The Naked Man Problem and the Secret to Never Forgetting Numbers
46 comments
·October 28, 2025socalgal2
aapoalas
Finnish sauna enthusiast here: going to same sex sauna naked is absolutely common (although you'll also find people who avoid it), but mixed sauna is less commonly done.
Amongst technical university students it used to be effectively universal that sauna was all mixed and naked. At some point it became common that some people, females especially, would wear swimsuits into sauna. It has also become common that before mixed sauna there is scheduled separated sauna turns for those who want to go but don't want to enter mixed. (Scheduled so no one has to raise their hand up and publicly say "I'd prefer to go without mixed bathing.")
In private life, a mixed naked sauna between eg. close friend families is something I consider pretty normal and do frequently enough without really blinking an eye. But that's because it's between two sauna-crazy families. It's all pretty dependent on the person or people.
forinti
I find it comical that modern beachwear leaves almost nothing to the imagination and nudity is still taboo in some cultures.
hdgvhicv
> And I like my space free of other naked people.
How sad. I wonder what the deep problem is. Religious, cultural, something more serious.
Imagine not being able to go to a sauna, or shower in public, because of a fear of people.
mvdwoord
How does a preference become fear?
I am not afraid of other naked people, but I have had it once too many that certain people in e.g. a hotel sauna (for context, this was in some boutique hotel in Southern Germany) do not respect personal space, and the whole sauna naked thing becomes performative and annoying.
Once the nut-sack of a 160kg weighing Bavarian man makes a near hit with your chin as the man tries to climb over you to the bench at the back... anyway.
I found this with a significant amount of the naked sauna goers t.b.h. the claim of additional health benefits has been thrown at me, which is such obvious bullshit, it merely emphasizes the performativeness of it all.
bloak
Talking about memorising numbers, one should definitely mention this well-known system which maps consonants to digits: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mnemonic_major_system
With a system derived from that you can quite easily learn to memorise a shuffled pack of playing cards, by which I mean: someone shuffles the pack of 52 cards and deals them out in front of you, one card every couple of seconds. An hour later you are able to recite the sequence of cards forwards or backwards. (But you can't do random access! What you've done is associate each card with its neighbours, so you can step through them forwards or backwards, without necessarily knowing which direction is which.)
deathanatos
This makes me think of two things:
1. the NATO alphabet. (Alfa, bravo, charlie, delta…) It's surprisingly easy to memorize: it will only take you a few sittings of practice. And it's useful, for when you need to turn letters into words. And then people cutely wonder if you're ex-military.
2. I tie a small ribbon to my luggage. It could be anything: string, tinsel. If you're familiar with wine glass charms, same idea. It makes the bag identifiable from distance, so long as the charm is in line of sight. It does not, remarkably, stop strangers from grabbing the wrong bag, but it does get funny if they insist they recognize their bag when you ask them "you tied sparkly pink ribbon to your bag?"
jandrewrogers
The NATO alphabet is an uncanny intersection of being highly memorable and having carefully engineered properties across several dimensions. Whoever designed it did a brilliant job.
It is sticky as hell and surprisingly useful. I do assume that people who know it are ex-military but that isn’t entirely reliable in the US. A lot of other people picked it up, in part because it is so easy to learn by osmosis.
fainpul
> Whoever designed it did a brilliant job.
It was an iterative process. Various words have been replaced over time, as problems became obvious.
neonz80
RobWords made a video about it a few weeks ago! https://youtu.be/UAT-eOzeY4M
GaelFG
Was really helpfull when making international phone call to services like IRS or sometime good providers. Trying to spell out my french name and long adress or some order number with my strong accent was such a pain until then ^^
defrost
I know it from amateur radio, emergency services, and maritime communications, it's "officially" the International Radiotelephony Spelling Alphabet, shorthanded by some as the NATO Alphabet.
Others may know it by virtue of being fans of, or simply exposed to the Bloodhound Gang.
( FWiW I'm neither in nor from middle North America )
chias
Once upon a time I read the joking phrase "M as in Mancy" and now it is the only thing I can ever think of when trying to spell out the letter M.
Perhaps I have now infected one of you. I am sorry.
xavdid
This was originated (or at least popularized) in an episode of Archer from season 1. It remains maybe my favorite 5 minutes of comedy ever out to screen. It's just so tight!
necklesspen
On a side note, the NATO alphabet is quite normalised in the Netherlands - most telephone operators will default to it when providing you information and likewise there is an expectation on you to use it when providing spelling sensitive information such as emails.
jvvw
Same in UK - I usually use it when giving my postcode to people.
rf15
An anecdote: I easily remember short-ish (pins, phone numbers) number combinations, learn completely new alphabets of new languages easily enough, just like their words, but I struggle to learn the NATO alphabet: the words have no meaning and I don't perceive them as atomic enough like a letter or number is, so it mostly looks like a large amount of random noise to me, like having to learn pi to 100 digits.
gblargg
I forced myself to learn the NATO alphabet recently by using some online flashcards. Nothing complex, just shows the letter and I have to recall the word, then click to see if I got it right. Didn't take very long to get it down, and I go through them every few days to verify recall.
null
mattlondon
Why not just put a name tag on your luggage?
tzury
I've been Gematria since I am 6yo.
e.g. As a 48yo, I remember about 24 ATM PINs for many cards I had over the years, since they are all funny and memorable 4 letter names / words.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gematria
I started it as a person told my father his phone number (6 digits as Gematria that translate to "a cloth in my mouth")
234-281 (בגד בפי)
mrwaffle
Personally, it's much easier for me to remember 246 (or any other number up to about 6 digits) than some mapping I pretend to care about.
Syzygies
I choose from a range of lockers that are years I was single. Who did I date that year?
I also set the combination to all zeroes, to scramble my combination after locking. Easier getting in and out with fixed muscle memory, and easy to confirm this is my locker. No one else does this.
mattlondon
Don't try and remember the number, just remember the location.
We're hardwired for spatial awareness.
jorisnoo
This. I could never recall the numbers, yet i always find the right one, just by a feeling for where it is.
teo_zero
I tend to visualize the position of the numbers on a phone's keypad. The sequence is then the travel to touch them in order. For some reason, I find easier to memorize that shape than the single digits.
kbrkbr
Related: the mnemonic major system. Similar thing with consonants [1], somewhat time tested.
But probably not for aphantasts, at least I struggled. Much more with memory palaces.
_factor
I find myself rhyming the number in my head in a specific way that’s a little goofy but memorable. Just image how radio announcers say phone numbers and you have an idea.
More remembering the rhythm than the digits.
isodev
That’s so cool! I do this with colours - every number has a colour so I remember me imagining seeing the colour combination of a number. Like 438 is green, yellow, purple
hshdhdhehd
I'd do that in reverse. More likely to remember 438 and so can use that to remember the colours!
isodev
That’s so cool! It’s funny how memory works, I’m very visual in my mind when I need to remember facts it’s usually through some kind of scene or memory castle-like setup. Sometimes, I can remember the page or place where something is written so I “read” it in my mind in order to reproduce the fact.
All I got from this is people need to get over being naked / seen naked.
In Japan it's common to get naked with strangers people of the same sex at a hot spring. IIUC in Finland it's common to get naked with strangers of all sexes at a sauna.
In the past, in the USA it was common to take communal same-sex showers in PE class in junior high school and high school.
But sometime in the past 40 years, that seems to have changed in the USA. I've met lots of 20 somethings and 30 somethings that can't handle a sauna or hot spring because they claim they've never been naked with anyone else. WTF!