41–50 of 68 posts
How often do you need to write down exactly what was said? Studies[0] show that when students use laptops to take notes, they remember less than when they use a pen and paper. The suggested mechanism by the latter improves retention is that it forces you to understand and summarize the content due to limited output speed (thereby processing it more deeply); when you are able to produce output at near the speed of inp…
How often do you need to write down exactly what was said? Studies[0] show that when students use laptops to take notes, they remember less than when they use a pen and paper. The suggested mechanism by the latter improves retention is that it forces you to understand and summarize the content due to limited output speed (thereby processing it more deeply); when you are able to produce output at near the speed of inp…
The difference is you're not missing anything being said while your write down the thing. It's a little like being able to type fast as a programmer: useful despite typing being only 5% of programming, because it lets you transfer your thoughts faster, so you can focus on the next thought sooner.
Pitman / Gregg gave rise to outrageous claims on both sides and religious discussions much like "Windows or Mac".
Given the bandwidth possible I've wondered why no one has tried a stenotype like keyboard on a computer.
Some time ago I wrote an English -> Gregg Shorthand converter: https://luckytoilet.wordpress.com/2010/07/09/an-introduction... It's not very good, but I'd like to see if anyone can make a better one. It's a shame that shorthand is lost to time and mostly replaced by technology like audio recorders.
The article misses out the rather fascinating battle between Pitman, Gregg and then new Stenography that was going on in the 1910s. The stenographers competed in all those speed competitions until they comprehensively won one of the early ones. This was so disruptive that the competition paused for some years and when it came back was pen system only. Pitman / Gregg gave rise to outrageous claims on both sides and re…
> But Gregg goes even further, eliding unstressed vowels and unvoiced consonants to get to the phonetic nugget of the word: “bed” is written as “b-d”; “act” as “a-k”; “done” as “d-n”. Isn't this a source of collisions? How do you distinguish between bid/bed/bud in Gregg? Or between din/den/done? I have to imagine that context isn't always good enough to help the reader discriminate.
It does lead to collisions, context is usually enough to disambiguate, or there are many specialized abbreviations. I never played with it long enough to get the details, though.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You do push the pen. Otherwise how would you write an O? like ()? Similarly there are upward strokes in h, b, d, k, m, n, r... I would say that cursive ("joined up handwriting" as I know it) prefers downward strokes, and I don't think it ever begins a letter with an upward stroke.
We were taught to begin all cursive letters with an upward stroke, with even a preceding tail on letters like a and o, as shown here -- http://www.howtowriteincursive.org/tag/cursive-writing/ .
Shorthand is a fantastic skill to learn, and I really need to learn it. People get annoyed when you are taking notes on a laptop in meetings. It's just a human psychology thing. You seem otherwise engaged. Even if you're fully engaged in the conversation. There's just some hardwired human aversion to believing you're paying attention when you're pecking away. So being able to attend meetings the old fashioned way, wi…
The most effective way is to take notes on a pad or a spiral notebook. Eventually, run them through a scanner. (How are you going to enter equations, draw arrows and diagrams, etc., with a keyboard? If you have a stylus "works almost as good as a pen!", just use a pen on paper. Yes, I'm old, and I wear a watch, too.)
Just a side point from the last line of this article: shorthand (and "cursive") is specifically adapted to the fountain pen: the strokes are continuous and drawn (i.e. you never push the pen, only pull it). Even with a pencil or ball point/byro if you pull rather than push you end up with a much more readable handwriting. And a 10% improvement is YUGE when you have to write everything by hand and there are no copiers…
You do push the pen. Otherwise how would you write an O? like ()? Similarly there are upward strokes in h, b, d, k, m, n, r... I would say that cursive ("joined up handwriting" as I know it) prefers downward strokes, and I don't think it ever begins a letter with an upward stroke.
I don't know if they still require it, but as of 5 years ago my kid was still required to do his schoolwork with a fountain pen (until grade 8).
Shorthand is a fantastic skill to learn, and I really need to learn it. People get annoyed when you are taking notes on a laptop in meetings. It's just a human psychology thing. You seem otherwise engaged. Even if you're fully engaged in the conversation. There's just some hardwired human aversion to believing you're paying attention when you're pecking away. So being able to attend meetings the old fashioned way, wi…
The most effective way is to take notes on a pad or a spiral notebook. Eventually, run them through a scanner. (How are you going to enter equations, draw arrows and diagrams, etc., with a keyboard? If you have a stylus "works almost as good as a pen!", just use a pen on paper. Yes, I'm old, and I wear a watch, too.)
I wrote a quick hack at http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/rpn-edit#3_1_7_1_15_1_1... that almost does a reasonable job; I think that, although it doesn't quite reach being a usable equation editor, among other things because it doesn't have "=", it shows that one is possible.)
I wrote another related quick hack at http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/81hacks/autodiffgraph/ with a slightly different take on the problem, where the objects you calculate with are continuous functions of x rather than pure numbers.