to help Wally's quest to GM. Playing blindfolded is one of the best training tools in the box. They'll get better at being able to see deeper and deeper without needing to touch the pieces on the board.
We used to play connect 4 like this in high school, it’s frustratingly difficult to remember the game state but it’s easy to play (you just call out the column). You can easily forget the board position if you think too long about a move and as the game progresses it becomes more difficult to keep track of the game state. But it’s a lot of fun, I can imagine it becomes a lot easier over time especially when they are so experienced in chess.
I had a friend in high school who would play mental chess while weight training. He claimed it was good practice for his golf game; I think he was just showing off.
Genuinely thought they were both going to get put in solitary and have their sentences extended for engaging in gang activities, based on their coded messages to each other. Good God, but I have low expectations of this prison system.
>"“alligator” for A, “baseball” for B, “constellation” for C, “dinosaur” for D, “elephant” for E and “golf ball” for G.
Shame there wasn't anyone to share "Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta, Echo, Foxtrot, Golf, etc" with them. It works well in practice, has less syllables, and probably has many in prison that already know it.
I'm sure the words they chose sounded suspicious if heard repeatedly but if heard just occasionally they were probably less so than words like Delta, Foxtrot, Tango, etc.
On the other hand, using your own phonetic alphabet is a way to disambiguate your communications in a noisy channel. If someone hears someone say "Charlie 6" they could be talking about anything. But "constellation 6" is almost definitely a chess game.
Yeah, it's a shame there was no one to share the most well-known way to relate words to the alphabet that likely many of the guards would already be familiar with.
Had you considered they chose these words for good reason?
>> At the heart of our mental chess game lies a profound lesson: It is easy to play the victim in life, to allow your circumstances to dictate your disposition. But the difference between being content or distraught is a matter of perspective.
Good advice, but only as long as you don't let the bastards that screwed you up get away with it just because you got over it. Don't let yourself be fine with letting others treat you like dirt.
The vast majority of people are in prison on non-violent drug charges; it is horrific how society believes that they are all horrible people who deserve to be there and doesn't care about them at all.
Even under normal circumstances, the institution cares little for their rehabilitation, and now they are under atrocious conditions such as these. Many psychologists consider solitary confinement to be a form of torture, but as we know, in covid times that no longer matters.
I'm hoping there's some broad reform coming for jails and prisons in the US. Currently, there's no uniformity in the way prisoners are treated. It's not unusual, in the US, for a prison to have no television, no books, little actually edible food, limited human interaction, etc. You can't even write a letter if you don't have someone on the outside funding your commissary account.
That setup, of course, just ends up being a gladiator school and/or permanent psychosis camp.
Permanent psychosis camp is an apt description. The US makes its prisons as hellish as possible – and post-prison life as difficult as possible – as a form of punishment, and that results in some of the highest rates of recidivism in the world.
What's worse is that people get incarcerated for increasingly severe crimes. A drug offender spending a stint in prison is very likely to go back in for a more violent crime with a few years of release.
I’m not optimistic about it, but I do wonder if the experience of living through a pandemic will give folks a fresh perspective on just how rough imprisonment is, and a willingness to consider alternatives. If it’s torture to be stuck in your own home for a year—with your own bed, food, schedule, entertainment, family, and hot water—just imagine how much worse it must be for someone locked up in a cage for decades without even those basic freedoms. If you believe that long prison sentencing is a deterrent, and someone told you that breaking a law would cause you to have to live another year of pandemic life, does that not feel deterrent enough?
Yep. It boils down to rehabilitation v. retribution. Rehabilitation is effective at preventing recidivism. Retribution is politically expedient.
And this goes beyond prisons, too. Kinda hard to not turn to crime again if your chances at a career are gated behind criminal background checks that you're destined to fail.
> I'm hoping there's some broad reform coming for jails and prisons in the US.
Doubtful. Prison reform isn't popular at all amongst voting blocs that matter to politicians and it's a hard sell to the public tuned into a "safety first" and "lock 'em up and throw away the key" attitude.
I’m of the opinion that you shouldn’t send people to jail for more than 3 months if they’re not going for their entire lives. I don’t want people coming out of a place like that into my suburban neighborhood.
One of the biggest in progress "reforms" is decriminalizing marijuana and end of the "war on drugs" in general. Keeping 20% of prison population from ever going there.
Unlikely. Far too many people willingly short-circuit all rationality in favor of ineffective, but emotionally-satisfying stances like being "tough on crime".
Treating prisoners as crappy as they can get away with is usually something in favor of a US politician with any ability to do something about it.
I sometimes wonder, since prison is meant for those who commit crimes, so presumably when society decided prison is appropriate for certain crimes, didn't that mean automatically no social interaction for prisoners, since the ideal society would not have (any other) criminals?
If yes, that would mean solitary confinement is the only real imprisonment.
There are lot's of other ways to take this question with this line of reasoning but I'll leave it at this for now.
This comes from a common mindset that people in prison deserve no rights because they broke the law. They don't take into account the fact that there are people there who don't deserve to be (either because they are innocent, or because the law they violated was unjust), and if incarcerated people have "no rights", then they can't fight for their freedom.
The abolitionist movement has been mostly dormant since the reconstruction era, but seems to be alive again this past year.
We need to ensure that these dots are connected; prisons are not only the moral successor to slavery, but the literal legal framework by which it continues.
Strictly speaking, slavery is not against the law in the United States; this carve out in the 13th amendment was seized upon immediately and remains with us today.
Is there a prison review website? Let's say I wanted to get sent to the "nicest" prison in the USA (not a white collar "tennis-camp" prison). What crime would I need to commit where to have the highest chance of getting sent there?
Interesting. I once had a language professor from cold-war era Czechoslavakia. He was in the military and had to stand around in formations for hours. He found a like-minded friend and played chess 'in their heads' as they stood.
Extra: After he moved to the USA, he applied his mental skills to poker where he became a world-class lowball player.
When I was I high school I played some mental chess against the school’s star player. (He could beat me when he alone was blindfold.) I’m not a great chess player but I was surprised how far it was possible to play before making a mistake. Gives me hope in case I should end up behind bars.
To me the state of US prisons reveals a really dark aspect to US culture and that is there's a real penchant for... cruelty. Like here's just a partial list of major problems just off the top of my head:
- The essentially institutionalized use of rape as a means of controlling inmates;
- Ridiculously long sentences for relatively minor offences as just another casualty of the disastrous war on drugs;
- commissaries as a profit center with ridiculously marked up prices;
- ridiculous costs for telephone calls as another profit center, making it more difficult for inmates to maintain social ties to family;
- prisoners count as citizens but can't vote. Also prisons are jobs. This makes prisons the perfect tool for gerrymandering and pork barreling;
- being charged (not convicted but _charged) with a felony while on parole violates your parole and can send you back to prison to serve the remainder of your sentence. I don't know how this passes the due process test;
- Overcharging to force plea deals;
- Paying prisoners <5c/hour;
- Forcing prisoners to pay a co-pay to see a doctor. $2-5 might not sound like much but it is at 5c/hour;
- Female prisoners may need to see a doctor to get adequate tampons or sanitary napkins. See above for why that's a problem;
- 5c/hour incentivized individuals and private companies to use prison labour to undercut real competitors;
- You don't really have a choice: working is typically mandatory;
- Prison food. 'Nuff said.
- The "are you a felon?" scarlet letter you'll carry for the rest of your life. This actually causes problems even for the ultra-rich. As one example, it has caused real problems for Mark Wahlberg, such that at one point he sought a pardon from the Massachussetts governor for what was a fairly vicious assault when he was young. That effort failed. I absolutely oppposed the Wahlberg pardon. He shouldn't get an exemption. Reform this stupid system instead;
- Early release prisoners having to pay for their own drug tests where they have huge problems even finding a job as a felon in the first place;
- Disenfranchising felons in fairly stupid ways that are clearly a form of voter suppression ie they can't vote for really no good reason;
- Overcrowding;
- Privatizing of prisons;
- Having a delay between parole being granted and the prisoner being released. This is so dumb. This allows other prisoners to "tax" the parolee as any infraction during that period may violate their conditions of release. In comparison I saw a show about a prison in Mexico where a prisoner was called intot he warden's office, told he'd been freed and he was immediately free to go (probably for this "taxing" reason). I was honestly surprised at how humane Mexican prisons seemed in this show (compared to their US equivalents);
I don't think it's an understatement to call the US prison system to be a humanitarian crisis and a blight on the soul of the country.
[+] [-] GrantZvolsky|5 years ago|reply
Another less impressive anecdatum is my own experience of about a year with a phone that couldn't remember phone numbers. In the beginning I memorized numbers out of necessity. By the end of the year I had a mental address book of about 30 numbers and new numbers could be added effortlessly. The bewildered looks of people giving me their number without me pulling out a phone to write it down were priceless.
[1]: https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bo%C5%BEena_Kuklov%C3%A1-J%C3%...
[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjoX5y_JZ40
[+] [-] sn41|5 years ago|reply
[1] https://artofmemory.com/wiki/Katapayadi_System#:~:text=In%20...
[+] [-] briefcomment|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ArneVogel|5 years ago|reply
[1] https://lichess.org/account/preferences/game-display bottom of the page
[+] [-] binarymax|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] faizshah|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] InitialLastName|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spaetzleesser|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] techer|5 years ago|reply
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Royal_Game
[+] [-] EliRivers|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] myth_drannon|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tyingq|5 years ago|reply
Shame there wasn't anyone to share "Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta, Echo, Foxtrot, Golf, etc" with them. It works well in practice, has less syllables, and probably has many in prison that already know it.
[+] [-] 83457|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] elihu|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] air7|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] slingnow|5 years ago|reply
Had you considered they chose these words for good reason?
[+] [-] Lio|5 years ago|reply
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-25560162
[+] [-] YeGoblynQueenne|5 years ago|reply
Good advice, but only as long as you don't let the bastards that screwed you up get away with it just because you got over it. Don't let yourself be fine with letting others treat you like dirt.
[+] [-] danjaco|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tyingq|5 years ago|reply
That setup, of course, just ends up being a gladiator school and/or permanent psychosis camp.
[+] [-] paxys|5 years ago|reply
What's worse is that people get incarcerated for increasingly severe crimes. A drug offender spending a stint in prison is very likely to go back in for a more violent crime with a few years of release.
https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/news/2019/may/3/long-term-re...
[+] [-] csnover|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yellowapple|5 years ago|reply
And this goes beyond prisons, too. Kinda hard to not turn to crime again if your chances at a career are gated behind criminal background checks that you're destined to fail.
[+] [-] wnevets|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] meddlepal|5 years ago|reply
Doubtful. Prison reform isn't popular at all amongst voting blocs that matter to politicians and it's a hard sell to the public tuned into a "safety first" and "lock 'em up and throw away the key" attitude.
[+] [-] spoonjim|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] njharman|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] everdrive|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Karunamon|5 years ago|reply
Treating prisoners as crappy as they can get away with is usually something in favor of a US politician with any ability to do something about it.
[+] [-] ROARosen|5 years ago|reply
There are lot's of other ways to take this question with this line of reasoning but I'll leave it at this for now.
[+] [-] LocalH|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jMyles|5 years ago|reply
We need to ensure that these dots are connected; prisons are not only the moral successor to slavery, but the literal legal framework by which it continues.
Strictly speaking, slavery is not against the law in the United States; this carve out in the 13th amendment was seized upon immediately and remains with us today.
[+] [-] nashashmi|5 years ago|reply
If a person is in prison for violence then treatment would be no more violent games and videos.
If a person was in prison for theft or gambling related, then treatment would be prohibiting acts that deal with money or games of chance.
If a person was involved in bribery or lying, then treatment would be avoiding anything that involves cheats.
[+] [-] irrational|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RickJWagner|5 years ago|reply
Extra: After he moved to the USA, he applied his mental skills to poker where he became a world-class lowball player.
[+] [-] hartator|5 years ago|reply
Well that sucks.
[+] [-] adonovan|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Balgair|5 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZT6JEOC3D8
[+] [-] nxpnsv|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] confidantlake|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cletus|5 years ago|reply
- The essentially institutionalized use of rape as a means of controlling inmates;
- Ridiculously long sentences for relatively minor offences as just another casualty of the disastrous war on drugs;
- commissaries as a profit center with ridiculously marked up prices;
- ridiculous costs for telephone calls as another profit center, making it more difficult for inmates to maintain social ties to family;
- prisoners count as citizens but can't vote. Also prisons are jobs. This makes prisons the perfect tool for gerrymandering and pork barreling;
- being charged (not convicted but _charged) with a felony while on parole violates your parole and can send you back to prison to serve the remainder of your sentence. I don't know how this passes the due process test;
- Overcharging to force plea deals;
- Paying prisoners <5c/hour;
- Forcing prisoners to pay a co-pay to see a doctor. $2-5 might not sound like much but it is at 5c/hour;
- Female prisoners may need to see a doctor to get adequate tampons or sanitary napkins. See above for why that's a problem;
- 5c/hour incentivized individuals and private companies to use prison labour to undercut real competitors;
- You don't really have a choice: working is typically mandatory;
- Prison food. 'Nuff said.
- The "are you a felon?" scarlet letter you'll carry for the rest of your life. This actually causes problems even for the ultra-rich. As one example, it has caused real problems for Mark Wahlberg, such that at one point he sought a pardon from the Massachussetts governor for what was a fairly vicious assault when he was young. That effort failed. I absolutely oppposed the Wahlberg pardon. He shouldn't get an exemption. Reform this stupid system instead;
- Early release prisoners having to pay for their own drug tests where they have huge problems even finding a job as a felon in the first place;
- Disenfranchising felons in fairly stupid ways that are clearly a form of voter suppression ie they can't vote for really no good reason;
- Overcrowding;
- Privatizing of prisons;
- Having a delay between parole being granted and the prisoner being released. This is so dumb. This allows other prisoners to "tax" the parolee as any infraction during that period may violate their conditions of release. In comparison I saw a show about a prison in Mexico where a prisoner was called intot he warden's office, told he'd been freed and he was immediately free to go (probably for this "taxing" reason). I was honestly surprised at how humane Mexican prisons seemed in this show (compared to their US equivalents);
I don't think it's an understatement to call the US prison system to be a humanitarian crisis and a blight on the soul of the country.
[+] [-] williesleg|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] AcerbicZero|5 years ago|reply
How a system so unjust can exist in a modern “democracy” is beyond me.
[+] [-] djrogers|5 years ago|reply