I should be trying to sleep for longer, but finding a moment
to sit outside on a wonderfully calm and peaceful Sunday morning in early
summer is the next best thing. It sets a fine stage for a lot of mental
clarity, so I thought I would write. It has been a long lapse since I wrote
anything on this blog. I’ve had nothing that I would have cared to come forth with
and share for a long while. I’ve been working a couple of months now in a
position in which the daytime hours are much more agreeable to my physical and
mental constitution. Before that, I was suffering all sorts of things between
last entry and now that I would rather not post. Thankfully, most of those conditions
from back then have since improved.
I accomplished a goal a couple days ago. I managed to commit
to learning nine language modules each day: one for each different language I’m
learning, for a hundred days straight. It is a sub-goal to apply to the greater
mission; that is to get to tour Europe someday* (without the insanity of being confined
in a bloody tour group). As for now, I’ve only been able to apply them to the
odd text now and then, and answering questions in trivia games now and then. Retaining
absolutely everything that I’ve learned is doubtful. The real prize is knowing
that I’ve been able to get this far into it. I’ve been able to translate some
foreign phrases from Facebook posts more instantly in my head with less effort;
even in Russian, the hardest (I find) of the set of languages I’ve been trying
to learn. I caught myself even dreaming in Spanish one night. Hopefully that’s
a sign that some things are being integrated mentally and thus sinking in; but
more likely, it is probably because it is the only other language, besides
French and German, with which I have had the most practical experience in using.
The new position is a bit more rigorous, but I have no
complaints about it. The extra rigour prompts me to think of how to do things
more efficiently to save my energy. Thoughts of exercising efficiency along with improving skills with hacking languages has prompted interest in me to start
thinking about ways of hacking other things that are more practical and
applicable. Learning, applying and entertaining myself with tricks and
shortcuts for mental arithmetic is becoming a renewed fascination for me. It
comes at an emotional price though. When I review them I get extremely pissed off
when I find brilliant hacks and mnemonic techniques, some of which are actually
centuries old, that were never shown to me during my elementary/high
school/university years which could have made life so much easier. I hate the
so-call modern education curricula because so many things that are truly
practical and brilliant to learn are rarely included in them. These tricks and
hacks become repressed because it conflicts with what is institutional. It’s a
sign of a system that really doesn’t want you empowered; just controlled and
conforming. After entering “mental math hacks” in a search engine, I found links
to the Trachtenberg system. I tried out a few tricks with it, and I must say
that I’m impressed (and I don’t impress easy). As interesting and unique as the
techniques for calculation are with this system, the background story of its
creator is far more intriguing. I’m pleased to say that I have found a new hero
who merits his story being shared. It’s like a story akin to something that Ian
Flemming could have wrote. It’s a story of a heroic champion nerd who challenged
and came out on top of defying the worst of the “schoolyard bullies”. The next
couple of paragraphs is my precis of it**.
Jakow Trachtenberg was an engineer by vocation, an aspiring
and brilliant one, who began of his career soon after the beginning of the
twentieth century in a shipyard in the Ukrainian port city of Odessa, which was
then ruled by the Romanov dynasty of Tsarist Russia. During his rule, Tsar
Nicolas II was very intent on having a modern navy, and Trachtenberg was put in
charge as Chief Engineer of this project, managing up to 11,000 workers to
build those ships and their armaments. Despite this particular assignment, he
was a dedicated pacifist, going so far as to found a society of Good Samaritans
when World War I broke out: preparing others for the care and treatment of the
wounded. All of that changed though. The course of his life was interrupted by
the Russian Revolution in 1917. When the Communists took control of Russia, and
all the lands within its empire, Trachtenberg soon found himself out of work
because their mandate didn’t include building ships (or perhaps it was just
because since it was the former Tsar’s plan, they had to be contrarian to it).
Being appalled by the violence of the revolution, and the brutal and widespread
killing of the citizenry, Trachtenberg became quite an outspoken critic against the Communist
regime. As this choice act clashed with Communist ideology, it pissed off the
respective authorities enough to make him a target dissident whom they were
going to detain and most certainly do harm to. They had already killed some of
his family members. So, under disguise, he fled to Berlin to make a new life. There,
he managed to have enough charm to woo and then marry a woman of aristocratic
status; he applied his intelligence into developing an inventive system for
teaching foreign languages, and also started to publish a pacifist magazine. If
he rolled any dice for deciding to move to Germany, he wouldn’t have guessed
that he was going to crap out given the way its history was about to unfold. It
undoubtedly seemed like a good idea at the time, since Germany had just ended a
horrible war that cost them millions of lives, and the folks there might be
interested in learning a thing or two about how to live in peace. However, the
National Socialist Party that was coming into power under Hitler had a bit of a
different take on such things.
Trachtenberg, once again, found himself falling
ass-backwards into bad luck by preaching peace and non-violence under the
watchful eye of the wrong sort of political opposition. Being some kind of guy
who was doing all this crazy-talk about peace, which conflicted with the
crazy-talk of a dictator who was planning for world domination – well, it kind
of brought him under a lens of suspicion at that time. Strike one for Jakow! Doing
that as an Auslander (foreigner) no
less in the beloved Fatherland no doubt didn’t sit well with the new Nazi party
either. It was probably perceived as a lot more intensely negative being that
such a foreigner was originally from one of the lands east of Germany, which
were supposedly full of those inferior Untermenschen,
like Ukraine was regarded to be in the propaganda. Strike two for Jakow! And
just to be really screwed with bad luck, the fact that Trachtenberg was
ethnically Jewish had thrown another few shovels full onto the shit pile of
trouble that he was already buried neck deep in with the Nazis. A smart fellow
like Trachtenberg saw that he needed to make some tracks . . . right the hell
out of Germany. So, he fled to Austria and worked with a science magazine there for
a while; but then the Nazis started the Anschluss, annexing Austria into the
Third Reich, so that had him on the run again. The Gestapo and the SS had
sought him out everywhere, as his reputation put him high up on Hitler’s shit
list of people to be arrested and detained. Although he did his best to evade
them, he was soon captured in Yugoslavia, and then was shipped off to a Konzentrationslager.
During that time of his imprisonment, to keep his sanity and
wits about him, while witnessing and enduring the despair, and the horrific
ruthlessness and brutality of the concentration camp, Trachtenberg mentally
retreated into the abstract world of mathematics and numbers. They couldn’t
take that away from him. Possession of paper or writing implements was risking severe
punishment or worse by the guards, as well as having any other arbitrary thing
that could be assumed to be used for forbidden communications. Since he didn’t
have any access to even simple materials to help him make complex calculations,
he devised his own system of algorithms that he could use to make mental
shortcuts to compute large numbers mentally. The only other calculation instrument
he had (besides his brain) was a nail he found somewhere in the camp, which he
used to scratch in the dirt, or on wood, to do ciphers and devise his theoretical
algorithms. He regarded that nail as his best friend and his salvation while he
was in that camp. When he did find paper to write on, it was bits of wrapping
paper and old envelopes, and because it was so scarce, he used it
only to secretly record his finished theories of his method.
His real salvation to escaping that camp was the
action of his aristocrat wife, who managed to bribe a guard to get him out. It
happened just before he was given a death sentence. Long story short, he
managed to escape with his wife to a refugee camp in Switzerland. He and his
wife remained there after the war, and established a mathematical institute in
Zurich, based on the theories and mental shortcuts he devised when he was in
the concentration camp. He began teaching it to children who were once failing
miserably in classes based on the traditional math teaching methods, who then
began to excel at solving math problems using his system. He instructed children who
were deemed “mentally retarded” who, after being taught his system, were doing
arithmetic that challenged most average adults. His institute was highly regarded
as the best the place to be if one wanted to pursue an advanced career in architecture,
engineering, and anything else math related in Europe since its founding in the
1950s, at least until the tech and computer revolution.
It’s a shame that this triumphant bit of history isn’t more well
known. I guess that’s why I chose to share it here. My youngest nephew will be
graduating soon, and going into post-secondary education program in the fall that
will be more intensive for learning maths and physics. I hope he has the sense
to do his own bit of hack-seeking, to find out what works best for him
mnemonically, and in practice. He should be at least thankful that he has more
than a nail at his disposal.
*- Knowing so many languages might be a bit impractical, I
am not OK about touring any place where I’m plunged into an environment where in
essence I’m rendered functionally illiterate; no matter how well I’m
accommodated with services in my native language. Misunderstandings will
inevitably occur: one should know some manners and polite greetings, and basics
at the very least to help smooth things over when that happens. Numbers are an absolute
must to learn, since math and counting money is universal.
**- Given that it’s close to the anniversary of D-Day,
sharing something that is somewhat of another victory during World War II seems
right as well.
