Reposted a tweet by Julia Angwin
I’ve randomly noticed an odd dip in the use of patriarchy, patriarchal, and feminism as words in Google’s nGram Viewer starting around a peak in 1999-2000 and continuing until 2008-2009. I’m curious what may have caused this? One could also add the word “gender” which shows a similar dip, but it tends to drown out the signal of the other three, so I’ve removed it here.

nGram Viewer of three words with very similar usage graphs

Winter Counts and related holiday traditions

Some indigenous American tribes kept annual winter counts which served as both a physical historical account of their year, but served as visual mnemonic devices leveraging a bit of the idea of a drawn memory palace along with spaced repetition by adding a new image to their “journey” each year.

I was reminded about the idea over the weekend by a dreadful, cheeseball Hallmark Holiday movie A Royal Christmas Ball (2017) (please don’t torture yourself by watching it). The two main characters had a Christmas ritual of creating a holiday ornament every year for their Christmas tree with a design that represented something significant in their lives that year. Because most families generally use and reuse the same ornaments every year, the practice becomes a repeated ritual which allows them to reminisce over each ornament every year to remember past years. It’s a common occurrence (at least in Western society) for people to purchase souvenir ornaments when they travel, and these serve the same effect of remembering their past travels.

If others haven’t come across this idea as a fun mnemonic device for the whole family with built in spaced repetition, I recommend you give it a try. Just don’t everyone necessarily make coronavirus ornaments for this year.

Non-Christians could leverage a similar idea for their annual holidays, feasts, or events if they like. Of course, you could follow the Lakota tribe and make a more traditional winter count.

For those interested in some of the further history and description of the idea of an annual count in the framing of mnemotechny, I would recommend LynneKelly’s book Memory Craft or some of her more academic works.

Replied to a tweet by Stephanie Stimac Web WitchStephanie Stimac Web Witch (Twitter)
Coincidentally I ran across SpaceHey earlier today, and I had the very same thought…

I prefer living in the slightly older blogosphere though. Maybe with some improved infrastructure over what we’ve lost?