Jonathan Foer's Ted Talk

The author I mentioned in my previous post --

Moonwalking with Einstein

I finished reading Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer a few weeks ago and learned a lot about memory from it. I was hoping to get some insight into how to improve my ordinary memory but all I learned were tricks to improve deliberate memory techniques. Not that the two are entirely unrelated but it wasn't quite what I was looking for. I do highly recommend as it's a well written narrative and educational (at least for me). It also pointed me to the Rhetorica ad Herennium among other assorted ancient and more modern books on memorization.

your vote doesn't count (but that's no reason not to vote)

If you're like me then you realize that no matter who you vote for this election, you won't be represented on most major policy decisions.  Sure there will be some trivial things like, you know, staving the complete collapse of US society as we know it off by stopping the Republican candidate.  But then you know, a competent government can do bad things much better than an incompetent one.  So it's hard to say.

In any case, your vote not counting is no reason to not vote.  It just happens to be things are bad enough your vote might not be enough to make your vote count so you've got a bunch of other shit to also do to make sure your vote counts next time.

Some Friedersdorfian reasons you might not want to vote for either candidate:

Against Romney
Against Obama