(Part 3) Top products from r/LearnUselessTalents

Take note that fuel he's using is very likely denatured alcohol, also some protips:

For a better looking stove, take some very fine grit sandpaper and sand the paint ends of the cans, while they're full. You can try to sand them when you've emptied them but trust me, full is easier.

Try using cans with wider bases to get a better heating area, think about those Foster's oilcan' beer cans. The aluminium is a little thicker on those as well, so your stove will hold up better.<br /> <br /> Additionally, by picking up some cheap wire fencing you can construct a pretty easy potstand that will keep your food and heating pot/cup off of the direct flame.<br /> <br /> The filler that the constructor is using, is likely fiberglass. Go with that, instead of regular cotton because, well.. duh, flammability. <br /> <br /> These awesome little stoves aren't just used by hoboes but also by a lot of ultralight backpackers who can sacrifice the weight of a can of propane and larger/weightier stove by constructing one of these. Source: I'm an ultralight backpacker who has constructed close to several hundred of these little guys :)<br /> <br /> **Edit:** forgot the word &quot;fuel&quot; and added clarification for &quot;Foster'soilcan' beer cans."

Edit 2: Wow, this got a lot of visibility! Cool! For those backpackers who are looking to lighten your load or for some general backpacking advice, why don't you head over to /r/backpacking and/or /r/Ultralight where there are plenty of knowledgeable folks just waiting to critique your gear list and help get your pack squared away. Also, you don't necessarily need to use denatured alcohol, but isopropyl is dangerous and leaves nasty residue in and on your cooking cup/pot. Plus, I've found that denatured is easier to find in a lot of places. You can also substitute HEET or other jellied alcohols but be warned, there are other stove designs that use that type of fuel a lot more efficiently. Trying to stuff jelly into the one that OP's demonstrating will be an exercise in futility.

Edit 3: For those of you who are looking for some more resources about constructing these things, you should experiment! Jump in and make your own, test them out, experiment!

Also, here's some web links that might help you, that I've found helpful in my journey with making these:

Zen and the art of the alcohol stove.

A drop of rain blog, fuel consumption and weight.

Adventures in stoving, DIY alcohol stove design principals.

And finally, Dave Sailer's book who was almost directly responsible for inspiring me to go ultralight and build a stove in the first place. (Ignore the one bad review, he's an extremely humorous writer and this book is a great read.)

There are a variety of ways to go about this.

Salience: This means "standing out." In this case, in your mind. If you're trying to memorize a list of really boring stuff, try to visualize or mentally attach it to not-boring stuff. Don't be PC. Don't be kind or gentle in your mind. Be shocking and graphic. To memorize the sequence "Ortho, Meta, Para" in Chemistry, don't use your teacher's lame phrase, "Ortho met a pair of hot ladies." Instead, imagine a person named Ortho, a cruel mockery of the fact that he had to wear orthopedic shoes as a child--he was bullied, beaten, urinated on, by the horrible thugs he called classmates. These wannabe cavemen claimed that his nickname was "So meta" because he actually was ortho! Get it? Huh Huh Huh. He was miserable until he met a paralegal, whose name he could never remember, so he called her "Para." She seemed like the one for him, until one day, in bed, while doing it doggy style, she cried out, "Oh, Ortho!" And he lost it. Killed her with his orthopedic shoes. Then beat himself to death with them.

All because Ortho Met a Para. Or something.

Mnemonics: These are tricks to memorize things. One simple mnemonic is the "One, a bun. Two, a shoe. Three, a tree..." type of thing. You first memorize a simple sequence like this, then to memorize other content you tie it to the easy-to-remember sequence. Another mnemonic technique, as described by /u/The_Cantigaster, is the method of loci.

Let's say you needed to memorize these facts: (a) The first psychological laboratory was in Germany; (b) Titchener, Wundt's student, brought Wundt's ideas to the US, and (c) William James made psychology popular through easy-to-understand books and lectures.

Using the first method, you might spend time vividly imagining:

(a) A wound (sounds like Wundt?) in a delicious German bun (maybe it has sausage in it?), oozing blood.

(b) A twitchy student with a twitchy shoe--really twitching like crazy--traveling from Germany to the US ('twitchy' sounds kind of like Titchener?)

(c) A tree with huge branches shaped like a "W" and a big swing hanging down, shaped like a "J" (William James) planted in the dead center of the US, being chopped down to make popular psychology books.

OK, so YMMV.


Repetition: In itself, it's not very good as a memorizing strategy; however, if you leverage it right, you can get some serious gains. Hermann Ebbinghaus (sp?) started research on "forgetting curves," which are just line graphs of how much you remember about stuff you've tried to memorize, over time. You can find literature online about how to use that research to maximize memorization, mostly by setting a schedule of exactly when to repeat your study of new material. The key to really efficient memorizing by this method is to refresh your memory/studying, multiple times, at just the right point in the forgetting curve. See the next point.

Get this book: Make it stick. The second author (Roediger) has been leading a bit of a large leap forward in the science of how to learn things. He uses cognitive psychology methods, rather than traditional educational theory or more fancy stuff, which has sometimes made him unpopular in certain fields--but overall his stuff has been well received. Don't be fooled by the casual tone of writing (the first author's doing); Roediger and colleagues have racked up an impressive, well-thought-out mountain of empirical research that has led them to some great insights about how to learn. Notably, he has sort-of based a lot of his research on Ebbinghaus' original "forgetting curves" studies. This book--or rather, the research it's based on--will help pretty much anyone improve their learning of pretty much anything, a great deal. Another reason Roediger's work has been pooh-poohed by some is that he focuses on memorizing, not fancy higher-order learning. However, he has found that memorizing well actually promotes that higher-order critical-thinking type of learning, and that the techniques for doing both kinds of things are not terribly different, anyway, if you want to do them efficiently and well.

Going from pure memory here (my copy of the book is lent out), Roediger suggests some overall principles:

1. Study less; test more. Test yourself over and over, repeatedly. Read one page, then test yourself on what you remember. Then do that again. Don't read twice; read once, then test twice. Read again if necessary, but test, test, and test more. Flash cards. Make your own phone-app quizzes. Get your friends to test you. Testing makes you learn more fully, more deeply, and more quickly than studying or reading or merely repeating does.
   
   
2. Test yourself even on things that you think you know. Roediger has found that people trying to learn/memorize things often stop when they have a 'feeling of learning.' That feeling is often a lie. Test and retest. In fact, the "feeling of learning" is very frequently an illusion. Part of learning well involves ignoring that feeling and basing your self-assessment of learning on... assessment. So keep testing yourself, not just to learn, but to really see what you are (and aren't) learning.
   
   
3. Lots of booster/follow-up tests. This is in line with "forgetting curve" research. As you slowly begin to forget, revisit your earlier material over and over, at various points later. This locks things in better. Roediger, in the book, has some suggestions for how often to revisit/retest. If you look up his academic papers, you'll find more specific recommendations, if you want.
   
   
4. Mix up your testing. Use different methods, etc., but--more importantly--test yourself on all kinds of different things all mixed together. Don't give in to the temptation to study only one thing at a time. Mix various things you're studying in one course (if you're in school), and mix your studying for various classes together. If you can't mix them, then at least alternate. Spend 30 minutes studying your vocabulary lists for Advanced Finnish and then 30 minutes studying your lists of ions for Intro Chem. Don't make a "Finnish study" night and a "Chem study night." You need to remember this stuff later, possibly in a different and confusing context. Force/fool your brain to learn how to recall things in various contexts. Train your brain to "switch gears" quickly.
   
   
5. The harder you work to learn, the better you learn. My students hate me telling them this, but it's a solid, well-established fact. You have to make your brain work. Give yourself problems to solve that you can't quite solve. That you need Google and a couple of phone calls to friends and looking through your 7th-grade math textbook to solve. Read things that require a dictionary to look up the hard words (and maybe the words used to define the hard words in the dictionary). Write your own questions and problems. Give them to friends/family/homeless people for five bucks. See if they can understand and answer them. Answer them yourself. The more your brain works at processing, slicing, dicing, and--importantly--making connections with what you're learning, the better you will learn it. Things like "mind maps" and writing your own summaries of what you've learned will help with this. You might also try explaining your learning to someone else.
   
   Hope this gives some ideas. There's a perfectly enormous amount of work that has been put into answering your question over the last... um... few thousand years. And there have been great leaps forward in the last ten or twenty.

Magician here. Head on over to the sidebar at /r/Magic - there's plenty of information on exactly where to start.

For my money, there's no better place to start than a cheap book. For card magic, look to "The Royal Road to Card Magic". For coins, grab "Modern Coin Magic". For general magic, pick up either Mark Wilson's Complete Course or Joshua Jay's Complete Course.

None of those books should run you more than fifteen bucks. Grab a copy and just read it until you get bored.

Also, please, don't ever learn magic on youtube. The thing that's hard for those new to magic to understand is that it is a craft that has been worked on for thousands of years. Every secret, every beautiful piece of magic ever invented has been based on the work of others, which couldn't have existed if it weren't for the work of others even before them. Every secret, as minute as you can imagine, deserves to be shared with the express permission of the person who put in the hours, days, and years of work it took to discover that secret. YouTube magic schools rarely give proper credit, and truthfully, they rarely teach a magic trick very well at all. You can also never be truly sure that a YouTube magician is worth their salt, whereas you can see--from the fact that these books are decades old yet still being heralded as some of the best magic books out there--that we magicians think they are worth reading.

Bottom line: youtube will teach you secrets. A good magic book, like the ones I recommended, will teach you how to be a magician.

Great info here. If anyone is looking for more stuff like this, I'd suggest this book, it's a pretty easy, fun read.

Reading the answers there's some great banter, but here's some more practical info - in case you were actually serious in your question.

If you're after Judeo-Christian concepts, then look up Gustav Davidson's Dictionary of Angels as it lists numerous demons.

Another guide would be the Lesser Key of Solomon which has detailed demon descriptions and guides for summoning.

Another place to start would be Enochian Magic principles. Put the three together and you're off to a good start... but

Read this before you do anything, Dion Fortune's Psychic Self Defense.

/u/Insanelopez has the best advice so far - if you're being serious. Don't get stuck into something too quickly that you don't know anything about.

They come from this book: http://www.amazon.com/Super-Smutty-Language-Kristin-Henson/dp/1250026210

Of youtube fame (Dirty Signs with Kristin): https://www.youtube.com/user/thfemale

I went to school with her and knew her while there. Our campus was shared with the national technical institute for the deaf (NTID). So, there is a large deaf population and many programs and classes on ASL available. I am fairly certain that she took some american sign language classes while in school, though that was not her major. She got a lot of criticism over the book (people pointing out some inaccuracies or claiming it is exploitative), though I think many people found it amusing. I don't know much about the backlash from the deaf community, but you can tell from the amazon reviews that there were quite a number of vocal critics. I'd say like almost every group, deaf people are sensitive when it seems someone is trying to exploit their culture. She had a couple of interpreters help her, so I think the message would be able to be understood for the most part by a deaf person (even if it overlooks colloquialisms of the language).

To anyone interested, this method is used in this book, as well as other mathematical shortcuts.

Enjoy.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0471467316

My husband has a deck of cards that has edible plants. Something like that and playing solitaire might help. edible plant deck of cards

Not the book in question but one I received for my 21st birthday:

https://www.amazon.com/Pot-Culture-Z-Stoner-Language/dp/0810994402

Always fun to open to random pages and read a bit.

The worst-case scenario survival handbook may fit the bill. Want to know how to jump from a motorbike in to a car? Or win a sword fight?

This is from Allen and Mike's Really Cool Backcountry Ski Book by Allen O'Bannon

Read more :\^)

I personally don't put much stock into the whole speed reading thing. You lose the sense of the prose and you likely take less away from the material (I do).

I'll echo what others have said and work on comprehension. Also, you could read "How to Read a Book" by Adler and Van Doren. It's an insightful look at what constitutes a text and how you should approach it. It focuses not only on literature but other texts (history, science, poetry, etc.) as well.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Beginners-Guide-Echolocation-Visually-Impaired/dp/1480153516

Seeing people can do it too, according to this: http://www.livescience.com/39231-humans-can-learn-to-echolocate.html

I read this book a while back and has helped me tremendously with reading peoples body language.

This is how I learned

http://www.amazon.com/Cards-As-Weapons-Ricky-Jay/dp/0446387568/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1370445135&sr=8-1&keywords=cards+as+weapons

I can't believe that no one has yet mentioned that there is an entire Latin-English dictionary devoted to sexual vocabulary. That's the real goldmine for useless Latin words (unless you're reading Catullus).

> I already have a Russian accent.

>How do I speak without one?

Rather than waste time on amateur YouTube videos, you'd be better off working with a voice coach in person or taking a full-length professional accent training course:

Barron's American Accent Training with 5 Audio CDs

>[...] With 30 years of extensive research, the unique AAT methodology has been refined to teach the American sound quickly and easily, paying special attention to:

> Voice quality, with emphasis on accurate presentation of the authentic American sound

> Pronunciation, with attention to all vowels, consonants, blends, and diphthongs

> Intonation, which focuses on syllable stress rules and word stress in a sentence

> Linking, or liaisons between phonetically transcribed sounds so students can "see" the sound

Five CDs might seem like overkill-- but unfortunately, there's no substitute for taking it slow.