In article <_swLe.3501$DV3.2648@newssvr17.news.prodigy.com> ,
Joseph Ashwood <ashwood@msn.com> wrote:
:What I said was the people make bad storage devices for large quantities of
:entropy. Each individual has a limit to the amount of entropy they can
:memorize, if each individual can memorize say 120-bits, then each passphrase
:they memorize can only have 120/n bits of entropy (on average) where n is
:the number of passphrases.

People routinely remember a fair number of phone numbers amd names.
Consider too Jeopardy, Trivial Persuit, and the large numbers of
fan-memorized baseball and hockey statistics: many people have a -lot- of
memory capacity when they have motivation.

I do not know it to be "fact", but I have read a number of times
that in many pre-literary cultures and cultures with substantial
oral traditions, memorizing large amounts of material "word perfect"
was a routine expectation -- and apparently we have largely lost
that skill through lack of practice.

Still, every year at Fringe Festival time, a hundred troops come
through my city, with people who have memorized 3/4 hours to 2 hours of
material -- and some of those longer 90 minute to 2 hour shows are solo
performances. Does the School Play tradition still continue, with
children who have a hard time remembering to take out the garbage
turning out to be able to give fine memorized performances?
--
"I will speculate that [...] applications [...] could actually see a
performance boost for most users by going dual-core [...] because it
is running the adware and spyware that [...] are otherwise slowing
down the single CPU that user has today" -- Herb Sutter