{"id":3064,"date":"2012-01-17T19:07:27","date_gmt":"2012-01-18T00:07:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.decisionsciencenews.com\/?p=3064"},"modified":"2012-01-19T12:02:32","modified_gmt":"2012-01-19T17:02:32","slug":"some-code-to-help-you-remember-numbers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.decisionsciencenews.com\/?p=3064","title":{"rendered":"Some code to help you remember numbers"},"content":{"rendered":"

HANDY COMPUTER PROGRAMS FOR TURNING NUMBERS INTO MEMORABLE WORDS<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Two posts ago<\/a> we showed you the digit sound system<\/a> for remembering numbers. This week we provide two Python<\/a> programs (and one R<\/a> program) to help you create mnemonics.<\/p>\n

w2num.py – converts every word in the English language to a number
\nfind.py – takes a longish number and gives you words that when put together translate into that number using the digit-sound system<\/a>.<\/p>\n

If you are not a programmer, or if you are lazy, you can get to the chase and just download the relevant outupt files here<\/p>\n

wordNum.txt<\/a> – every word in English translated into a number using the digit-sound system
\nnumWords.txt<\/a> – All the English words that translate into a given number<\/p>\n

However, you have a long number that you want to make a mnemonic for, you’re better off using find.py or find.R below to find mnemonics. These handy programs break up long numbers into shorter ones which do have mnemonics.<\/p>\n

NOTES:
\nThese programs use phonetics (not spelling) to make the mnemonics. Read the small print on Jap Murre’s site<\/a> to see why “letter” is 514 and not 5114 and why “ing” is 27. Thanks to Daniel Reeves<\/a> for convincing discussions on the merits of using a purely phonetic system.<\/p>\n

As usual, we’re open for suggestions on how to improve these programs … they’re both kind of slapdash jobs.<\/p>\n

##w2num.py##
\nPrerequisites: You need to save a couple of wordlists locally. In particular
\n1) You need to save a copy of http:\/\/bit.ly\/xz8YIC<\/a>
\nas cmudict-0.4.scm. This is a mapping from words in English to phonemes.
\n2) You need to save a copy of http:\/\/scrapmaker.com\/data\/wordlists\/twelve-dicts\/2of12inf.txt<\/a>
\nas wordlist.txt. This is a list of reasonably common English words (b\/c some of the words in cmudict are too rare to be useful).
\n3) Put cmudict-0.4.scm and wordlist.txt in the same directory as
\nw2num.py and then do
\npython w2num.py > wordNum.txt
\nto generate the number corresponding to every English word. (If in the future these URLs break, just search around for copies of cmudict-0.4.scm and 2of12inf.txt …there are many copies of these dictionaries around.)<\/p>\n