I don't think the original got enough attention for this one to merit a flag. Also, the guidelines here say that "when you flag something, please don't also comment that you did."
There are methods of handwriting that allow you to avoid hand cramps. The Palmer method of handwriting, which was popular in America at the turn of the 20th century, emphasized using the whole arm and shoulder to make marks on the page. In order for this method to be effective your wrists must be limp in order for your arms to slide quickly across the page. Instead of consciously "drawing" letters, you build up and use muscle memory to create letters, in the same way you naturally build and use muscle memory when you throw a ball. If you master this method of handwriting, you can write at 60 words per minute, for hours at a time without your hand cramping. Unfortunately, the Palmer Method was abandoned when education reformers in the U.S found it too "difficult", because it requires months of training and practice to become proficient. It also required left-handed students to write with their right hand, because English runs from right to left and this method requires your other hand to manipulate the paper. As a result, generations of Americans have grown up using an inefficient, painful method of writing.
Of course, the manuscript writers needed to draw the letters in a calligraphic style, which necessitated precise wrist motions. So a writing method designed for brisk mark making wouldn't have helped them.
EDIT: I'm not saying that I support forcing left-handed people to write with their right hands. It may be true that the Palmer method (or any right-hand only method) has a history of teachers using corporal punishment to punish mistakes, but corporal punishment is of course not necessary to become proficient.
Eksith, you're right that "drawing" the letters doesn't have anything to do with the speed at which letters are made. The "drawing" comment was made about why many people's cursive handwriting is so poor. When students learn cursive now, too often they are simply copying letters from a book or blackboard ("drawing the letters"), instead of practicing the physical motion. So when students need to write cursive script quickly, they don't have enough time to render each letter correctly and consequently they develop their own methods muscle movements, which usually leads to sloppy handwriting. The same kind of thing can happen when you are taught to type. Correct touch typing teaches you to let your finger return to the home row after pressing a key before you reach for another key. If you aren't taught to do this, you will develop your own muscle movements that are suitable for typing some words, but lead to mistakes in others.
A common error is letting your finger hover near the letter you typed when the same letter is repeated in the word that you are typing. This seems like an "optimization", but it isn't, and causes lots of spelling errors because it can easily mess up your key press timing. Using your own "optimizations" might be able to type as quickly as a touch typist in short stretches, but it is far more likely that you will make more errors.
When I was around 3-4, there was a teacher's assistant at the Montessori school I went to that insisted I write with the right hand. Every time I took the pencil to my left hand, she would grab it from me and stick in in the right hand. I never understood why, until I realized she was trying to get me to start on a variation of the Palmer Method.
Almost 25 years later, I'm still writing with my right hand, but do almost everything else (except cutting with scissors, which was also forced on me) with the left.
The Palmer Method is difficult, pompous, superfluous with motion and overall an unpleasant experience to be imposed on under the best of circumstances.
> Instead of consciously "drawing" letters, you build up and use muscle memory to create letters
You bloody write letters. No one "creates" letters unless it's on stone or wax tablet and no one "draws" it unless it's calligraphy. That's a ridiculous euphemism for forced muscle memory on a medium that requires no such effort to write clearly, efficiently and without pain.
Coming from a family with a very high percentage of left-handers (about 7 out of 10 on my Mother's side)...I can sympathize. The older ones who went through forced "right handed training" struggle with a host of psychological issues as a result of this forced training (not to mention some physical scars as the use of the "sinful" hand was beat out of them). The long-term effects have never been well studied because when the practice was common, there were social pressures not to and now the practice has mostly stopped.
Edit: You have carpal tunnel likely because you're holding the pen/pencil incorrectly and exerting far too much pressure. Drummers have this problem too when they use the tiny muscles in their hand to do the job of the big muscles.
Check if you're holding your writing utensil correctly.
As a left handed person in China, I always get stairs when people see me writing with my left hand (like I was an alien?), and I have trouble eating at tightly packed circular tables.
and my old man was forced to write right handed.. i am not sure what they called the method where the teacher would crack your knuckles with a yard stick if you messed up, but that is how he was taught. most perfect, effortless bloody handwriting of anyone i knew. with either hand.
learning can be painful. not learning might be worse.
Your father was abused into better handwriting and I feel sorry for him. Similar or better results can be achieved with patience, a kind word and a good instructor.
Huge public works projects that served a helpful purpose involved the death of countless workers in the past (I.E. the Panama Canal). We're grateful the end product exists, but who would tolerate a lock or dam that consumes that many lives today?
Just because things "were", doesn't mean they should "still".
> Of course, the manuscript writers needed to draw the letters in a calligraphic style, which necessitated precise wrist motions. So a writing method designed for brisk mark making wouldn't have helped them.
I'm hardly an expert, but I took a calligraphy class in college, and the instructor was always getting on our case, telling us "write with your arm, not your wrist/hand"... you weren't supposed to rest your hand on the paper as one typically does when handwriting; rather, you were supposed to use arm/shoulder movements to move your hand, with your wrist kept relatively stiff.
The idea, as I understand it, was that your large arm/shoulder muscles tend to tire much less quickly, and using them makes it much easier to maintain consistent, smooth, controlled movements. Even when fresh, writing with your wrist/fingers tends to be rather different simply due to the highly restricted movement range and the smaller muscles.
Yeah, the edit time limit is often pretty annoying... [Comment before going to bed and didn't notice that typo that completely changes the meaning until the next morning? Too bad! >< ]
I guess there are reasons for it, but it'd be cool if HN, say, increased the edit time limit by 1 minute per 1 point of karma over 500 or something ...
Try writing with your off hand when your coordination isn't fully developed. Even today, after some practice, my right handed writing is no better than a second grader's. Why put someone through that kind of frustration?
Frankly, left handed writers must be taught differently. http://www.musanim.com/mam/lefthand.htm shows some of the challenges. It's more than just switching a hand.
This Palmer Method thing sounded interesting, so I looked into it a bit more, and it doesn't actually look that esoteric, and there are also lefties who can do it:
> I went to Catholic school in the 50's and learned penmanship by the Palmer Method. I am left handed, and to this day, people still say how beautiful my handwriting is....
But my favorite comment is this one:
> Just the sight of this nearly makes me vomit with nervous revulsion......the Palmer Method, Catholic school.....I started in a catholic school in 1960. I endured 6 years of shear hell on earth. Like Holocaust victims I will never forget.....and I will tell my story to all who will listen....catholic school...slapped in the face by nuns, public ridicule was the nuns trademark, told that my Protestant mother could not enter the gates of heaven,....I still have nightmares 50 years later
Finally, I do think that the idea of writing from your arm, shoulder, and back makes intuitive sense. There is a school of piano playing technique that encourages the same thing, and even good typing technique embraces this. Same for many sports.
The real scandal here happened in 1959. When Congress passed created 501(c)(4)s, the law said that (emphasis is mine): "Civic leagues or organizations not organized for profit but operated exclusively for the promotion of social welfare".
In other words, 501(c)(4)s were intended to be allowed to spend NO MONEY on politics. However, a 1959 IRS regulation decided that "exclusively" (0%) really meant "primarily"(up to 49%), and in doing so they completely changed the spirit of law, which was not only illegal, but made the new law a nightmare difficult to enforce. Every single 501(c)(4) that has spent money on politics since 1959 has been in violation of the law passed by Congress — which means that the real law is almost guaranteed not to be enforced.
As I understand it, the US method of interpretation of legislation is to take the opinions of government agencies more or less at face value. After all, they're the experts, so to speak. This is distinct from the Supreme Court's power to interpret the Constitution.
To me it seems like an abrogation of the independent role of the judicial arm. In Australia, for example, the courts jealously defend their rights and powers to interpret legislation to divine the intent of Parliament. Each government agency has no more standing or influence than anyone else.
Government agencies are part of the executive branch, though...so in a sense, their professional role is to execute the law. The judiciary at every level has the power to check that execution...a criminal judge can rule against the prosecutor's office, for example.
I guess I'm not getting what you're getting at? When the judiciary interprets the intent of a law, whose opinion besides the government agency do you think they should consider with equal influence? And if you're going to say, "the public"...well, I think that is the case in the U.S. too. So how are you gauging whether Australia's courts give fairer weight to the public than America's courts?
The idea is that from day to day, agencies interpret the Acts that govern them in order to correctly give them effect. When someone challenges an agency, a US Court presumes in the first instance the agency's interpretation is correct because they are the experts in its administration.
An Australian court does not make that presumption.
It's a big deal because if you go to court against a US agency over the content of its relevant laws, you have to overcome that presumption. In practice that gives US agencies de facto interpretive powers that Australian agencies don't usually have.
> We were once great at innovating in the physical world...But recently, software (and mostly Internet software) has been the focus of innovation, and its importance is probably still underestimated—there are compounding effects to how it’s changing the world that we’re only now beginning to see...But innovation in the physical world (besides phones and computers) over the same time period has been less impressive.
Actually, I would argue that the opposite is true. Software hasn't really had any important innovations (using David Wheeler's definition, which is from a CS/EE perspective, and which is linked to every couple of months on HN[1]). The software required to run a smartphone isn't significantly different than the software needed to run a similar application on a desktop. On the other hand, the hardware on a smartphone now and a desktop from the 90s is different. We take hardware advances like reliable capacitive touchscreens and maybe this storage advance linked to on HN today [2], and Moore's "Law" for granted, but "putting more transistors in a circuit" and increased hardware capabilities were the bottleneck to producing today's technology, not new software techniques.
The reason that people associate software with innovation is because it has become the latest tech buzzword. When a word is overused in this manner, it is hard to have a conversation about it because the definition has been degraded to include pretty much anything. The granting of patents to trivial software ideas gives companies a claim to innovation that they do not deserve.
Rayiner's comment on this thread:
> The long-hanging fruit is gone, and all that's left is hard engineering.
will soon be true for computer hardware, and eventually "Moore's Law" will be broken. When software does not become significantly faster each release cycle, it will be more apparent that hardware is responsible for today's advances as opposed to software.
When a word is overused in this manner, it is hard to have a conversation about it because the definition has been degraded to include pretty much anything.
When you can picture someone using the word against itself, I'd say that's when the bell tolls.
E.g., "Our greatest innovation for this product has been not worrying about innovation, and focusing on incremental improvement"
I posted this comment about obscenities on another thread recently, but I think it is relevant to this thread as well.
According to Paul Fussell's Class: A Guide Through the American Status System, aversion to profanity is a middle class thing. The upper class[1] do not use euphemisms for profanity or obscenity. Fussell wrote that Jilly Cooper reported "I once overheard my son regaling his friends: 'Mummy says pardon is a much worse word than fuck.'"
I doubt that many members of the upper class (see Fussell's book for a definition of upper class, it is roughly the tastes of "old money" but not dependent upon actual wealth) read Hacker News. It is likely that those who do not object to obscenities such as the word "fuck" are more socially liberal freethinkers who dislike formality. Those who do object are likely to be members of the middle class who believe (foolishly) that in censoring profanities and vulgarities, they are emulating the upper class. The phenomenon of "professionalism" is also a product of the middle class — to the upper class, selling things for a living is distasteful and déclassé. "Professional" language is usually very timid and full of circumlocutions as the primary goal is to not say anything that anyone may find offensive.
Hah. Cheers for this. I was going to comment about this book, but then I realised that I didn't remember what it was called, or when I'd read it, or any actual details, and didn't actually have enough content for a comment.
It's a good book, and I'd recommend it if you have an interest in this area.
i loved all of this except the [1] thingy - it smacks of the trying-too-hard pretention that causes all the bland US javascript salesmen to worship "professionalism" and conformity. maybe you could edit it out and just put a link instead?
My favorite story about how Ernst Kummer [1] did arithmetic, from Hoffman's The Man Who Loved Only Numbers[2]:
"One story has him standing before a blackboard, trying to compute 7 times 9. "Ah," Kummer said to his high school class, "7 times 9 is eh, uh, is uh...." "61," one of his students volunteered. "Good," said Kummer, and wrote 61 on the board. "No," said another student, "it's 69." "Come, come, gentlemen," said Kummer, "it can't be both. It must be one or the other." (Erdos liked to tell another
version of how Kummer computed 7 times 9: "Kummer
said to himself, 'Hmmm, the product can't be 61 because
61 is a prime, it can't be 65 because that's a multiple of 5, 67 is a prime, 69 is too big-that leaves only 63.' ") "
> Erdos liked to tell another version of how Kummer computed 7 times 9: "Kummer said to himself, 'Hmmm, the product can't be 61 because 61 is a prime, it can't be 65 because that's a multiple of 5, 67 is a prime, 69 is too big-that leaves only 63.'
That's how I do problems like that, too (I am not a genius mathematician), and it is exactly the sort of thinking that kids should be doing all through K-12. Estimation, intuitive reasoning, analogy, pattern matching, logic, etc.
> Estimation, intuitive reasoning, analogy, pattern
> matching, logic, etc.
Alas, most of the things on your list require a pretty solid foundation to work. You need patterns already committed into your brain to do pattern matching and to see analogy, you need to have internalized experience for intuition to work, you need to have previous exposure for any meaningful estimation.
All to often people forget foundation when they move to the upper layers and sadly sometimes this leads to thinking that foundation is not necessary. And now matter how you look at it there will always be bits of the foundation that require rote learning.
The only thing as breathtaking as the amount of information the Chinese military has stolen is how dysfunctional their military is. Here [1] is an excellent article about corruption in the Chinese military. The Chinese government is a bizarre mix of authoritarianism, greed, patronage and nationalism, and it has no clear structure. The military is no different. It doesn't matter how much technology they have; as long as the military has no internal cohesion and accountability, they will never overtake the United States.
Here's a quote from the article, citing a 'princeling':
" "China no longer has a paramount leader who can hammer down authority at crucial junctures. "Gangs" of patronage and bribery are congealing together, he said, adding that "Corruption is the glue that keeps the whole system together, after the age of idealism." "
And another:
" A third princeling, whose father once ran China's security apparatus, blames Jiang for sabotaging the last leadership transition in 2002 by refusing to relinquish control of the military. He said Jiang promoted dozens of generals who are, as he put it, either "henchmen" or "morons." The result is that nobody is really in control, he said. "
Such articles like the OP's seem to cater to alarmism and hyperbole as these kind of events occur all the time. The difference here is that the US gov is being quite unprofessional by resorting to publicizing these events. Also, it's quite trivial/foolish to care whether or not any country will overtake the US (or another country). The way I see it - decreasing the US' influence may actually be beneficial. Rather than a unipolar/bipolar world, there can be a multipolar world. Maybe it'll reduce the crap that the US gov does/causes domestically and internationally, as it seems the fed believes it can ignore accountability because of supposed exceptionalism.
There has existed a multipolar world in the past, in Europe. That world was very frequently in a state of overt war, so it's not clear that that's a better state of affairs than an unchallenged dominant nation.
"quite unprofessional by resorting to publicizing these events"
What kind of bizarre world are you imagining where governments are meant to or do act "professionally". The international diplomatic community is indeed a noxious swamp where immoral and illegal activities get ignored and hushed up all the time. However it's also an environment where governments release stories to their populations through newspapers. Like China provoking that fight with Japan over islands and pretty much every story in the Daily Mail in the UK (or is it the Sun?).
The activities described in this article are shameful and it is one of the tragedies of this age that large organisations whether governments or corporations literally have no shame or morals. And more importantly nor do we have a way of requiring them to act rationally, reasonably or morally.
Then it would have ended up like Gopher[1]. In 1993, the University of Minnesota announced that it would start to charge license fees to use its implementation of the Gopher server. By 2000, when the university GPLed it, it was too late.
That's a decent guess, but I think it's also possible it would've followed the path of one of the pre-web online services like AOL, Prodigy, CompuServe, or eWorld. Those systems are what happens when somebody owns the marketplace and you need to get permission to set up shop, which (if the WWW took off at all) would more or less have been the state of things while the patents lasted.
Come to think of it, that sounds a lot like the realm of the app store in some ways.
Original Web browsers were capable of using Gopher in a graphical way; in fact, being cross-protocol like that was a big deal in the early days, back when a lot of Universities had substantial amounts of information on Gopher servers and indexed by search software like Veronica and Jughead. (Easy access to FTP was a big deal, too, but FTP hasn't disappeared to the extent Gopher has, so it kind of still is.)
The U.S has an enormous amount of rare earth metals. [1] But the processes of extracting the ore have such a horrendous effect on the environment that the only country willing to mine the metals in significant quantities is China, and the villages in China near the mining sites have suffered as a result [2]. The U.S is rife with abuses of the environment — mountaintop removal mining, anyone? — but so far no one has been willing to match the rare earth metal production levels of China.
