This seems like one of those things that will push something useful out of my head if I learn it.
Absolutely. I stopped reading a couple of pages in because I didn't want to forget where I live.
Learn to read a binary font by reading a story
121–130 of 136 posts
Re: Learn to read a binary font by reading a story
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's funny how when someone on HN says, "My method works well, but there are some pathological cases, like X" someone else on HN will invariably reply with, "Yeah, but I don't see why X would be an improvement." This is a bad practice not only because it misrepresents the original thought (the person was not claiming that X was an improvement, they clearly called it pathological), but more perniciously it subtly erod…
If it came across that way, I'm sorry - I'm genuinely curious why such machines don't convert what was typed into English. In the past it was almost certainly a lack of computational power (or zero) - what about now? I was only asking about the reading portion, the writing is pretty clearly faster. I'm not in any claiming that they should be typing on QWERTY. I'm wondering why the pathological case exists at all when…
Ah, I'm sorry, I actually gave the wrong impression. On the machine I own, you can choose whether or not to have it display English, or what you've actually written, or a split screen with English on one side and what you've actually written on the other.
Reading it in English isn't as ideal as you may think, though. I actually prefer reading the notes. The problem is that if you're writing at 225 words a minute, it can be very easy to accidentally leave off a letter, or add an extra letter to a stroke. The English might come up as come up as a completely different word, where as if you're reading what you've actually written, it can be a lot easier to see your mistake and read the correct word.
For example, let's use the word Dime again. If I'm going at 225 and I accidentally add an "R" to the word dime, it'll look like "DRAOEUPL". In English, this would read "Did there come a time", where as if I were looking at my notes, it would be obvious to me that I intended for that to be "dime". If you're reading back at court, you don't want to make mistakes like that.
Re: Learn to read a binary font by reading a story
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Chording becomes your standard input device That's exactly what steganographers do, and they go further along by condensing syllabes, words or even phrases in a single chord. Pretty amazing, although it seems a lot harder than this, and not as good for reading. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stenotype
In case it wasn't just a mind-typo: stenographer and steganographer are two different things. (Although I guess one could argue that they are quite similar)
Well played, brain.
Re: Learn to read a binary font by reading a story
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
Could you make this bookmarklet toggle between regular/dotsies?
That could probably be done. What's the use case? Maybe if you think of a good plot for the http://dotsies.org/game I'll take a stab at it :)
how's this for an idea, inspired by this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxX_bVluflo it would be an investigation into a world that got turned into dots, or something. That way you could have lots of dotsies font all around, and a bunch of text slowly turning into dotsies for practice. You might also consider color coding the letters so that you have an additional channel of hints that you can toggle on and off. To make the reader have a more gradual slope.
Re: Learn to read a binary font by reading a story
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
If it came across that way, I'm sorry - I'm genuinely curious why such machines don't convert what was typed into English. In the past it was almost certainly a lack of computational power (or zero) - what about now? I was only asking about the reading portion, the writing is pretty clearly faster. I'm not in any claiming that they should be typing on QWERTY. I'm wondering why the pathological case exists at all when…
Ah, I'm sorry, I actually gave the wrong impression. On the machine I own, you can choose whether or not to have it display English, or what you've actually written, or a split screen with English on one side and what you've actually written on the other. Reading it in English isn't as ideal as you may think, though. I actually prefer reading the notes. The problem is that if you're writing at 225 words a minute, it…
Makes sense, and yeah, that kind of error is something that grammar checkers still fail miserably at. Thanks!
It's good to know that it has at least been done. There are so many places where technology lies untapped, I was half-expecting this to be one of them since it's such an old field (and with close ties to the government).
Re: Learn to read a binary font by reading a story
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ah, I'm sorry, I actually gave the wrong impression. On the machine I own, you can choose whether or not to have it display English, or what you've actually written, or a split screen with English on one side and what you've actually written on the other. Reading it in English isn't as ideal as you may think, though. I actually prefer reading the notes. The problem is that if you're writing at 225 words a minute, it…
Makes sense, and yeah, that kind of error is something that grammar checkers still fail miserably at. Thanks! It's good to know that it has at least been done. There are so many places where technology lies untapped, I was half-expecting this to be one of them since it's such an old field (and with close ties to the government).
I'm half expecting them to replace this field entirely with speech to text technology in 50 years or so.
Re: Learn to read a binary font by reading a story
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
Makes sense, and yeah, that kind of error is something that grammar checkers still fail miserably at. Thanks! It's good to know that it has at least been done. There are so many places where technology lies untapped, I was half-expecting this to be one of them since it's such an old field (and with close ties to the government).
I'm half expecting them to replace this field entirely with speech to text technology in 50 years or so.
50 years or so? Kurzweil would have another heart attack if he read this ;)
Re: Learn to read a binary font by reading a story
#128This seems like it could actually be a real improvement on written Latin if it adopted a real phonetic alphabet. Just transposing all of my existing graphemes for new, smaller ones seems a little silly. (And since what you're really asking is not for people to learn a new alphabet, but to learn a new symbol for every word in their lexicon, it wouldn't be that much more of a leap. Think about it.) Thinking about it--…
I'm going to school right now to become a court reporter / stenographer. Basically, I type on a funny looking keyboard ( http://www.acculaw.com/images/products/display/stenograph%20... ) where you're not so much typing letters as much as you're typing sounds. So the word "talk", for example would be written "tauk", with each letter of the word pressed at the same time (if possible. Some words you need to come back fo…
dime going as "TKAOEUPL" reminds me of this: http://i.imgur.com/EFzu9.png
Re: Learn to read a binary font by reading a story
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hangul, the Korean writing system, is at once phonetic and syllabic. Each "symbol" represents a syllable, but each sub-symbol represents a particular sound in the syllable; and each sub-sub-symbol encodes phonetic information about how it should be pronounced. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul#Letter_design for a better explanation. A binary representation of the Hangul system could be very interesting. Use the…
I've been learning Hangul recently, and now every language that doesn't encode syllables into the writing system just seems immensely flawed to me. Hangul seems like a very intuitive, logical writing system. There are relatively few exceptions to the rules it sets out, though I think that's likely because it's such a young language -- more and more seem to be creeping in over time as dialects evolve.
> I think that's likely because it's such a young language
Do you mean language or writing system? Hangul is ~500 years old, comparatively new for a somewhat widely used writing system, though it's an odd case given that it's not really adapted from another system. The Korean language itself is much older.
Re: Learn to read a binary font by reading a story
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is problem with phonetic alphabets: people have different accents, and so something that is obvious for an Englishman is confusing for an Australian, or an American. When I was (briefly) doing some linguistics, there were several times when I spent minutes trying to work out what a certain set of IPA symbols were. (I was pretty good normally, but words with multiple/varying/regional pronunciations are very conf…
Not really. Greek has a phonetic alphabet, and we're doing fine with accents. You just standardize words and spell them in one way, and the people speaking the dialect just spell them the same, even knowing they sound different. It's not a problem, and you can even emulate the accent in writing for whatever purpose.
Cool, I didn't realise that Greek was a phonetic alphabet!
I think there is a difference between an alphabet that one uses from birth, and one that you try to teach to adults. In the former case, you're starting from scratch. In the latter case, you've got your old alphabet confusing things.
Evidently, phonetic alphabets are possible; but for an adult to learn to use one it would take practice and effort, and many people would probably be fairly resistant to that ("our old one is perfectly good", "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" etc.).