In my hometown in Uruguay we have this monument: http://www.flickr.com/photos/flodigrip/1510286707/ the sphere on top is meant to be open every 100 years. In 1992 it was opened and we could see what the people from our hometown 100 years ago left for us.
They had a letter to us, documents, different kind of money, pictures, etc. Very interesting stuff
And then inside that is a Rush album on a compact phonograph record with the inscription, "From the Great Library at Temples of Syrinx. Please destroy at your convenience. Do not play. - Best Regards, The Priests."
But please for heaven's sake do not consider great handwriting to be a sign of intelligence or greatness as a value in itself. This sort of thing destroys kids in their early days. During my days in school(In India). Good handwriting was considered a mandatory trait of good, brilliant and hard working students. Any body who didn't have good hand writing was automatically considered a bad student.
The net result was kids with genuine brilliance, appetite for hard work but with a bad handwriting struggled. Some times forced to imitate their class mates in a bad way. I was a big victim of it. In fact the head mistress called my mom and told her, every thing was brilliant about me and if only I could have great handwriting I could score higher than everybody else. The worst part of it was I took it seriously, I had convinced myself no matter how hardworking or intelligent I was I didn't deserve to score well as I didn't have a good handwriting.
It was not until a couple of years later. During my pre university days. My uncle cleared my mind of all this. He convinced me that good handwriting discipline is nothing great in itself. Although its good to have one. But greatness lies in what you write and not how you write it.
Later I developed how to write in script with separate letters without joining them as in cursive writing. It greatly increased readability. But people around me used to find that strange and some even suicidal for a student.
Its basically what Leo Tolstoy said:
What a strange illusion it is to suppose that beauty is goodness.
The same thing happened to me in a UK school in the 1980s.
I was told off repeatedly - and my parents told - about my poor handwriting, my tendency to "rush" work, and even that I went to the toilet too often. Of course, the reality was that I was bored and the teacher was a vindictive fool.
I remember saying to my mum at 8: "I'm worried about my 's'es", and she said "it's hardly likely you'll be sacked from a job because of your 's'es is it?".
More incorrect than rude, typing is about hitting the letters you wanted to hit accurately, quickly, consistently and without strain or injury, spelling and grammar are something entirely different!
And both are about communicating with other human beings effectively. I could spell out everything phonetically or use text shorthand as well, but that makes it generally harder for a wide audience to enjoyably consume my writing. Humans do a large part of reading via gestalt comprehension, changing the "shape" of words stymies this process.
How's this for the actual discussion: There have been cases of people dying because the pharmacist misread the doctor's scribbles and gave them the wrong prescription.
We have medical students "training" their fast and ugly writing, right from the beginning of college. It's all about the doctor's status. The bad handwriting is one medal.
And you've just lowercased the starting letter of a new sentence. If you're going to flag someone over something, make sure you double check what you've typed.
Yes I did and it was on purpose, because I was listing exact examples from his comment. Probably should have put them in quotes though, I'll give you that.
No Irony. He admits his education was imperfect. The complete para is :
"But though I was none the worse for having neglected exercise, I am still paying the penalty of another neglect. I do not know whence I got the notion that good handwriting was not a necessary part of education, but I retained it until I went to England. When later, especially in South Africa, I saw the beautiful handwriting of lawyers and young men born and educated in South Africa, I was ashamed of myself and repented of my neglect. I saw that bad handwriting should be regarded as a sign of an imperfect education. I tried later to improve mine, but it was too late. I could never repair the neglect of my youth. Let every young man and woman be warned by my example, and understand that good handwriting is a necessary part of education. I am now of opinion that children should first be taught the art of drawing before learning how to write. Let the child learn his letters by observation as he does different objects, such as flowers, birds, etc., and let him learn handwriting only after he has learnt to draw objects. He will then write a beautifully formed hand."
If Gandhi says 'Bad handwriting is a sign of imperfect education.' Evaluators correcting the exam papers may think anybody with a bad handwriting is a poor student discarding the content of what he has written.
Sometimes people just go by the trends. Times have changed a lot since Gandhi. These days non-violence is taken as a sign of cowardice, during Gandhi's time it was considered a sign of perseverance, patience and taking on the enemy with moral courage and ultimately defeating him by mere Kindness and courtesy.
Interesting. One thing that's always jumped out at me over the years, for no particular reason, is the sometimes horrendous handwriting (and sometimes even spelling) of extremely skilled engineers. Sometimes their writing looks like they are holding the pencil vertically in their hand with 4 fingers wrapped around it.
It's because as a programmer you barely do write anything by hand any more these days. I notice it myself, I'm now faster at typing than (hand)writing, and I wrote shitloads during my times at the uni.
I do a lot of planning on my diary so I write quite a bit.
Also many programmers like working out problems on paper first before firing up the editor.
We do a lot of writing but of a different kind. We don't write essays, stories and records of historical events. But we definitely scribble a lot of symbol manipulation stuff.
Too true! If I have to write anything in cursive other than my signature(which has now become a symbol more than my name in cursive) I am completely flummoxed as to how to do it.
my signature(which has now become a symbol more than my name in cursive)
True story- when my sister first moved to France, the first time she had to sign anything official, she was told "no, not your name, your signature". So she made up a new scribbly symbol just for that purpose.
Damn. I had bad handwriting as a kid--and haven't great handwriting now--and the bad grades did bother me. But somehow I survived w/o carrying scars into later life.
It is strange and not so strange, and not always such an illusion... perhaps we can blame nature, but though form should follow function, and much good is hidden and much ugliness made pretty, but it's a mistake to think that they are entirely separate and unconnected. http://www.paulgraham.com/taste.html
I don't remember the full context, but once my uncle said: "It must be an old person, because the handwriting is so pretty."
To which my grandfather replied: "you had to write like that with a fountain pen"
I've never used a fountain pen, but I gather you have to maintain a fairly constant speed as the pen moves along the paper. If you want that handwriting back, I think you have to get rid of ball-point pens and pencils. Although while pretty handwriting is nice, I'm not convinced its worth the time to learn. (Which isn't to say legible handwriting isn't worth learning)
I used both fountain pens and pencils when I was in school and I had similar results, regardless of the tool. Though my writing wasn't exactly beautiful, but it was pretty readable.
Regarding the ball-point pen, when I switched to it, I had to write fast, so the writing might have deteriorated from both the speed and the tool.
There's something about a fountain pen. I have a few, and without fail I write more neatly, and make fewer mistakes, than when using pencil or ball-point. I think it's that they demand slightly more concentration on mechanics to make them work, and that's enough to make a big difference in the writing quality.
Eh… I have one I use daily (a Pilot/Namiki retractable nib) and it certainly hasn't made my handwriting any better. It is nicer than a regular pen though.
That's simple. Dip and fountain pens allow you to create lines of different thickness, which can result in interesting calligraphy. It's simply impossible with ball pens which produce constant thickness lines.
I was required to use a fountain pen at school (late 80s UK). Needless to say as a left handed person my enforced writing style one word, blot, one word, blot was anything but fluid.
At least you weren't forced to write with your right hand. I have been told that was fairly common a generation further back (At least, my dad claims so).
I have been lucky, not being punished for writing with my left hand. My mother was forced to write with her right hand. But even in the 1980s pupils in Germany were forced to write with the right (in both meanings) hand.
We now know a lot more, about what this does to a child's brain, but then, teachers just believed to be right.
I knew a left-handed math prof who had had that treatment growing up in Holland. But he'd developed a party trick.
One day he told us about this. And said that the result was that he could write with both hands. Different things. He demonstrated. Wrote with both hands at once, different things, on 2 neighboring boards. Kept on writing. Got to the bottom of the boards. Then turned around, began lecturing from the first board, reached the bottom, and continued the lecture from the second. He had laid out the boards perfectly to do this.
It doesn't do anything to a child's brain, it's just gratuitously cruel. That is reason enough. But many people the world over learn to eat or whatever with a certain hand and it does not hurt their brain.
I think even if your handwriting is crap a fountain pen just looks better, or at least more auspicious. Horrible for lefties of course, but very nice to use if you're right-handed.
If you're left-handed, handwriting proceeds best by mirroring what the right hand would do (ie. write 'backwards'). It's far more natural. Alright, so others will need a mirror to read it - but that ought to be society's problem, not yours! ("Equal rights for the Sinisterous!")
In a gradual shift toward ambidexterity, I've found that questioning society's insistence on 'right-ness' can be enlightening...
Presumably script that proceeds right to left (and even upwards) was originated by left handed scribes
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spellchecker : left handed scribes became left handed scones. The history of heavy baked goods in the development of human civilisation has been scandalously neglected by a blinkered academic community.
I remember I read somewhere about the fact that right-to-left script was preferred when carving script on stone. as right hand people supposedly prefer to hold the hammer on their right hand.
I'm not sure if that's really the cause. Furthermore in many ancient scripts the direction was quite unimportant, in some cases even reverting in each line (Boustrophedon).
Writing left-handed in a left-to-right script requires the hand to move over the ink that was just applied. This invariably means smudges. Writing right-handed (LTR) the ink has time to dry before the hand moves over it for the next line of prose.
Buy a good fountain pen, write slowly. Start by getting cheap pens, preferably those with interchangeable nibs to see which nib size you prefer using. When you know which size you like (for most people it will be medium) get a decent pen and nib and carry it with you.
I have a vintage Parker 51 and some oldish German pens. Modern Japanese pens are quite good though nibs can be narrow for Western taste.
After trying several fountain pens and having less than pleasant experiences, I have for years now used felt-tip pens almost exclusively. It approximates the look and feel of a fountain pen close enough for my tastes, and requires much less wrist pressure than ballpoint pens.
Nice calligraphy, sure, but hopefully not cursive. Careless cursive handwriting ends up illegible much, much faster than print handwriting, and relies way too much on context to let you figure out what individual words are for my liking. I've had to ask people who wrote cursive notes with just a couple of words instead of a full sentence what they actually wrote, since I couldn't make out the word without the priming of a full sentence of barely legible scribbles.
My father used to do a lot of research using microfilmed 17th-19th century documents.
Cursive handwriting (combined with often poor microfilm or fiche photography) was an occupational hazard, he got fairly good at interpreting some documents but it might take him the better part of an afternoon to transcribe 4 or 5 pages of journal entries from some documents.
For what it's worth, I have (older)relatives in Sweden who still write like that, with a ballpoint pen. So i don't think it's necessarily that it was written with a fountain pen, although they may have learned with a fountain pen and just continued writing that way.
I watched without the subtitles and had no idea what it was about; nonetheless, i got to listen for 5 minutes to a language i never heard before and it was beautiful!
My guess is that it is collection of letters by people about the historic value of the day. It must be something boring like that otherwise he would have kept it for himself.
But seriously, why the downvotes? I responded to a joke about pretend early 20th century spammers with a joke about pretend early 20th century rickrolling. Are we only allowed to be completely serious here? Did I do harm to the level of discourse here? What's going on?
Imagine if it was a 100-years old, still functioning and yet to be released smartphone, with an HD video of the 1912 celebration. :) That would be so cool... Like in that movie, "Das Jesus Video".
Anyway, as others said, it probably contains letters from people of that time.
The package was opened. It contains a collection of historical documents, letters, telegrams, newspapers clippings and national decorations. Also a white banner with gold tassels that said "Fra Kongen" which translates to "From the King." and several other banner and flag-like decorations in the Norway's colors of red, blue and white. The package weights 3 kg.
Nothing inside that small package could be as valuable as 100 years of wonder and excitement. But it would have been hilarious if it was pics of the Mayor's wife.
I'm wondering what prevented them from doing x-rays on the package, or an echography, or something to find out what's inside? I mean, I get that they want to keep the mystery, I just don`t think I'd be able to contain myself for 100 years!
Pretty common for Scandinavian countries. Something about engagement plummeting whenever they try to change them. So they do it like Craigslist and never change anything.
Article in English: http://www.vg.no/nyheter/utrolige-historier/artikkel.php?art...
Live stream tomorrow: http://www.vgtv.no/#!id=55544