Master of Memory: Accelerated learning, education, memorization - MMem 0509: Learn the world’s cats by population!

Episode Date: February 18, 2016

Learn the world’s cats by population, species, and geographic distribution in this episode! I describe a mnemonic method for memorizing all this information about all the cats of the world. What do you want to learn? Leave your question at http://MasterOfMemory.com/. Music credit: Maurice Ravel’s String Quartet, 2nd movement, performed by the US Army Band.

Master of Memory 509. Welcome to Master of Memory. I'm Timothy, and I'm here to answer your accelerated learning questions every day and to inspire and empower you to learn anything you want to learn faster than ever. It's Thursday, which is Geography Day at Master of Memory. Now today, instead of talking about the populations of humans across the world and where the most important cities are and things like that, which really interests me, I've decided to tackle something else that interests me and talk about the populations of cats around the world.

Now actually, the purpose of this episode is not just to learn about cats, but to talk about an exclusivity principle that I've kind of been pondering myself a lot lately. Very often in these episodes, I talk a lot about how to store information and how to memorize things using memory palaces and so on, but I don't always talk as much about what things are valuable to know. So I'm going to spend a little bit of time at the beginning of the episode here actually just explaining why I think that it's valuable to know what I'm talking about in this episode so that you can apply this principle to other learning projects as well. So talking about the populations of various types of

cats of the world might sound like trivia, but I think the opposite. I would call this anti-trivia. And I recently wrote a blog post on timothymoser.com, which is my personal blog, about basically Europe's obsession with certain creatures that Rome brought to us to use as entertainment, such as elephants, giraffes, and tigers. But while those are some very interesting animals, I think that it's always good to put things into context and base your knowledge on a balance between personal interest and some sort of rational numeric justification. For example, let's say you're listening to the radio and you hear a song that you really like by a particular band

and you've never heard this band before but you think it's amazing and so you keep listening to the song. My approach, personally, would actually be to go to Spotify, find that band, learn which five of their songs are streaming the most and learn those five songs in addition to the song on the radio that I like, I suppose. Now, what this does is it leverages thousands of other people who have really filtered and tested the music for me. Plus, it informs me of which songs I'm most likely to hear on some social gatherings, you know, speakers or whatever, which is a huge

value when you're learning songs largely just for the cultural fluency value, which is one of the main reasons that I learn songs. So it's kind of a double win in that way. The general principle here, whether with cats or with music, is cutting past the trivia and looking at everything from a global perspective. So going back to the cats and other animals, rather than learning something like the top 10 most interesting creatures in Africa and other obscure facts like that, why not base your knowledge of something interesting, like cats, on numbers such as interaction with

humans or population numbers? So for example, if there are about three times as many jungle cats in the world as there are snow leopards, and people really interact with jungle cats a lot more than they do with snow leopards, why are the snow leopards more important than the jungle cats? Well, maybe because they're so beautiful. But, you know, if you're going to choose to learn about snow leopards, why not at the same time learn about jungle cats as well?

Because there are more of those and people see them a lot more. And so you're making it more relevant. That's kind of the idea that we're going on here. If you want to argue that it's more important to know maybe the cats that are the culturally most interesting or, you know, famous in the West, then you probably already know those and I think it's more interesting to know which ones are best known and most actually found in real life worldwide. Regardless, we're going to cover basically all the cats of the world, but I want to put all of the cats that we know really well into context by kind of sorting these by population and also by where they're found.

So I've sorted them both by population and by group, and I'm just going to go from top to bottom in each of these different groups. And again, not actually talk about, you know, how you're going to go from top to bottom in each of these different groups. And again, not actually talk about, you know, how you're going to learn these numbers, which I pretty much talked about in the last geography episode when I talked about how to memorize the populations of countries. It's really not hard to memorize large numbers like this. But regardless of whether you actually want to memorize this information, I think that it's just it makes an interesting point. So let's go down the list. The first kind of cat by far is the domestic cat. Now in general I'm going to be going by continent when

I do this, but I can't really go by continent with the domestic cat because they're pretty much everywhere in the world, and there are 600 million domestic cats in the world. Now just below that is the wild cat, which really looks just like a domestic cat, but it's found throughout the eastern hemisphere, so throughout Europe, Asia, and Africa, and there are quite plentiful. There are several subspecies, but it's a wild cat, looks like a domestic cat, and it's found all throughout the eastern hemisphere, and we're not really sure how many there are, but there are plenty of them. Next, let's dive into Africa a

little bit, which is, of course, where, as we know, we have lions and cheetahs and leopards, but let's put them into context. First of all, the most plentiful cats in Africa, besides, as we mentioned, the wildcat, are the serval and the caracal, very likely. Actually, we don't know how many of those there are, but there are tons of them. And they're probably the cats that the Egyptians kind of deified a bit. And they're very, very plentiful in Africa. The Caracal is also in the Middle East. As far as the cats that we pretty much know the population of, we have the leopard, first of all, which is all throughout Africa, also in Asia, so all throughout Southeast Asia, and everywhere in between, so it's in the Middle East as well. And there are 75,000 leopards, more or less. With the lion, we have a loose

estimate of about 30,000, so a lot less than there are leopards, but it's quite a few. Then we have the African golden cat at around 10,000, and it's really only found in Central and West Africa. Then we have the sand cat, which we don't really know how many there are of those, but I don't know, probably in the neighborhood of, well, they're really not threatened. They're near threatened, but they are pretty plentiful. And they're found throughout the Sahara, the only cat that thrives in true desert conditions, so throughout the Sahara and the Middle East. Next we have the cheetah at 7,500. So that's really not many cheetahs. And that's a dangerous thing because obviously they're threatened. And so they're found throughout Africa. They used to

be in the Middle East and India, but really not anymore. And then at the bottom of the list in Africa, we have the black-footed cat. And so this is threatened. We don't really know exactly how many there are, but they're found in the southern end of Africa. Next, going up to Europe and Asia, we have the Eurasian lynx, which is found all throughout Europe and Asia. And there are a whole bunch of them. We don't know how many, but that's one of the most plentiful cats, probably. Next, we have the leopard cat, of which there are about 50,000. And there's a subspecies of which there are only about 100, which is pretty crazy. But in general, the leopard cat is a very, very plentiful cat in Southeast Asia and Indonesia. And then we also have in Asia,

the jungle cat, of which there are probably, I don't know, I put my very rough estimate from what I looked at at around 15,000, but it's unknown, but there's no concern about really their conservation status. The jungle cat, which is in Asia, in basically India and Southeast Asia, and also a little bit in the Middle East. Next, we have the clouded leopard, of which there are about 10,000, and that's in Southeast Asia. And then the marbled cat, also 10,000, in Southeast Asia and Indonesia. Then we have another 10,000 of the rusty spotted cat, which is found primarily in India. And then we have another couple of cats that there are 10,000 of, more or less. The population is not known,

but Palace's cat and the Asian golden cat. There are a whole bunch of them. They're found in, well, the Palace's cat is in Central Asia. The Asian golden cat is in Southeast Asia and Indonesia, and they're near threatened, but there seem to be a lot of them. Next, we have the tiger, which is really hard to say how many there are. In the wild, there are said to be less than 4,000, but there are about as many in captivity, so there might be about 10,000 tigers in the world. But as an interesting fact, there were about 100,000 tigers 100 years ago. So that gives you an idea of the direction they've been going until very recently. And they're found in southern and eastern Asia.

Next, we have the fishing cat, of which we're not really sure how many there are, but they are endangered. And they're found in south and southeast Asia. And then we have the snow leopard, of which there are about 5,500. And they're found in central and south Asia. And then let's continue into Indonesia a bit. There are a few cats that are only found really in Indonesia. The Sunda clouded leopard, of which there are about 10,000, and the flat-headed cat.

There's an unknown population, but they are endangered. And then the bay cat, of which there are probably about 2,000 total. That's really not many. But that doesn't compare, if we go over to Europe, with the Iberian lynx, which is only found in Spain and Portugal, and there are said to be only 200 individuals. That's pretty ridiculous. So if you're going on the extreme spectrums, we can talk about how many there are the most of, and then how many cats there are the least of, and that would probably be the Iberian lynx. Finally, let's go over to the Americas, and I'm going to attack both

of the Americas at once, because in the past, they used to have roughly the same cats in both continents. But let's start with Leopardus, which is found largely in South and Central, the South and Central Americas. And the tricky thing about Leopardus is this is not a species, this is a genus. There are actually about a dozen different species underneath it, and most of them are quite plentiful. And I'm just going to name them off here really fast. We have the Pantanal cat, the Colocolo, Jeffrey's cat, the Southern Tigrina, the Pampas cat, the Ocelot, the Oncilla, and the margay. And it seems that none of these are considered threatened, but there are two in this sort of genus that are considered more or less threatened. And we have the cod cod, of which there are around 10,000, and the Andean mountain

cat, of which there are probably around two and a half500, which is quite, you know, very few. The most plentiful cats are the bobcat, which is in North America, and there are probably around a million of them. And then we have the cougar, which is pretty plentiful throughout both of the Americas. And so the bobcat's only in North America, the cougar is throughout both of the Americas, and there are lots of those. We don't really know how many, but there are plenty. Then we have the Canadian lynx, which is, it's not known how many there are, but there are lots of them. And they're found in North America, pretty much just Canada and Alaska. Then we have the jaguar with a very loose estimate of about 15,000. It's found in South America, Central America, and Mexico,

and it used to be found throughout North America as well, the jaguar. Again, I hope you find this anti-trivia kind of useful for contextualizing some of the things that we all were taught as kids and all kind of know about, I guess, how many tigers there are and the fact that cheetahs live in Africa and stuff like that. This kind of puts that into a broader context. Next week, we'll be talking about a lot more anti-trivia with some sort of mini episodes that I'm going to do as I'm away without a really decent microphone while I'm doing a bit of travel. Meanwhile, what do you want to learn? The world's knowledge can be yours.

Leave your learning request at masterofmemory.com slash question and I'll talk to you again soon.