A while back, I enabled the My Stats feature on my Flickr account. Using it, I can see overall and individual photo viewing statistics. What have I found? This picture is my most popular picture, having been viewed 515 times since posted. Further, it has been viewed 41 times just this week and eight times yesterday. All of the hits come from direct accesses, not from search engines or views on Flickr.

Why is this picture so popular? Who on the Internet is linking to this? And now, I guess I'm making it worse by linking to it myself. Oh well...

When I was a kid, we had these alphabet magnets on the refrigerator. A was red, B was orange, C was yellow, D was green, E was blue, and F was purple. G began the cycle again at red. In other words, it was the colors of the rainbow cycled over A-Z, It also then cycled over the numbers from 1-9,0, meaning 1 was yellow, 4 was purple, etc.

I used to play with these magnets sometimes. Somehow, my mind permanently associated each letter's color vale with that letter. As a result, in my head I associate letters and words with colors. As far as I can tell, this has caused me to have much better recall. Making a totally uneducated comparison, it is like I'm using the color as a key into a hash table of thoughts, words, and letters. When I think of the word "Amanda," I think of the color red. Similarly, when I think of the word "Joe" (Hello there, Joe), I think of green. Conversely, when I'm trying to recall a word or an idea but am having recall issues, I usually start by remembering a color and work back into the word from there. It is rather interesting, if not insane. I've even been known to write scripts and programs that change the text displayed in some computer programs to match the color keying in my brain.

Sadly, despite my searching, I am unable to find an alphanumeric magnet set that has the same colors as the one I had as a kid. If anybody ever comes across one, let me know. It'd be neat to have. Apparently we don't value the rainbow color cycle in modern times. Sucks.