Tomorrow, a 100 year old mysterious package will be opened in a museum in Norway

Post by ithkuil » Fri, Aug 24, 2012, 11:05 AM UTC

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #51

fractallyte wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 edit 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.

Post by s_kilk » Fri, Aug 24, 2012, 12:25 PM UTC

mistermann wrote: post #30

kamaal wrote: post #12

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Handwriting is an amazing thing. 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…

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.

Post by eru » Fri, Aug 24, 2012, 12:32 PM UTC

btilly wrote: post #41

sdoering wrote: post #34

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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 firs…

Post by underlines » Fri, Aug 24, 2012, 1:00 PM UTC

bradly wrote: post #11

Video with English subtitles: http://www.vg.no/nyheter/utrolige-historier/artikkel.php?art... Article in English: http://www.vg.no/nyheter/utrolige-historier/artikkel.php?art... Live stream tomorrow: http://www.vgtv.no/#!id=55544

Post by ImprovedSilence » Fri, Aug 24, 2012, 1:23 PM UTC

kang wrote: post #60

johnx123-up wrote: post #44

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"Bad handwriting is a sign of imperfect education." - Gandhi Ironically Gandhi's handwriting http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f4/Gandhi_ha...

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…