Where would I be happiest? In my ideal world, of course. Everybody has one and each world is different. In my world, I have the most beautiful women and houses and cars and whatever. In your world, you have all of them. If we take it too seriously, if we can’t admit that we’re living in a common, maybe-not-ideal world, it can make big troubles. But dreaming about it is definitely safe if I’m not going to act on it. To make it come true, that’s another piece of cake or post of blog.

But how does it look like? How does it feel to be there? It’s not easy to answer. Is there murder in the ideal world? Is there money there? Is the annoying next-door lady there? Is your ex there? To put it another way, if you can choose whatever you like after death, what heaven would you make up for yourself?

You can remove all the dark sides of life, erase murder, poverty, sadness from your heaven. Then you would die of boredom. No problem, you say, let’s remove boredom, too. Philip K Dick had a character in the Eye in the sky who removed everything she didn’t like until she found herself in an empty universe.

I want murder because I like detective stories, I just don’t want murder to take place where I live. Well, in an ideal world, I would try it once to experience it, then undo it somehow, because I am a good and moral person after all.

This is the title of the radioplay that I sent yesterday to the BBC radioplay competition. Cross your fingers, so you’ll see my name on the shortlist in August.

In this economic situation, everyone is interested in savings.  I am exploring here how you can save a few letters when typing.  A simple method exploited by shorthand and speedwriting systems is to find the most frequent blocks of letters (n-grams) and use an abbreviation instead.  The natural consumer’s question is, how can you save most?

Bigrams or trigrams? Suppose, the most frequent bigram (block of two consecutive letters) is th in English.  We could type 1 for it, so “the royal path” would be spelled “1e royal pa1″.  Suppose furthermore, the most frequent trigram (block of three) is ath in English, so using 2 as an abbreviation would give us the spelling “m2 is the p2″ for  “math is the path”.  As you can see, the longer block is abbreviated, the more letters are saved.  But longer blocks occur less frequently.  How could you save more, with bigrams or trigrams?

(See my previous post about n-back words)  I found only two in English: beriberi, hotshots. There are some more in Hungarian: elõkelõk, tisztiszolga, történetének.  It’s addictive, don’t read this post before going to bed.

I really can’t stop, I just checked if there are words with an amazingly repeating block of 5 letters.  None in English, only one in Hungarian: tisztességesség.

n-back is a method to test your short term memory.  According to some research, it may increase your fluid intelligence.  I’ve been playing with BrainWorkshop, a neat little open source program  for n-back.  It works, I’ve already become smarter.  My proof is that I invented a word puzzle.

The n-back value of a word is the number of letters repeated at the nth position, for example the 2-back value of dad is 1, because the last d is two positions from the first d.  A letter in bold shows a repetition.  The 2-back value of my name, Adam, is also 1.  Higher numbers can also play, the 3-back value of member is 1, while its 2-back value is also 1 (member).  Is 1 the highest n-back value for words?  No.  Some of my favorite ones, nonsense, contented, stomachache all have 3 as their 3-back value.  Or the simplest one, tartar, which is nothing else but repetition.  They look easy, because its a whole block of letters that are repeated.  But there are trickier ones, like fulfilling where the repeating letters are interspersed.  Which English word do you think has the highest n-back value?  I don’t know.