This is hardly the latest of developments — indeed, it’s been kicking around for 300 or so years — but I recently learned about this handy mnemonic system from Jonathan Foer‘s excellent Moonwalking with Einstein and thought it might be of interest to Geekosystem readers. The human brain is generally better at recalling words and sounds than it is at recalling numbers, and the Major System cleverly exploits this quirk of evolution by converting numbers into consonant sounds, which can be used as building blocks to form longer words. Part of the trick of the system is that only consonant sounds are assigned to numeric values, and so you can string those consonants together with whatever vowel sounds make them easiest to remember.

For instance, under the system, the letter F can substitute for the number 8, R substitutes for 4, and and M substitutes for 3. If you’re trying to remember that a building is located at, say, 8434 Main Street, you can string these consonant sounds together to make the word “farmer” (8 -> F, 4 -> R, 3 ->M, 4 -> R), and then make the same conversion backwards to keep the number firmly in mind. Want to remember something at 8443 Main Street? Try using the word “forearm” to remember. (8 -> F, 4 -> R, 4 -> R, 3 ->M.) Since the vowels are whatever one wants them to be, there’s flexibility towards whatever is easiest to remember for the user of the system: Thus, “firmer,” “former,” and “forumer” all encode that same 8434 as “farmer”, and  ”firearm,” “far rum,” and “furry ram” encode that same 8443 as “forearm.”

Over the weekend, Facebook quietly changed the way that the “Like” button on third-party websites — including this one! — work. Whereas before, there was a pretty clear differentiation between the Facebook “Share” button as distinct from the Facebook “Like” button, clicking that thumbs-up on an article, video, or what have you now serves to add it to your Facebook feed. The “Share” button, for its part, has been removed from Facebook’s documentation and may soon be phased out entirely.

You can try to be too cool for Valentine’s Day all you like, but it’s going to happen anyway, and you can’t avoid it. You don’t have to like it, because it’s nearly impossible to like a 99% commercial holiday. But don’t try to escape it, because there is no escape. It is a zombie out to get you, and it’s here. (You were probably one of those “Was there some kind of game happening today?” people on Super Bowl Sunday. Guess what? Everyone knew that you knew there was a game that day.)

But in case there is still a tiny, microscopic neutron inside of you that feels an urge to do something, even something weird, snarky, or slightly mean, then here are some (mostly) printable Valentine’s Day cards just for you, lovingly scraped from a few corners of the Web.

Twitter is a popularity contest and animated GIFs remain the coolest thing on the Internet, so it follows that if you can make your Twitter avatar into an animated GIF, you will be the coolest kid on school and thusly win Twitter. But how to do it? Sadly, if you upload an animated GIF to Twitter when you’re trying to set your icon and you have to resize the GIF, the animation breaks. But Greg Leuch has written a short, handy guide to overcoming adversity and making your Twitter avatar as animated as the twinkling stars in heaven above:

You may have heard about those high-resolution full-body scanners being deployed by the TSA in airports across the country, which a lot of people do not like.

The reasons for this dislike are many; they provide high-resolution images rendering the person scanned basically naked, and while it’s been said that the images will never be saved, this has been proven untrue on similar machines; the alternative, per new regulations, is a procedure now widely known as “junk-grabbing“; there are concerns that the backscatter technology used in about half of the scanners could cause cancer, although the jury’s out on that one. (The other half of the scanners use millimeter-wave technology, which uses harmless electromagnetic waves, but can be confused by folds in clothing.) Bruce Schneier has written a very comprehensive timeline of the TSA backlash.

A relevant question as many people gear up to fly away for the holidays: Which airports are actually using the new scanners? According to the TSA, the following 68:

Facebook routinely gets flack for not letting users easily access their contacts’ email addresses in bulk; even their supposedly more user-friendly Download Your Information feature, released in October, doesn’t touch upon it. Plenty of techy types have come up with Greasemonkey scripts and the like to successfully pry email addresses and other personal data from Facebook, which Facebook has in the past argued constitutes a violation of its Terms of Service — never mind that it’s the users’ own data.

Fortunately, there’s a much easier way to mass export Facebook contacts’ email addresses, although it might be counterintuitive to tech geeks for one reason: It requires you to create a Yahoo email address.

It can’t be more ironic: Today, in order to distribute free bumpers which fix the iPhone 4‘s antenna attenuation problem, Apple has released an iPhone application … that you have to download. Using, we assume, your obviously powerful and reliable iPhone connection.

Also, you’ve got to hurry: The bumpers are in limited supply and are expected to run out quickly. Apple has also noted that customers who purchased an iPhone before July 23 must apply for a free case by August 22. Others will need to apply for the bumper “within 30 days of your iPhone 4 purchase.” The entire program ends on September 30, because this “free stuff” notion is just getting ridiculous.

The Internet is fair bursting at the seams today with unsubstantiated rumors regarding plot details of the next Christopher Nolan Batman movie. Specifically, that the Riddler is the villain.

Yes, that was the opening paragraph of an article I wrote in February.  Go ahead and look.  I’ll wait.

Today, the Internet is fair exploding with news that a Warner Bros. studio casting grid, a document kept updated with all the jobs and prospective jobs available and taken in the industry for scheduling purposes, shows the Riddler as a character who needs casting for Batman 3, and shows Joseph Gordon-Levitt as “interested” in the role.

Let’s talk about what this means, and what it doesn’t mean, because one thing that it does not mean is that the Riddler will be the main villain in Batman 3.

Did you hear that Nintendo is making a new Zelda game? Okay, so Nintendo will never be not making a new Zelda game, but…

New Zelda game! You swing a sword! There’s bombs! And arrows. And a clawshot. And a pony.

What more do you want?

Information? We got that.

Attention all college students, professors, and school employees:

Google would like to offer you the Google Voice Beta. It doesn’t even look like there’s a time limit on this, but if graduation is coming up for you you might want to jump on it: you need an e-mail address that ends in .edu. The service also only works in America.

The reasons behind this, according to the Google Voice Blog:

We’ve found that Google Voice can be useful in many different ways to many different people. But one group of people that it’s especially well-suited for is students… But since Google Voice is currently only available by invite, a lot of students are still listening to voicemail and sending text messages the old-fashioned way…. So starting today, we’ll be giving priority Google Voice invites to students.

Read on...