The Bi-Weekly History Test is the answer to all of the world's problems, for all of the world's problems originate from ignorance, and ignorance comes from a lack of the Bi-Weekly History Test. Whoever participates in this sacred test is assured of eventual omniscience, because if you always have a test coming up, you will be studying for it, and history is not beyond the memory storage of our brains.

How the test works

The Bi-weekly History Test works by dedicating an hour to say what you know about 60 decades or years of one of the ten history epochs that you are taking. You have to speak exactly one minute about each decade, to ensure that the subject material covers the entire history of the test and you don't run the risk of scewing the test by running accross a decade that you know so much about that you can talk the rest of the the hour on it, or hurting your chances of scoring bullet points on the Wikipedia pages by getting carried away talking about stuff that won't appear in the Wikipedia page and won't score you points. You film yourself talking for the entirety of the hour with a blindfold on so you can't cheat. You only take it off to click the random number generator and see what decade comes next. At the end of the hour you watch the video again along with the Wikipedia pages for the decades you are talking about and simply mark which ones you get correct, and at the end of the hour tally up the score. Upload the video, and voala, you are the new human!

The ten tests are: 1) The Anno Domini, AD, test, which tests the years from 0 - 2000, with 200 decades to talk about, 2) the Before Christ, BC, test which tests the 200 decades before the year zero, from 2000 BC to the year zero. 4) the 20th century test, which has 100 years, 5) the 21st century which has 17 years, 6) this decade, 7) this year, 8) the next 10 years, 9) the next 100 years and 10), the next 1,000 years.

Grading

The self grading is done by assigning points to each event mentioned in the decade or years Wikipedia page. The Wikipedia page has different categories, and some are more important to remember than others; for example, it is more important to remember a war than a famous person, but for the sake of the test as long as it has a bullet point next to it, than it is worth a point. So the grading is very simple, just how many bullet points from Wikipedia you get in the hour.

The Bi-weekly test provides a wonderful oportunity to place their power over society in their own hands, for once we change our value system to respect the intellectual class and not the materially wealthy class, we can begin to develop our society into somthing that makes everybody strive to be the best they can be and not have a reason to dislike anybody just because they are better than you, because the only way somebody can be better than you is by being better at the Bi-weekly history test or a faster bike rider, like on my bike racer levels page, but everybody will know that the people who score highly in the testing did so because they worked the hardest for it, therefore making themselves free from any kind of blame that they have what they don't deserve.

It is reasonable to expect ourselves to memorize history as a whole with the technology we have available to us today.

In order for us to realize how easy it is to memorize every important event in history, and become excited about the prospect of achieving the kind of godly omniscience that we can see every event in history as part of a seamless story that we understand so thoroughly that we can process what is happening today and predict the future, we should understand how much memory we actually have, and how to develop it to serve our needs.

For starters, let's talk about what other people have to say about memory. On the Scientific American website, there is an article by Paul Reber, professor of psychology at Northwestern University. In the article he states that "the human brain consists of about one billion neurons. Neurons combine, so that each one helps with many memories at a time, exponentially increasing the brain's memory storage capacity to something closer to around 2.5 petabytes (or a million gigabytes)...  Each neuron forms about 1,000 connections to other neurons, amounting to more than a trillion connections".

That's a lot of memory! He didn't make it clear though how he came up with that calculation and if it corresponds to text, video or image storage, because image and video takes much more space than text. For example, Livy's History of Rome is 3,475 pages and only takes 6.8 megabytes, but this image of the Roman Colosseum is 1.9 megabytes, and this hour long video tour of the Roman Colosseum is 2 gigabytes. To put this into perspective, lets analyze how much data this will give us in each of those three media:

1) In text: If our brains have a million gigabytes of memory, and our ability to recall the past is typed onto a computer in text form, that means that our brains have the capacity to hold 147 billion pages of text. That's 233,066,971 years of continuous talking on fast speed on the Mac, which is a 250 word page every 50 seconds.

2) In images: Our one million gigabyte brains can hold 526,315,789,474 images of 1.9 megabytes each. If examined for one second each, it would take 16,689 years of continuous viewing to get through all of them.

3) In video: If our brains hold a million gigabytes, and an hour long video is two gigabytes, that means our brains can hold 500,000 hours of video, which is 57 years of continuous video playing.

To plug what Paul Reber says about memory into something that we can realistically work with, let's use the video format of brain storage which gives us 57 years of continuous memory. That's a lot of memory, but it isn't infinite.

When it comes to my personal opinions about memory, I know that we have a lot of it, and that 57 years of continuous video memory storage sounds about right, at least as latent memory, because it seems like I can remember pretty much any part of my life if I am reminded and think about it long enough. One thing that is obvious is that our conscious memory, that is, the memory that we can access while we are operating during our day to day lives is very limited, but that there are many ways to remind ourselves of things. This reminds me of an interesting experience with memory that I had while keeping a dream journal on a hiking trip in 1996 when I was 22 years old. I was hiking the colorado trail by myself and got into a routine where I set my alarm at like four thirty every morning while I was in the middle of a dream so I could record it while it was still fresh in my mind. I was amazed how many new memories came back to me as I was writing the dreams on my notebook. It was clear to me that I was entering into a special memory vault in my brain that was throwing all these random old dream memories at me. As I sit here typing this now, an image of one of those summer dreams comes back to me of playing football with Keanu Reeves. I remember as I was writing my dreams down, that I was remembering dreams that I had when I was five years old with the same clarity that I had the fresh dreams, and so I started writing them down too. There was no way that I would have been able to call back all those hidden dreams from my early childhood without thinking about the other dreams first.

If so many memories can flood back just because we start thinking about stuff they relate to, then we should recognize the difference between trying to remember things just by thinking back on them, and correctly using techniques to recall the deeper memories that we can access only if we know where to look. If you want to access an insignificant memory, you have to think about things related to what you want, and then trace back along similar memories until you find what you are looking for. The best way to store and access the memories in our brains should be done the same way that we file books in a library or store files on our computers. For example, if you are looking for a file on your computer and your word search doesn't come up with anything, then you don't just start clicking through random folders and hope that whatever folder you end up on has the image you are looking for. What you do, is you look through the folders that you have and click on the ones that you think your file is in, and if you organize everything correctly, you never have a problem finding the file you are looking for even if you don't remember the name of it because you can find which folder it's small group of files is clustered in because you can trace back through the common sense way of organizing it. People who organize files into small folders in their computers are able to keep collecting files forever because they can exponentially zero in on their target file through all of their folders, just like how the Power of Ten works, but people who just download files and don't put them into their proper place can never find what they are looking for because it's like looking for a needle in a haystack. You can only find the needle if it is in the needle holder, which is in the toiletry bag in the bathroom.

It's important to know how to learn things contextually so you can file memories in places where you can retrieve them when you need them like when you take the Bi-weekly history test. If you view the prospect of memorizing history as being too difficult to merit the effort, it is probably because you don't file memories the correct way, because we have proven that our brains have the storage capacity for it. If the idea of scoring well on the Bi-weekly history test seems easy to you, it is because you understand that all you have to do is develop an interest in every bit of history and all of your seemingly unrelated bits of knowledge about the subject in question will tie themselves together into one independent concept about the subject, until you have wrapped your brain completely around it; just like how the 1,000 connections to each brain neuron can connect to any other neuron exponentially increasing memory. This works the same way the world wide web does with each individual person representing a single brain neuron that can communicate individually with each other neuron and establish a brand new relationship, or thought, in the overall matrix.

The fact that all of the brains neurons can get a memory from each other means that in order to maximize your memory, you need to exersize each neuron's ability to reach out to the other neurons, and the best way to do this is by forcing the brain to constantly bounce around to all of the diffent thoughts that it can have in order to maintain strong connections, the same way a well trodden road is much easier to travel on than a neglected one. So the way to learn history is not by the way we were taught in school where we slowly trudge through one subject at a time as though it has nothing to do with anything, but to try to learn everything at once at the direction of the person who is learning. This relates to how the way children study math has changed since I was a child. The way I was taught to multiply in my head was by memorizing the multiplication tables, but these days they are teaching kids to do math the natural way by determining what seven times 8 is, not by memorizing that it is 56, but by memorizing an anchor multiplier, like 10 and then tracing back from there, so they go seven times ten is seventy minus 14 which is 56.

It is with the zeroing in technique that we can make learning all of recorded history seem like an exciting instead of daunting endeavor. If the random number generator tasks you to recall the decade of the 360s and you don't know, then you could try to recall the 350s and the 370s, and if you don't know any of it, maybe you should ride your bike on that century for the next two weeks.

Now that we understand that our brains definitely hold enough memory to wrap our heads around a few hundred decades from history, let's analyze exactly how much memory it would take to do well at the Bi-weekly history test.

To find the average size for a decade on Wikipedia, I will take the decade of the 1000s, because it is halfway between 0 and 2000 and they were generally getting larger as time progresses. This page has 2,825 words, or 11.3 pages or text, so because there are 20 decades from 0 to 2000 the AD history test covers 226 pages worth of text, which is three hours eight minutes of talking. That should be quite easy for our human brains to conquer, so why don't we? Because it doesn't mean anything to us personally. That 226 pages of information needs to be attached to a living breathing creature with a back story for our brains to be able to hold all of that information at a surface level.

The actual service level of our brains should be discussed. Just like with computers, you have memory and storage, our brains have them as well. For example my Apple Macbook Pro computer has a storage of 500 gigabytes, but only a memory of 16 gigabytes, which is only 3% of it's storage. If our brains had the same storage to memory ratio, then our memory should be 320,000 gigabytes, which is 18.24 years of continuous video, which we don't have so we can't use the same ratio. There is new computer storage technology that uses femtosecond laser writing that has built a hard drive that currently holds 360 terabytes which is a little over a third of our brains storage, but they are improving it.

The question is what is the best way to determine what our brain's RAM memory is, how it relates to our brain's storage, and how our brain processes differ from that of computers. Computers operate much more simply. Unless it's crashing or acting like the goblins are inside it, your computer either has a file or it doesn't. The brain is much more tempermental. If you can view the way memory works in a computer as blocks of information sitting neatly side by side the way carbon molecules are organized in diamonds to be easily retrievable simply from their addresses, then we should look at memory in the human brain like a series of messengers that you have to interact with who may or may not have some knowledge of what you want to know and will pass it along their friends to see it they can come up with anything. It's like we have an eternal wealth of knowledge to draw on, but it is in a different language and is only useful to us if we need it because if we had it at our conscious disposal all of the time our brains would overheat. Computers RAM memory drives don't overheat because computers aren't equipped with that second level of mental processing, the executive level that has to constantly process what is happening now and adjust for it. The computer is nothing without a human, and if it had to deal with that next load of real time tasks to manage then surely it's RAM memory would suffer just like the human brain has, and would have to build in an information blocking governor the way our brains have.

Due to the finicky complexity of our brains, in order to determine how much consciously retrievable memory we actually have, we need to categorize the different types of consciously retrievable memory there are and how much memory they have, and range them from almost no memory at all up to infinite memory. Picture a person who you are sitting there with and asking them to talk to us about literally everything they know from the top of their head and see how long they can talk and use the video format for memory usage, which is two gigabytes per hour. I will build a scale from one to ten for types of people with their non warmed up and warmed up brains, because that is how I think.

With the human brain, we need to understand that there is a difference between non warmed up memory and warmed up memory. Non warmed up memory is when you just ask somebody something without giving them the time to think about it first. So if you were to ask a Bi-weekly history tester about the decade of the 30s, he would only be able to tell you about it for one minute, but if you asked him after he had been studying it for an hour, he would be able to talk about it for an hour, so it is a 60 times ratio.

1) Senility. one second / one minute

2) Stupid person untrained. five seconds / five minutes

3) Average person untrained ten seconds / ten minutes

4) Stupid person trained twelve seconds / twelve minutes

5) Smart person untrained fifteen seconds / fifteen minutes

6) Average person trained thirty seconds / thirty minutes

7) Smart person trained minute / one hour

8) The superhuman who can remember everything they know. 2.5 petabytes, one million gigabytes.

9) A person with a cell phone with them to do Google searches. Almost infinite storage.

10) Past life, Akashik records. Infinite yottabyte storage.

The point in making the short term memory chart is to illustrate that human memory works on a sliding scale and depends on the overall interest level that the person has had on the subject and whether the person has developed the neuropathways like a highway of knowledge. Brain memory works the same way that muscles do, if you train it then it can do whatever you need it to do, surpassing it's original state my a factor of a hundred or more.

I believe it is possible for the average person to not only be able to recite the 226 pages of information from the decades on Wikipedia from the year 0 to 2000, which is about three hours, but to be able to recite the entirety of all the history books that we have available to us. Because if learning history is dependent on our interest in the subject and not the latent storage capacity of our brains, then all we have to do is make sure that we are either paying attention to the books we listen to, or listen to them enough times to remember the sequence of events, which gets exponentially easier the more we learn from the other books because the entire story is related, just like our brain neurons are. To give an idea of how much data the entirety of history takes up, I will share what I have on my website on my education page, which has every history book that we know of until the beginning of the dark ages, which I place around 100 years after the fall of Rome. After Gregory the Great in the 600s, there was a dearth of regular historians until guys like Machiavelli in the Renaissance.

My classical history book collection for the whole world contains 121,240 pages of text, which is 1,684 hours of speaking, which is 70 days, or two months and ten days of continuously talking. If you study history for your whole life of 100 years, then two months of the most important and interesting information you can know doesn't seem impossible or even unreasonable.

The Bi-weekly history test is the best way to develop your historical knowledge, because it forces you to learn everything at the same time, which keeps you motivated to keep learning by reminding you of how much you still have to learn, and keeps you interested by constantly teaching you new things, which inevitably keep you interested in even more things, so there is never a shortage of historical knowledge to thirst for, and you aren't distracted by useless modern mumbo jumbo.

We must plug the Bi-weekly history test into mainstream culture by proclaiming the participants in the test as the true new human species, as I'm sure we can all agree that we are evolving into a new species of human. We will call this species Homo Evolutis, because that is the name that a man named Juan Enriquez coined for our new species of human, and I haven't heard anybody else give a name for it, and his name sounds fine to me. He gave a TED talk saying he believes we are a new species because we are consciously evolving ourselves with technology like never before. That sounds fine to me, but I would like to address that concept. While it is true that we are developing technology to evolve our bodies to live healthier longer at a huge rate of improvement like the world has never seen, it is still true that we are the same primitive beasts that we have always been. The way I see it, the changes our bodies get to go through because of the technology is purely cosmetic. While we can use technology to do a lot with our bodies, we should acknowledge that there is still a difference between Darwinian evolution, which is survival of the fittest and takes millions of years, and superficial tweaks that we can do to our bodies. If we were to use technology to change the human body that it was differently enough from us to merit the type of distinction that a botanist would have to make us a new species, than we would have to do something along the lines of creating a type of cyborg human that has computers and robots inter-weaved throughout our flesh, but we already have that, it's called cell phones and cars. So there is no actual way for us to become a new species over a course of one generation. Our physical development will certainly be accelerated due to the vastly different lifestyles we have, but we will still be working with God's clock which has always worked very slowly. That's why the dinosaurs died out instead of evolving themselves into better forms that are suited to the new environment.

If we truly want to evolve ourselves into a new human species that has control over it's own evolution and merits a new species name of Homo Evolutis, then it has to be by a criteria that we can control, which is not in the realm of the body with cell phones and artificial hips, but in that of the mind, for it is our lifestyle behavior that will lead us to an eventual new species. If we keep improving our bodies to live longer, but we keep populating the world with people who don't have the resources to have quality lives and continue to destroy the planet at the same time, than we will just "cyber-evolve" ourselves back into the stone age. Any criteria to define a new human species needs to be kept strictly to our behavior, and leave the Ken and Barbie doll cyborg stuff to the children. The best way to define our new species based on our behavior should be measured in regards to our knowledge. We define our collective species as having just entered into the "information age". If our society is in a new age, and we want to consider ourselves a new mental species, then we should define ourselves as being a sort of "homo informationalis", and the best way to transform ourselves into this new human of information is by filling our brains with information. Not by buying a cell phone and an Internet plan so you can do Google searches and call yourself "homo informationalis", that is too easy. Life doesn't work like that. Animals always have, and always will have to fight to evolve, and so it's no different for us. We have to actually transfer the information from the computers to our brains. Once our brains are filled up with the type of information that the Internet has, then we can truly call ourselves something that is unrecognizable from the monkey person who was terrorizing the world just a generation or so ago.

What kind of information do we need to fill our brains with in order to become this new species of omniscient human? It has to be information that an enlightened society will fine useful. We should define exactly what that is. An enlightened society does not have destructive and useless industry, because that is destructive to the health of society as a whole and would drag society down or not allow it to exist. So industries such as gambling, warfare, and unfair business practices that people happen to be able to get away with in order to make themselves wealthy at the expense of society should not be considered actual knowledge. That type of knowledge should be considered to be nothing more than just a display of intelligence and will power that is wasted on a selfish person who doesn't have the social intelligence to even consider themselves a proper human being. They should call themselves something like "Homo Sapien Selfish Destructivus". There really is only one type of intelligence, and that is the knowledge of what is good and bad for the world, by being able to tell the story of the world, past present and future.

So, as long as I am the only person on YouTube participating in the Bi-weekly history test, I will proclaim myself as the world's only true new species of human, the Homo Evolutis. Once others start participating in this new social movement, then we will begin to be able to find out who the best human is based on their historical knowledge and allow that person to become president, and not the village idiot. In our new Utopian world where nobody has to work because of robots, let the stupid people have fun listening to music while they ride their bikes and only harm themselves when they make bad decisions, and not think that they have to rack their brains trying to get into positions of authority over others in order to feel good about themselves.