You may forget him, but he wouldn’t forget you, as long as he could see your phone book.
Surely the greatest lame ass autistic ever, I want to encourage you to see a bit of the former world of Kim Peek.
I saw a TV special program on this guy once. I remember getting the impression that he held himself high and seemed proud of his accomplishments and mindpower, which I was glad to see. He seemed happy and content. I hope he exited peacefully.
R.I.P.
(He looked a lot like Roger Ebert!)
My favorite Kim Peak tape, so far
Cherry picking a bit, I found him most impressive when onstage, asked questions about obscure books he had once seen.
The ability to name the day of the week of any given date is trivial IMHO. You need to memorize only a small amount of data. Knowing the day of the week of Jan 1, of any given year, the rest falls into place. It is an autistic joke, that puts Kim in a good mood. It is a zero feat, not even a warm up.
The ability to remember what was in an issue of a magazine decades earlier, and the sports story of that day, is classic Kim. No one else could do that.
Sorry, I forgot to add the link
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=plKMACytOh4&NR=1
It’s worth watching this guy for a bit. His mind wanders, yet it is a mile deep.
Did he do the days of the week for dates by pure memorization or did he do math calculations to compute the days of the week? I got the impression he was doing it by pure memory, no math.
Well, I never learned the trick. However, there is a max of 7 possibilities for Jan 1. Then another 7 variables for a leap year. So if he memorizes the day of Jan 1, for each year for a few hundred years, that tells him the answer automatically. May 5 th, in a year where Jan 1 is a Monday, on a non leap year, will always fall on the same day of the week, and the same for any other date. There isn’t that much to remember, just the day of Jan 1 , 7 conversion factors, plus a different set for a leap year. So instead of memorizing thousands of dates, all you need to know is what day a date is, in a year when Jan 1 is a certain day. No hard math needed, and not much memory either. Especially considering the memory Kim had. That trick is like watching Evel Knievel jump rope, Micheal Phelps take a bath, or Congress waste a billion dollars.
Even using the math trick I expect anyone would take a noticeable time figuring out the answer, while Kim does it almost before the questioner stops speaking. I think whether he’s using the trick, (insanely rapidly), or using memory, it’s phenomenal.
ftfy.
Fixed that for MYSELF!
Sorry if my use of present tense was disrespectful or negligent, I was simply referring to the examples posted by feel the light.
Is Elvis still dead?
I could have sworn that I just heard him singing Chrismas songs.
IMHO he’s not figuring anything
My point is that “off the hat”, I get the impression that many people think you must memorize 100’s of thousands of day-date facts to cover many hundreds of years. In truth, because only knowing the day of Jan 1 is important, and the leap year variable, there is not a lot to know. I have done no research, so I won’t BS , however, I guess that there is also repetition in the pattern of the day of Jan 1.
It is worth watching the 5 vid series on you tube. His dad said mathematical reasoning was the one thing Kim was almost unable to do. Kim may have been autistic, but more importantly, his two brains halves were separate, lacking the unifying corpus collosume structure. This gave him the stunning ability to read his own way, simultaneously, left page with the left eye, right page with the right eye. Somehow this didn’t confuse him ? 
I think his two brains both learned not to worry about stuff to much, and follow dad. He had two brains, that loved reading and remembering, but couldn’t talk to each other, to create the confusion of normal reasoning.
There are simple math relations and calculations to figure out the day of the week for any date. Watch Arthur Benjamin do his Mathemagic show and you see him do that trick in his head as a math problem. But I don’t believe Kim did any math at all to figure out days of the week. It was just pure memorization of the calendar for every day of every year. The same way he memorized what was on the cover and the contents of Readers Digest for any particular issue. Pure memorization and recall. A normal person would do the trick using the math calculations. Kim wasn’t normal. He did memory and recall.
Both yes and no
He could read the cover of Reader’s Digest from '72. Must have been from pure memory IMHO. An amazing feat of memory.
He could also see patterns in data others could not see. Perhaps his skill of memory was so great he had no use for the obvious. The patterns I would use if I had to do the “know the day trick”, would be obvious to him, even if he did not need them. It was, at best , a warm up joke trick for him.
His instant answers to extreme obscure facts, singing the sports chant of the day, and declaring not just the score, but that it occurred in the end zone, describing the play…that was Kim Peak…RIP.
Great obit for him in todays’ NYTimes!!
I like this little bit:
Actually it’s much easier to use the golden day algorithme (just google it), Golden day beeing the 28th or 29th of the year.
I’m no genius but I can find the date of any day in the 20th and 21th century in less than a minute with this algorithme.
Finding it instantly is another story though.
Kim Peak had a super dad
He realized it to. Not so easy to figure out some stuff, with 2 brain halves reading different pages at the same time. His dad was his shadow, that both halves of his brain loved and trusted. Only dad could calm him, and bring a feeling of reason and order into his world. Both sides of his mind were united in the love and trust of his dad, who was able to get both halves of his son to feel they were doing the same thing.