Pearls Before Swine by Stephan Pastis for December 29, 2024

In the first Sherlock Holmes story, Holmes was making sure not to learn or remember anything that he didn’t think was important for a detective, such as the fact that the Earth orbits the Sun. Was he a genius or an idiot?

When you live alone, you can’t blame someone else for missing car keys.

Of course, there were plenty of tax loopholes…

I have taken to attaching my car beeper to my wallet chain.

Patrick McManus had a humorous essay about a “memory shelf”. Everybody has one, each one a different length. And as you learn new things, they get added to the shelf. When it gets too full, adding a memory knocks one off the shelf. This seems very derivative (though more likely just two clever people having the same idea).

As my elderly aunt would say of “simple” stuff she forgot: “It fell out of my brain.”

I used to remember the difference between short term and long term memory, but of course it’s been a while…,.

I so understand this one

My dad lived to be 96 years old. A few years before he died, he told me his brain was like the hard disk on a computer. After all that time it was full, and he couldn’t learn anything new without erasing something older.

This reminds me of the theory that there’s a finite amount of intelligence in the world, so as the human population increases, there’s less and less available for the average person.

I’ve wondered when watching reruns of “Gilligan’s Island”, is the experience stored in the same place in the brain or taking up space for every instance of seeing the show.

Here’s a new fact for you; the 91% tax was leftover from FDR, the Great Depression and WW 2. Eisenhower and congress didn’t have the guts or the will to lower it because the government got so used to fleecing Americans and spending our money. It wasn’t until JFK that someone saw the injustice in the govt. taking all the money that Americans were making and spending it themselves.

The brain only holds so much! I misplace my cell phone constantly!

Some brains have more space than others.

I put stuff in the same place all the time, so I don’t have to remember. As for tax brackets and government, nothing is ever what it is purported to be , except by whistleblowers who are subsequently persecuted.

Its so true

Homer: Every time I learn something new, it pushes some old stuff out of my brain. Remember when I took that home wine making course and I forgot how to drive?

Gettin to that age are you Stephen?

Learn while your young people. Later it’s like the on ramp doesnt connect to the freeway

Been there, done that…. pretty much every day.

To learn a new thing, we must forget something old.

Cute cartoon, and nicely chosen factoid for the example, but that’s not how memory works, at all, provided you’re learning things in a context where they have meaning for you. Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, discussed by others here, misunderstood it the same way.

LOL!!!!

When I was young, I read that Ulan Bator is the capital of Mongolia. I can never forget that. However, nothing I supposedly learned in school stuck.

Didn’t the same thing happen to Kelly Bundy on Married With Children?

In point of fact, learning new things forms new synapses, especially where circuits are present that already have been shaped to hold related information. It’s a “them that has, gets” situation where learning new things increases your ability to incorporate new information.

Just goes to show that you’re never to old learn new things.

Perspective used to be my problem too, then I retired, and my wife became my finder, for a fee.

Rat was helpful and not sarcastic to Goat? That’s a first.

My keys stay in my pocket. I have keyless remote and touchpads.

i try not to remember anything i can easily look up.

Yep, that’s how easy it is to forget facts…

I don’t really think that happens. Our brains learn to adapt, though our skills can atrophy. We all need to work on using our brains better.

also, the top bracket was 7% in 1913.

Time to kick out total horse patootie like “Bidenomics” and “Green New Deal”, boy howdy.

I think the 30,000+ lyrics & scripts I have memorized probably aren’t helping.

I don’t know if my brain is weird or not. There are things – sort of obscure things – that I know. I don’t remember how or when I learned them but they are locked in my brain. I’m always amazed when someone else doesn’t know these things. Since I don’t remember learning them, I assume everyone else just absorbed them like I did.

Oh, Ok, that’s how it works!!!

the more you study the more you learn, the more you learn the more you know, the more you know the more you forget, the more you forget the less you know, so why study…

Perfect definition of getting old

Learning after age 60.

I have a ton of useless info but can’t recall what l had for dinner 2 nights ago.

As even the IRS will tell you, that high tax didn’t work. The EFFECTIVE tax rate, even on the richest, was below 20%. Well below. Because loopholes and people just taking their money outside of the USA where it ceased helping the USA at all.