Kamala Harris received a random invitation for the Compton High School graduation by student board member MyShay Causey and she decided to show up. Our forever MVP is the coolest. pic.twitter.com/OtTt06WCf6
— Fabi ???? (@kamala_things) June 5, 2025
===
Earlier this year, an enterprising high school senior named Myshay saw my husband eating at the restaurant where she worked. She wrote a note to me and shared it with him, telling me about her incredible work in her community and her dream to work in education policy.
We spoke… pic.twitter.com/0ie8tEStJQ
— Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) June 6, 2025
===
MVP Kamala Harris attended Compton High School’s graduation today ?? pic.twitter.com/3YuLDrp0Q9
— rese ! (@ATTYHARRIS) June 5, 2025
===
Is Elon admitting there was election fraud and Kamala Harris actually won?
It looks like it. pic.twitter.com/QhU3RGdEo1
— Chris Wozney ???? (@ChrisWozney) June 5, 2025
===
When you know America fucked up and they realize there's nothing they can do about it now pic.twitter.com/v3qXEdZfMU
— Protect Kamala Harris ? (@DisavowTrump20) June 5, 2025
On The Road – frosty – 2024 National Park Road Trip – Washington (2/10) Seattle Part 2
Professor Bigfoot
It ain’t what you know, it’s what you can prove; and who’s gonna do the investigation to prove Elon stole the election?
TheQuietOne
Just watch. Someone is going to bitch because Myshay’s letter wasn’t written in cursive.
Nukular Biskits
Good mornin, y’all!
Flyby …. getting ready for work. Originally was gonna telework but shithead mgt … well, y’all don’t need to hear about it.
Be sweet.
Baud
I can’t believe she likes Gen Z.
Professor Bigfoot
James Fallows linked to “The Impact Map” that shows how DOGE cuts are affecting people literally all over the country.
Even right here in li’l ol’ Stark County Ohio.
Nukular Biskits
@Professor Bigfoot:
Still, I think everyone with GOP US Reps & GOP US Senators should demand an investigation.
Goose, gander … LOL
What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?
Hoping this feud gets all the DOGE shits fired on suspicion of disloyalty – they were mostly hand-picked by Musk so does the administration want them around? Won’t shed a tear for them. Also all of them have broken laws and Trump controls the DOJ so…he could decide to prosecute. They’re probably too clueless to realize the jeopardy they’re in yet but it’ll dawn on them eventually.
Baud
Everyone is hung over from the Bumble in the Jungle yesterday.
J.
Kamala Harris is a class act — as opposed to Trump, who is classless.
NotMax
Been a dearth of music of late.
Public pianoing. “Hardest” is entirely subjective.
lowtechcyclist
Good morning!
@TheQuietOne:
This lefthander says, “fuck cursive.”
lowtechcyclist
@Baud:
Well that’s alright by me.
stinger
@Baud:
I hope she runs again.
catclub
He could, but he won’t. Makeup today with Musk is his TACO coward move. also more stock manipulation.
Professor Bigfoot
@lowtechcyclist: ISWYDT
and now it’s earworming in my head…
Aziz, light!
@What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?: The key members of Musk’s little team of Hitler Youth now have permanent federal jobs, which they got without regard for OPM’s elaborate civil service procedures, in which one must compete for the appointment with a pool of other qualified applicants. My hunch is that their jobs will now be fully protected by the same provisions that used to give job security to federal employees but are now optional when the White House chooses to ignore them.
MagdaInBlack
@Professor Bigfoot: Yeah, me too, damn it.
Professor Bigfoot
@NotMax: Indeed, but bloody well done, kid!
Aziz, light!
Trump may want to punish Elmo for disloyalty, but the mission to destroy government operations is still in place.
They Call Me Noni
Yes, Elon Musk is why we can’t have nice things like basic services and decency. I vehemently dislike Republicans and hate TACO. I just knew Kamala would be our President and we would be moving forward. Sunshine, butterflies, roses and all the things. Instead we have hate, revenge and doom. My mantra every time I watch any news is “fucking Republicans”.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@lowtechcyclist:
Every prof and grad student who had to read my essay exams (oh the joy of a liberal arts edumacation) over 6 years of undergrad and grad school said the same thing about me.
The thing is it’s gotten worse from disuse, if that’s possible.
Suzanne
@lowtechcyclist: Awww! I love cursive. One of the skills I developed in recent years is good old-fashioned pointed pen Spencerian script. I figure it will come in handy whenever I get around to writing my manifesto.
ETA: I love pens.
Professor Bigfoot
@They Call Me Noni: Conservatives will kill us all to ensure their position above all of us.
Heh, they’ll kill themselves in their sociopathic quest for straight white Christian male dominance.
They’ll die of whiteness and take the rest of us with them if necessary.
Baud
@Suzanne:
Misread that and thought this was the After Dark thread.
Matt McIrvin
My beef with cursive writing, as I was taught it in school, is the capital letters. They’re hard to read, hard to write, pointlessly ornate and many of them don’t even join up with the lowercase, so you lose any benefit you might have gotten from that. (And anything you have to write in all caps just looks ridiculous.) It appears there was a push to simplify the letterforms and make the T and the F look less identical after I was in elementary school, so what you see in more recent instructional materials isn’t quite as bad.
Suzanne
@Baud: …..and you thought, “Hey, I’m already not wearing any pants, how convenient.”
Suzanne
@Matt McIrvin:
Delete your account, friend. ;)
zhena gogolia
@TheQuietOne: i’m not going to blame someone for not knowing what their teachers didn’t teach them
Baud
@Suzanne:
Not so convenient sometimes, like when I’m looking for a place to carry my pens.
They Call Me Noni
@Professor Bigfoot: And it is so sad and infuriating. Our children and grandchildren do not deserve this. My great granddaughter does not have autonomy over her own body. Mr. Noni and I started her 529 as soon as she had a SS# and put money in it every month. It will be fully funded when we die. Will there even be decent education when she’s 18? The three grandsons are just getting their footing as adults and this country is moving backwards. The money Mr. Noni and I worked so hard for and invested diligently to accumulate was supposed to begin generational wealth for our family. Will there be anything left of it when we die? I hate what stupid people have done to this country.
I need to get in a better mood because my princess is on her way over to spend the day with her Noni.
Professor Bigfoot
@They Call Me Noni: Blessings on you and your House; but we have absolutely been overrun with stupidity.
To quote one of my mutuals on BlueSky,
All of it.
ETA: and, JOY OF THE DAY TO YOU AND YOUR PRINCESS, may it be filled with laughter and fun and so much love.❤️
Betty Cracker
I’m old enough to have learned cursive in school, but I didn’t use it then (unless required) and have never used it since. For me, writing in print is more legible and speedy. That said, one of my friends from grade school writes in the most elegant cursive script — everything she writes looks like an 18th century founding document. Kinda jealous of that ability!
Baud
@Betty Cracker:
You are me. My handwriting is terrible so I don’t write cursive. I wish I could write pretty.
Professor Bigfoot
@Betty Cracker: My cursive was horrid, but I first learned to touch-type when I was in 4th grade and got my first typewriter the following Christmas.
What made me give up cursive entirely was the first year of engineering school— labeling a mechanical drawing in cursive was not an option; and I discovered that my printing was way more legible than my cursive.
That was 40 something years ago and I don’t think I could write a sentence in cursive again with a gun to my head. And I KNOW no one would be able to read it!!
sab
@Matt McIrvin: I have spent forty years in public accounting and I hate cursive writing with a passion. It is beautiful, but mostly illegible. I am so old that I learned to write in cursive in elementary school, so I am familiar with it. When clients write me a note in cursive I know that I will probably have to contact them to find out what that squiggled letter or number is, since it could be interpreted as one of several similar characters.
Cursive is beautiful, but to do it properly ( legibly) you have to be slow and careful, which defeats the whole point of cursive (etymology: from Latin for running or flowing.)
BellyCat
@They Call Me Noni: Don’t fret. YouTube will undoubtedly offer degrees someday (sooner rather than later) and will gladly accept 529 funds. They might even reduce some of the advertising based upon the amount paid. THE FUTURE OF HIGHER EDUCATION!
Baud
I curse cursive!
lowtechcyclist
@Suzanne:
It’s fine as a niche skill/art form, but taught to everyone as if it’s still an essential means of communication and recording? Hell to the no. My son didn’t learn cursive, and he won’t need it to be able to read anything I’ve ever written, including 20+ years of journals: I stopped using it in eighth grade for everything except my signature, and I’ve had no problem doing without it ever since.
Matt McIrvin
@Matt McIrvin:
I want to emphasize this point particularly: in the version I was initially taught, the F had no crossbar–the T and the F both looked much like what I, as a kid, would have read as a capital J, with an enormous curving flourish at the bottom, and the only difference between them was a nearly microscopic hook on the very end of the stroke for the F. It was absurd. I think some teacher took me aside at some point and taught me an extracurricular version of the F that was easier to distinguish.
Also, the capital Q was a 2.
Many years later, someone pointed out to me that these letterforms had originally been designed for quill, dip or fountain pens that could make thick and thin strokes, and they made much more visual sense if you wrote them that way–but we were making these letters with pencils and ballpoint pens. They were ill-suited to the technology of the age.
NotMax
@sab
Old enough that when they taught cursive the alphabet included the final t and final r as separate pen strokes.
Never broke the habit of writing that final t when composing in cursive.
frosty
Cursive is difficult, unreadable if you’re not really good at it, and not much faster than printing. I read something about italics when I was in college and stuck with it. Here’s some info and some quotes from another site. It looks good, it’s just as fast as cursive, and it’s easier.
https://handwritingsuccess.com/faqs-on-recent-state-handwriting-mandates/
lowtechcyclist
@Professor Bigfoot:
That got me to wondering whether I could! So I got me a pen and a paper and I
made up my own little signwrote “the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” in cursive. Much to my surprise, my hand even still remembered how to make the z.That’s the most I’ve written in cursive in probably half a century, and may be more than I’ll ever write in cursive again.
p.a.
If you’ve seen original documents from the past, you’ve probably seen this (from Wikipedia)
Rules
English
This list of rules for the long s is not exhaustive, and it applies only to books printed during the 17th to early 19th centuries in English-speaking countries.[1] Similar rules exist for other European languages.[1]
Long s was always used (“ſong”, “ſubſtitute”) except:
In handwriting, these rules did not apply—the long s was usually confined to preceding a round s, either in the middle or at the end of a word—for example, “aſsure”, “bleſsings”.[1]
p.a.
My comment (originally #43) in moderation. IDK why.
This is “43a”
SiubhanDuinne
@Matt McIrvin:
It is!
It is!
It is Balloon Juice After Dark!!!
Matt McIrvin
@sab: Many European countries reformed their handwriting education to use other forms of joined script that are quite different from our Spencerian-derived cursive. They’re far better, but most Americans who talk about this subject don’t even know they exist.
We instead developed this odd system in which children are taught to write twice: first taught to write in block letters derived from sans-serif printing fonts like Futura, which is quite readable but is a bit laborious to write; then they’re UN-taught that, ordered to immediately stop writing that way and instead write in a hand that has joined letters but is also illegible. It was always a strange and illogical way to do it.
Now most schools have just dropped the cursive instruction stage, which is treated as one cultural barbarism among many by nostalgics, and that’s dumb but honestly what we’re doing is still kind of weird and could be better.
brendancalling
I can often tell which of my students are from foreign countries without even hearing their voices because they know how to write cursive, which mostly isn’t taught anymore here in the states. This is a real shame, because the beauty of cursive aside, learning the technique is great for young brains because it makes you think about letters and the sounds they make in different ways.
In addition, several of my students are FASCINATED by cursive and want to learn. One of my (less studious) kids wrote an appreciation letter to a teacher and asked if I could sign it “fancy” because she doesn’t know how.
I swear, it breaks my heart to see the education system deny kids a skill like cursive writing. Even if they don’t use it in daily life, it’s still a good skill to have—like quadratic equations or graphing slopes, skills I have but have never used in my adult life.
NotMax
Checked to ensure the over the air broadcast antenna still working so can watch the Tonys on Sunday.
Basically the only time I switch the TV to antenna. Everything A-OK.
;)
sab
@frosty: I switched to italic in sixth grade because my teacher that year allowed me to. She said the point was legibility and italic worked better for me.
My italic is somewhat joined.
Eyeroller
@Matt McIrvin: I dropped the conventional cursive capital Q as soon as nobody was checking for it. T and F ought to be easily distinguishable and any style that makes them too similar isn’t a good one. But cursive styles have changed over the years. The other capitals, with the exception of G, are either very similar to the block-printed version, or are larger versions of the lower case (e.g. A, S, and Z).
Cursive can be faster but many of us end up with some combination of block-printing and cursive. I nearly always use a cursive “r” since a printed “r” tends to interrupt the flow more for me.
I was also unable to learn to write legible cursive until I started using a fountain pen. It made an enormous difference. I actually saw an article recently titled something like “How the Ballpoint Pen Killed Cursive.” Cursive is best written with high-flow ink. Gel pens are a decent alternative to a fountain pen since I don’t write enough to want to maintain fountain pens.
Eyeroller
@sab: Italic is the ancestor of cursive :-)
lowtechcyclist
@Matt McIrvin:
That’s pretty much in keeping with how we do everything in the U.S., though: America is the greatest country on Earth in every which way, so we don’t have to know how any other country does things, even if we’re going there as tourists, because the way they do it must be wrong.
dww44
@lowtechcyclist: I write better and faster than I print. I sent my 20 year old granddaughter a gift of a watch that had belonged to her namesake, my Mom, and included a long note. She couldn’t read it and the cousin’s wife with whom she was staying had to translate it to her. I had forgotten she wasn’t taught cursive.
p.s. Spouse has a beautiful readable handwriting. Not fancy, just clear and clean.
Baud
I want to go back to the old days when J’s looked like i’s and s’s looked like f’s.
NotMax
@Eyeroller
The old time cursive upper case X is unnecessarily fussy.
A lanky 9 and 6 conjoined at the tailbone.
Eyeroller
@NotMax: Again, depends on the style. As others have noted, many of us oldsters were taught a pretty archaic, and I would say excessively florid, style. One could make a cursive X with just two strokes and I think that’s how I was taught. But even that X you describe at least looks like the printed letter. The Q bore almost no resemblence. G doesn’t much either. Italic sounds like a better choice overall, maybe something like that is that’s what Europeans are teaching.
NotMax
@Baud
The long s (for lower case s, though never as the first letter of a word) is distinguishable from the standard s.
How about the v for u?
lowtechcyclist
@brendancalling:
I can’t recall its being taught in a way that got into any of that, and learning cursive certainly didn’t cause me to think about it on my own.
There’s no reason to deny anyone the opportunity to learn cursive. They can teach it in art classes as an option that kids can learn if they want.
And lefthanders should have been exempted all along from having to learn a means of writing specifically designed for right-handed people. At least by the time I got into school, most school systems had stopped trying to make lefties write with their right hands.
Baud
@NotMax:
U shouldn’t exist.
suzanne
@lowtechcyclist: Agreed…. it is a fun skill to have, and a joy when doing it with a dip pen with a flex nib. Get those beautiful thick and thin strokes.
For me, as someone who draws a lot (and not just technical drawing), it has helped refine the pressure in my strokes and thus the line quality in my drawings and prints. My control has improved, too.
My “normal” note-taking handwriting is a mix of print and cursive, and looks nothing like Spencerian. It’s apparently typical for advanced handwriters to blend the two together.
lowtechcyclist
@dww44:
And I discovered in eighth grade that I could take notes faster (ETA: and more legibly) by printing than I could with cursive just by writing half-size letters (which I could have never done in cursive). Which was when I gave up cursive altogether.
dww44
Curious about how all you print supporters sign your own names. What makes your signature distinguishably yours?
NotMax
@NotMax
More than you wanted to know about the arcane rules for the long s.
Baud
@dww44:
My sig is cursive, but I’m old enough to have learned cursive.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Baud: And that “y” in Ye Olde Shop was actually a character called a thorn and was pronounced like th
zhena gogolia
@brendancalling: I’m with you.
Matt McIrvin
@brendancalling: I suspect those kids aren’t writing cursive as it was specifically taught in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s–they’re using something better.
(It appears what I was taught, badly, was some variant of the Zaner-Bloser method, which was a reformation of the Palmer Method, which itself was a reformation of Spencerian cursive. They seem to have struggled the whole way with trying to make the capitals less absurd while not straying too far from some Spencerian ideal.)
At any rate, it was word processing that really set me free. The QWERTY keyboard has its own strange burden of history (whatever story you were told about where it came from, it’s more complicated and mysterious than that)… but for me it’s a good sight better than handwriting in any script.
NotMax
@Baud
Gonna confoozle any vacvvm cleaner salespeople.
;)
lowtechcyclist
@dww44:
That’s the one thing I still do in cursive.
The necessity for written signatures is becoming an anachronism anyway. I signed my tax returns electronically this year. (Probably did last year and the year before too, but can’t remember.)
Matt McIrvin
@dww44: I have a signature that started out as my name in cursive and more or less became an illegible scrawl. It’s nothing anyone can even read.
NotMax
Somewhat related to the above.
How the Black Death Saved the English Language.
Betty Cracker
@p.a.: #43 apparently exceeded the allowable number of links. The comment has been released from blog jail.
Suzanne
Whatever hand someone uses, I’m a big believer in by-hand notetaking. For me, anything that is multi-sensory is an aid to memory. I try to duplicate that in the virtual realm by augmenting notes with screenshots and Bluebeam tools like clouds, leaders, etc. But it’s not quite as good as handwriting or drawing diagrams by hand.
There’s some tools out there like the Rocketbook that can be helpful for those who like to take notes by hand but still need to digitize.
artem1s
@Professor Bigfoot: White flight suburbs and rural areas have been duped into believing that they live completely free of any federal funding. They have no idea how states pass thru funds from federal programs and refuse to believe that they exist even if they do accidentally get informed during some intake session. That kind of oversight is federal government interfering with their Invisible Skygod Given Rights™. Only moochers and takers (and blah people) get money from federal programs. If they are getting any of those dollars it’s because Jeebus loves them and wants them to have it.
Unlike JV Couchfornicator, I actually grew up in rural Ohio. Normally I’d say but for Pell grants and a local scholarship I would have grown up as pig ignorant and paranoid as the rest of my MAGAt relatives. But for the grace of the FSM I somehow dodged that bullet unlike my relatives who had the same opportunities and in some cases more opportunities to get out. They’ve been rubes falling for this con for at least 6 decades. Sometimes when I think I’ve had enough of this timeline I have to remind myself that I somehow was given an opportunity to take the road less traveled and grabbed it and I’m grateful for that. It’s not God’s fault they all decided not take the damn rowboat when the world was flooding.
lowtechcyclist
@Matt McIrvin:
Ditto. When I could type on a keyboard in a WYSIWYG environment, that’s when my writing could finally almost keep up with my thoughts. It was, as you say, liberating.
And needless to say, it took care of any legibility issues.
Matt McIrvin
@lowtechcyclist: I didn’t need WYSIWYG for writing, in fact it seems almost like a hindrance. The big leap was WordStar.
Another Scott
@Matt McIrvin:
Bring Back Slide Rules!!1
I remember changing grade schools and crying to my mom that I couldn’t read the cursive that they were using. She taught me.
It’s a good skill to have. I still write that way, but it’s mostly illegible to others because I write small and conserve energy by not making the letters deviate from the bottom line too much. ;-)
My mom also knew and used shorthand. That’s some weird, er, stuff.
One of my distractions when I’m bored is to look at how different people hold pens and pencils. There’s quite a variety there as well! The “I will crush the life out of this evil serpent rod” and the “This dainty fragile flower is my best friend” and everything in between…
Best wishes,
Scott.
Miss Bianca
@lowtechcyclist:
And this left-hander says, “Hunh?”
Suzanne
@Matt McIrvin: @lowtechcyclist: Have either of you ever tried to learn to type on the Dvorak keyboard?
NotMax
@Matt McIrvin
At the ad agency worked at in the early 1980s would pound out documents on a Wang.
Matt McIrvin
@Suzanne: Where pen on paper still shines is anything with mathematics in it. Wolfram Alpha and computer algebra systems are good for some kinds of mathematical exploration, you can bang it out in LaTeX for the publication, but there are times when you just need to write some equations down on paper, because all forms of computer entry are still ill-suited for math (odd given where computers came from).
Rusty
Im already lefty and I had to take remedial handwriting in 6th grade. After making al.pst no progress, the teacher asked if I could read my own handwriting, and we I said yes, she said, “That’s good enough!” I use a mix of printing and cursive, the only time I use it extensively anymore is for letter writing. A hand written letter is still.something special.
Another Scott
@p.a.: It’s fun to come across a “thorn” these days.
þ
Brad DeLong was on a kick for using it a lot on his blog for a while. Dunno if he still does.
þis is þe end.
Best wishes,
Scott.
Betty Cracker
@NotMax: The first computer I ever bought was a used Wang. Paid twice as much for it in 1989 dollars than I paid for my current laptop in 2023!
lowtechcyclist
@Eyeroller:
In elementary school, we were doing whatever writing with #2 pencils, whether printing or cursive.
BUT I attended a private high school from 7th to 10th grades, and we had to use these cartridge pens, where the ink flowed from the cartridge to the nub. You didn’t have to dip your pen in an inkwell, but every so often you’d need to replace the cartridge. So it was a quasi-fountain pen sort of thing.
Again, a lefthander’s experience: THEY WERE MESSY AS SHIT. Of course, to get the letters slanted properly for cursive, us lefties eventually learned to write overhand. Which worked OK with pencils, but with cartridge pens (and presumably with fountain pens too) the fact that your hand was above and to the left of what you were writing meant that you were smearing the fresh ink of what you’d just written. It was grotesque.
Ain’t gonna tell gay or trans or nonbinary or other genderqueer people how to be, because having been made to write in a manner designed for righthanders that didn’t fit us lefties at all, I’ve had just a small taste of the reality that being made to do things the same as people different from you just sucks big time.
Matt McIrvin
@Suzanne: Nah, I didn’t want to rewire my brain to use a layout that would be hard to use everywhere I went, even if it was better in the abstract. (And my understanding is that its benefits are oversold, too–they exist but are not gigantic.)
The history of typewriter keyboards is WEIRD. QWERTY was neither a careful, scientifically researched optimization, nor, as is sometimes claimed, a bid to intentionally slow down the typist to prevent jamming.
QWERTY *was* seemingly designed to increase efficiency, but by people who didn’t necessarily know what they were doing. And some of its quirks were the result of feedback from people who wanted to use it for primitive teletypes, to prevent some particular sorts of errors telegraphers made. It became easier for me to understand how it came about when I realized that its developers originally thought of the TOP row of letters as the “home row”, not the one we conventionally use.
Suzanne
@Matt McIrvin: Pen-on-paper is better for…… everything visual I do, honestly. Drawing/sketching any diagrams, details, tables, etc. I can do a first or second draft by hand much faster and much cleaner than I can on a computer.
It makes me laugh, though…. when people find out I’m an architect, 9 times out of 10, the response is, “Do you draw blueprints?”. The 10th time, the question is, “Do you draw in AutoCAD?”. The answer to both of those questions is no, and I don’t know if anyone has drawn a set of honest-to-God blueprints in at least 30 years.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
One of the surprising things in this thread are the number of people who were able to drop cursive earlier than I expected.
As mentioned, I’m a product of how cursive was taught in the late 60s, you learned how to print in 1st grade, learned cursive in 2nd. And as I mentioned above, if you were a liberal arts and parties major(s) in the late 70s and early 80s, cursive was it. And if your cursive was awful, profs and grad students dreaded getting your exams.
During my 11 years as an intel officer, I wrote a *lot*, particularly when I was with DIA at the Pentagon. We were using Wang Work Stations in 85-87 and didn’t transition to a PC-centric word processing system (yeah Word Perfect!) until 88. At the Pentagon in the early 90s, we moved to M$ I’d swear because Powerpoint was easier to use than Corel’s slide-making program.
All that time, every first draft I did was in cursive on a legal pad. I’d make changes on that. The second draft happened as it was typed into the word processing program, again eventually Word.
And then, I’d print it out to give to my boss for his edit which he did hard copy on the page. I’d then input that.
It wasn’t until I changed careers that I stopped writing that way. In the subsequent years of tons of gaming rules, historical army lists and really extensive army list historical notes, it’s all been word processing. But note taking at certain meetings is long hand. Other meetings where speed is needed, on a computer.
Melancholy Jaques
@Baud:
I recently came across a youtube video of a guy arguing that we should consider going back to runes.
rikyrah
Good Morning, Everyone😊😊😊
Matt McIrvin
@Another Scott: Cursive advocacy is a lot like nostalgia for slide rules. Slide rules, of course, fascinate me because they’re a technology that I missed by the tiniest possible margin, starting to learn math just when the first affordable pocket calculators were on the market.
Does using a slide rule give you a greater familiarity with Number? Maybe, kind of, I can see it… but I also suspect it’s oversold. There is indeed a good mental exercise in having to keep track of the order of magnitude yourself–this trains you not to accept an absurd result. I love the way a slide rule makes all possible expressions of a ratio simultaneously manifest.
But one of the things they were good for in the days before scientific calculators was their ability to seamlessly handle things like transcendental functions, and chain those with ratio calculations… but they way they represented *those* was kind of eccentric and not necessarily conducive to superior intuition.
Deputinize America
Eagerly awaiting the opening of the entirety of the Burn Books of Elon (the years of Twitter DMs and what he knows about his own Trumpist plots) and DONALD TRUMP )in terms of Elon’s criminal manipulation of DOGE and his contracts. I’m rooting for injuries.
One other thing – Fegelein thought he was safe……
Suzanne
@Betty Cracker:
This really is BJ After Dark, isn’t it?
Old Dan and Little Ann
My wife often shows my writing samples for her students. Some kids print SO small and neat that it’s beyond creepy.
Deputinize America
@lowtechcyclist:
Sinister.
schrodingers_cat
@Matt McIrvin: LaTeX FTW.
Baud
@rikyrah:
Good morning.
Jackie
@Professor Bigfoot:
Didn’t Muskrat confess to that yesterday? In a tweet, of course.
Hildebrand
@brendancalling: As a lefty, cursive was my mortal enemy – that and a teacher who would rap my knuckles if she caught me using my left hand (public school – 1970s).
When I wrote with my left hand I smeared my way across the page and was constantly getting bad grades because my letters didn’t tilt the ‘correct’ way. When I attempted with my right hand, to save myself from the yardstick, it was an unmitigated disaster – and my penmanship grades slid even further.
My mom complained and complained and it got us nowhere.
So, while I’m happy others have fond memories, I…don’t.
Deputinize America
@Suzanne:
Monster.
Miss Bianca
@lowtechcyclist: @Hildebrand: I honestly don’t get it. I am a lefty and I never felt the need to write overhand, if that’s what you call that weird crab-like-looking hand position thing I’ve seen other left-handed people do. I’ve never understood why.
But ink on my hands from cartridge pens? That I do remember. Not that my school required me to use them, it was an affectation among my circle of friends.
NotMax
@Suzanne
Flashing back to the monks in A Canticle for Leibowitz, hunched over tables, studiously copying “sacred” documents by using copious amounts of blue ink on white parchment.
Matt McIrvin
@Another Scott:
My mother suspects I’m a natural left-hander who somehow forced himself to be a righty. (My sister is left-handed and my daughter is also left-handed.) I think she’s wrong–I was just a right-handed kid with poor fine motor coordination. But one of her points of evidence is that the weird hooked way I hold a pen is similar to the way left-handers do it.
I have taught myself to be ambidextrous with a computer mouse and I usually mouse left-handed. But that’s because of repetitive stress injury–I moused right-handed until it started hurting me. I think it’s bad for me to click a mouse button with my arm extended as far to the side as you have to do to clear an extended keyboard’s number pad.
Suzanne
I have wondered about something w/r/t cursive for a while. I can draw, and do so pretty well, and was able to do so at a young enough age that I often heard, “Oh, wow, I could never do that” from people older than myself. But that isn’t true; I had an interest in it and therefore practiced a lot, checked books out of the library to learn more, and of course developed the skills.
From what I have read, anybody who has enough dexterity to write legibly can learn to draw, fairly well. (Much of drawing skill is really about learning how to observe and notice things.) I have wondered if cursive writing stimulates that dexterity better, though. Are flowing motions more “advanced”? I wonder if it would relate to other highly dexterous skills, like fingering on a string instrument or dissection.
Another Scott
@Matt McIrvin: I got a really fancy plastic over bamboo (“stable! self lubricating!”) Teledyne sliderule in high school. $40 when a decent scientific calculator was still hundreds of dollars. They really were amazing pieces of engineering. But you really had to think about what you were doing and pay close if you were doing more than multiplication and division. It was really easy to read the wrong scale and head off into the far end of the universe.
Of course, the same problem exists with calculators if you don’t think about which numbers to push in which order…
And slide rules were useless for addition and subtraction so they were doomed.
Best wishes,
Scott.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Professor Bigfoot: Damn it would be nice to see Musk and Trump in prison for that, but, Musk is a bullshitter. Has there been any suggestion the vote was messed with it?
Anyway, Musk made the accusation and it would be irresponsible to not speculate.
mrmoshpotato
Via Phil Plait on Bluesky
🎵Yes, we cannot build any bananas!🎵
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Suzanne: Ever tried one of the sketch tablets like Wacom makes?
Suzanne
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: Yes, I used the Wacom tablet in graduate school for rendering.
Matt McIrvin
@Jackie: Speaking seriously: I really hope we don’t go into the “2024 election was stolen” conspiracy hole. There’s ZERO evidence that Harris was in any way set to win. Optimists were trying hard to ignore everything that polls were saying. Our election system is fragmented and state-driven and while it can be messed with locally in many ways, it’s extremely difficult for a nationwide conspiracy to do mysterious computer things to rig it. It’s as bad as Trump’s “Stop the Steal” in 2020.
RevRick
@Professor Bigfoot: I don’t think Elon is claiming that he stole the election so much as he is saying that his tidal wave of $ bought the election by drowning out Harris’ message.
NotMax
@Another Scott
Were required to purchase slide rules in (IIRC) 4th grade way back when. Still have it (including the original case).
Learned to lubricate it with talcum powder for easier sliding.
Matt McIrvin
@Suzanne: Personally, I enjoy drawing and hate cursive and was always terrible at it.
Another Scott
@Suzanne: An old boss told me that he was convinced he couldn’t draw until he got a copy of “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain”. He liked that he was able to teach himself with that and enjoyed the results.
One thing I remember from looking at some art/drawing book as a kid was the admonition to look at the light and shadow more than trying to draw accurate edges. I messed around with sketching from a picture of the Pieta and thought there was something to that.
Remembering that we have several different brains in our head, each specialized to do some particular thing, and finding ways to turn parts of them off by seeing/thinking differently can be valuable in motor skills, can be helpful. (Tennis and baseball players can mess themselves up by thinking too hard about what they’re doing…)
Thanks.
Best wishes,
Scott.
lowtechcyclist
@Suzanne:
Didn’t have the opportunity back when it might’ve interested me to try. Also, I took a typing class (on manual typewriters, gah!) back in high school, so when in my early 40s, I could finally type on computers, my fingers already knew where to go on a QWERTY keyboard.
And really from then on, my typing could keep up close enough with my thoughts to make writing something I really enjoy, so although I knew about the Dvorak keyboard, I didn’t feel a need to adapt my computer and try it out.
The one thing I did try once was to get a keyboard that located the number pad and the other special keys to the left rather than to the right of the QWERTY keyboard. But again, by the time I tried that, things were really too ingrained in my brain to switch, so I went back to a standard keyboard.
Deputinize America
@Betty Cracker:
I’m convinced that it would have been better to teach us shorthand in the 3rd-4th grades.
schrodingers_cat
@Matt McIrvin: Never used slide rules. We had to use log tables and trig tables in high school. Scientific calculators were expensive when I was in highschool. I can approximate stuff pretty accurately. Taylor series FTW.
Soprano2
@Another Scott: I was told by multiple teachers (and an old boss) that I hold my pen “wrong”. I was never comfortable holding it the “right” way, and now no one cares. I use cursive and printing depending on the circumstances. I should probably start printing the notes for my caregiver, because she’s 19, although evidently she can read what I wrote. She went to a private school, so maybe she learned cursive, but she always prints when she writes.
I think it’s OK to learn cursive or to not learn it. I don’t get the big deal where some states are starting to mandate that schools teach it. I guess that’s just another “I learned it so everyone should learn it forever” things.
NotMax
@Deputinize America
Old enough to remember when the Evelyn Wood speed reading courses were all the rage?
artem1s
@stinger:
I hope she runs for governor of CA. Now that Newsance can’t figure out whose side he supposed to be on, I rooting for a jungle primary after this recall petition gets passed
I’m sure this is a GOP effort like the one that put the Governator into office but why not make it work for Dems this time.
schrodingers_cat
@Another Scott: The pencil/pen grip depends on what I am doing. I have much looser grip when I am drawing or coloring than when I am writing. It also depends on the size of what I am rendering.
Details: Tight grip
Sketch: Bigger font: Loose grip.
Deputinize America
@dww44: Signatures can be whatever you want, and it is quite simple for a handwriting analysis expert to distinguish hand printed (as opposed to cursive) signatures. I’ve examined and cross-examined experts on this.
My own signature is illegible to all but me, and remains consistent enough that an expert can tell.
This notion of “signatures must be in cursive” is an anachronistic malaprop.
Layer8Problem
@NotMax: Somewhere, oh these forty or forty-five years ago, I found in the stationery section of a store a single forlorn dusty slide rule in its package on a hook. I used money I needed for something else and bought it, thinking if I don’t I’ll never see one again. I still have it, in its plastic case with its single double-sided page of instructions. I should really learn how to use the thing. The only mileage it’s really gotten has been one of my stepkids using it as a prop in a Halloween nerd costume.
Gretchen
I worked in a lab where we had to sign everything we touched. The head guy took me aside and said it looked like one of my coworkers and I were signing each other’s work. I was from Detroit. She was from the Philippines. It turns out that Catholic schoolgirl handwriting is the same the world over.
pajaro
If we had a remotely sane political system, Kamala Harris would be the Democratic Shadow President. We would want her out there, and she would want to be there. We would look to her as the leader of the party, and she would be responsible for delivering the unified and unifying message that we need.
I was really happy to see a picture of her smiling her wonderful smile. I miss her.
Jackie
@brendancalling:
A lot of family history was written in cursive – that descendants won’t be able to read. Or already CAN’T read. My dad’s letters to mom, his dad’s letters to my dad while he was in WWII… MY letters to my parents (which of course were kept) It’s sad.
Deputinize America
@comrade scotts agenda of rage:
I’m old enough to have had a hateful old witch of a teacher in the third grade who had a fetish about penmanship and cursive. Of course her name was “Gertrude”, and she was about a thousand years old.
Soprano2
So we’re getting more rain today, the gauge on top of our building says almost an inch so far. We’re in the “we need to be growing rice” stage of this ridiculousness. I can’t get any ripe strawberries because the sun doesn’t shine enough for it!
Deputinize America
@Matt McIrvin:
I did some slide rule stuff in high school, and it did help me see patterns in mathematics. I’m the rarity – a trial-type lawyer who was also competent with math, even though I never enjoyed it.
Deputinize America
@NotMax:
I loved that book, but don’t remember that set of passages.
Spanky
@Deputinize America: Given the way my college class notes turned out, I agree 100%.
Deputinize America
@Matt McIrvin:
I’m a righty (mostly), but found that I could box and fence left-handed, which was kind of fun.
lowtechcyclist
@Suzanne:
Yeah, my first thought when I saw NotMax talking about pounding out documents on a Wang was “boy howdy, that must’ve hurt!”
Spanky
@lowtechcyclist: Think of the inkstains!
lowtechcyclist
@Deputinize America:
And proud of it!
Hildebrand
@Miss Bianca: I never learned the overhand method, I just smeared my way through writing lessons – lol:
narya
@Suzanne: be still my heart. I got an Apple Pencil and an app (Goodnotes, I think?) and still do note taking by hand. I kept a PAPER calendar/notes when I worked in an office, and I find that I take better notes that mean more when I go back to review. The App/pencil combo work fine–I go through much less paper–because I’m still writing. My handwriting in general is a mash-up of cursive and print, but I also learned calligraphy (and addressed all my wedding invites that way). And also too: fountain pens.
Suzanne
@Another Scott: I can see how that “drawing in the right side of the brain” idea can be helpful. One thing I have realized over my lifetime is how little people genuinely look at things and thus don’t absorb much detail. For me, learning to draw legibly was really about noticing…. proportions of things in relation to other things, what happens when things are moving forward and backward (relative to me) in space. The “logic” side of the brain can be really useful in developing that acuity.
schrodingers_cat
@artem1s: That would be a demotion from VP. I hope she runs again for President.
schrodingers_cat
@Hildebrand: You should try Arabic/Urdu which is written from the left to the right.
@narya: I love fountain pens. I have been playing around with drawing with fountain pens with colored inks over the past month and it has been so much fun.
Omnes Omnibus
@schrodingers_cat:
John Quincy Adams served in the House of Representatives after serving as President. Taft was Chief Justice of the Supreme Court after being President.
lowtechcyclist
@schrodingers_cat:
Maybe LaTeX is better now, but when I used it in 1993 to produce the printed version of my dissertation, it was a royal pain in the neck to work with. Did make everything look the way it ought to, though.
But when a year or two later I had a computer with Word which had Equation Editor, my immediate thought was, “why the devil did I have to use LaTeX?” Equation Editor’s output wasn’t as perfect and shiny as LaTeX’, but it was good enough. I was writing my Linear Algebra tests and the like with Equation Editor, and it did just fine.
Suzanne
@Soprano2: LOL, I have a weird callus on my right hand because I don’t hold writing instruments the “right” way, either. And my handwriting is neater than most, so it obviously didn’t hurt anything.
Of course, different grips for different instruments! When I learned do technical drawing by hand, and had to perfect spinning the lead holder as I drew the line so that the end of the line was as sharp as the left…. that took some practice! And I use an offset pen with the flex nib for Spencerian, which required learning a totally different grip!
I also do wheel-thrown pottery, which required different manual skills. I love this stuff.
different-church-lady
@catclub: That’s one thing Biden and Trump have in common: Biden wouldn’t prosecute Trump, and neither will Trump.
different-church-lady
@Old Dan and Little Ann: I feel seen.
Ohio Mom
@Suzanne: I believe there is research that backs this up. It’s true for me, too.
Everyone has to learn cursive to sign their name and a classroom teacher doesn’t have the time to teach 20-30 third graders individually how to sign their names. So for efficiency’s sake, everyone has to learn the entire alphabet.
Later the teacher can help students who need a little extra attention to finish learning how to produce their signature. Because then she isn’t starting from scratch.
I don’t think there is any reason to go beyond that, like I had to. All my elementary school written assignments, like book reports, after we learned cursive had to be in cursive. Just have students practice their signature on the bottom of the page, whether it be a math worksheet or spelling homework, or whatever.
Once again I reminded that my opinion means nothing in tne grand scheme of things.
Jackie
@Baud:
Should we now address you as Bad?
schrodingers_cat
@Omnes Omnibus: Obviously she should do what she wants. I hate other people trying to make that choice for her. No one told Trump that he should run for the governor of Florida or NY when he lost in 2020.
I hate how the media treated HRC and is now treating KH compared to the Orange One.
mrmoshpotato
@Soprano2:
Send it north. We’d like a good storm.
NotMax
@Ohio Mom
Unless a child is named X.
//
Baud
@NotMax:
Pretty sure Elon’s kids have private tutors.
different-church-lady
@Baud: YOU shouldn’t exist, pal.
Baud
@different-church-lady:
You sound like my mom.
Baud
@different-church-lady:
Except for, you know, the two prosecutions that were pending when the election happened.
siddhartha
Every election is stolen because of gerrymandering, Citizen’s United, white supremacy, voter suppression, etc. etc. Heck, Jefferson (anti-abolitionist) defeated Adams (abolitionist) because of the appraisal of black people’s being as 3/5th and the rape of black children/women.
In that sense, when has the US not been governed by the results of a stolen election and the justification of that stealing as representing “real Americans”? It’s not like we’ve ever lived in a democracy. We haven’t.
Harrison Wesley
@Omnes Omnibus: John Tyler served in Congress after his presidency. It was the Confederate Congress, so I’m not sure that counts.
narya
And I have done a ton of fancy needlework (petit point, needlepoint, crewel work, embroidery, etc., usually my own drawings as the basis, even if taken from another source). My grandmother was amazing; she did it all, all of the fancy stuff as well as knitting, crocheting, and sewing. My mother knits and sews, my sister knitted and crocheted; I’ve tried both, but I’m not very good at it. I think you’re right that those crafty manual skills are an interesting potential complement to the writing piece. They “feel” that way for me, but maybe not to everyone.
Gretchen
@Hildebrand: after my left handed brother had trouble with the nuns my mom encouraged me to write with my right hand. I do everything else as a lefty but I write right handed
Omnes Omnibus
@Harrison Wesley: There is a reason I didn’t mention him.
Spanky
@different-church-lady
Or is it … Paul.
Suzanne
@Ohio Mom: I wonder if, now that we’re in the age of AI, if universities are going to return to blue book exams. If so, there might be a minor resurgence in interest in learning how to write in cursive!
I loved blue book exams. Yes, I’m weird.
different-church-lady
@Baud: U sound like my mom!
zhena gogolia
@Suzanne: Lots of people are already returning to blue book exams.
different-church-lady
@Baud: I never heard about those because Biden was old.
Suzanne
@zhena gogolia: Good! Blue book exams are a fun challenge.
Ironcity
@NotMax: Hey now, this is not Balloon Juice After Dark. But it is interesting how different word processing systems came into use. The first one I used was called Data 3500 on 8″ floppys for a machine programmed in Basic, I think. That didn’t last long, and we went to IBM Mag Card (an evolutionary dead end) . Then Word Perfect on a Compaq luggable “laptop”. Word Perfect was, and may still be, a very capable and friendly system, very ecumenical in taking files in different formats and making them useful. After Wang PCs and AT&T PCs got into the Microsoft era with Word (preferred Word Perfect) but have been using Word so long it is second nature now. At one federal place they got around the excruciating contracting rules by going local small purchase (I think the threshold was $10K) and bought desktop PCs with ethernet network cards to hook to the network and Word Perfect, Lotus 123, and Harvard Graphics as the standard software. The small business supplier would deliver and setup the desktop machines and support them, it was at least DOS or maybe Windows, for a few years, then everything changed and they were replaced. Meanwhile, at the elementary school my kids were using Apple IIe to play Oregon Trail.
Harrison Wesley
Just read at the Guardian that Elon wants to make up with Don. Wonder how much he’ll be charged.
siddhartha
I’m trying to remember the last time I saw a show where they used the criminal’s handwriting to create a profile. The only ones I can remember are about crimes in the past.
Scout211
Good read this morning from Rolling Stone.
Web archive version: INSIDE THE BILLION-DOLLAR EFFORT TO MAKE TRUMP FEEL GOOD ABOUT HIMSELF
TL;DR: Our taxpayer dollars are being used to fluff his ego, lie to him about his “successes” and manipulate him. No surprise, but still shocking.
Baud
@Harrison Wesley:
Maybe Putin can mediate the spat.
Spanky
@Harrison Wesley: This Wired headline might explain that.
Scout211
Sure, by offering Musk political asylum. That would work well.
satby
It’s the 81rst anniversary of D-Day, so a few thoughts from Brian Klass on visiting both the cemeteries of the victors and the vanquished.
Harrison Wesley
@Scout211: The Federal government is now dedicated to running a four-year party for a very spoiled child.
YY_Sima Qian
A couple of days ago, someone asked if Xi’s hold on power in the PRC is possibly getting shaky, here is an insightful analysis of a shift in the dynamics at the very top of the CPC regime:
NotMax
@Spanky
$150 billion here, $150 billion there, pretty soon you’re talking real money.
//
satby
@Spanky: @Scout211: That’s why amusing as it feels to watch those two psychopaths scream insults at each other, we can’t lose sight of the catastrophic costs to all of us that have already happened. Though if it deprives them of a few billion it’s good.
Baud
@Scout211:
He was elected to all of those same things for his supporters.
mappy!
Spanky
It’s Pavl.
Matt McIrvin
@Soprano2: Cursive instruction is one of the things that’s now arbitrarily coded conservative/anti-“woke”, along with phonics (which I like, on the merits, though English orthography makes it harder than it could be!) and opposition to Common Core math (ehh, it’s complicated). That’s a lot of it: pure partisan craziness.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
Why would right wingers hate cursive? That’s more old school.
ETA: Nevermind. I misread.
schrodingers_cat
A 4th grader from California is going to be deported. This is what people who voted for Trump, including Elon wanted. He is delivering it. So Elon will be back.
Jackie
@satby: Thanks for the link!
Baud
@Baud:
To all = to be all
trollhattan
Already running out of things to say, they are.
Matt McIrvin
@Another Scott: A pet peeve of mine is when people marvel at the engineering of Project Apollo or the Boeing 707 or whatever, and say “… and they did all that with a slide rule!”
I loved Fran Blanche’s video on the glory of slide rules where she pointed out, well, no they didn’t. Engineers used slide rules for any calculation where three-digit precision was good enough, which to be fair is often the case. To go beyond that, there was generally a pool of “computers”: the unsung young women using mechanical desk calculators and printed tables to get the multi-digit results.
Old School
Captain C
@NotMax: That sounds like something you could get fired for these days.
prostratedragon
Been waiting for someone to remind him publically:
JML
I can’t write effectively in cursive any longer; I’d need to really practice again for it to flow fast enough to not frustratedly shift back to print. But I do find the influences from it interesting on things like my signature. For example, my capital J is almost exactly like my mom’s, whereas my capital M is almost exactly like my dad’s. (their handwriting was nothing alike) I rather like the feeling that I’m carrying part of them every time I sign something.
Matt McIrvin
@prostratedragon: Trump used to go out of his way to draw a racist distinction between the nice places we ought to be getting people from and the “shithole countries” that were actually sending immigrants. But ICE don’t give a shit, they’ll put anyone in the pokey (until a bunch of white people get upset and push back).
zhena gogolia
@schrodingers_cat: Lots and lots and lots of us didn’t vote for it.
cmorenc
@Aziz, light!:
The problem is that the same “Booty-ful bill” provision that ends civil service job procedures and protections for federal employees will also enable a future Democratic administration to dismiss such DOGE employees *before* passing legislation to restore civil service job protections to federal employees. Which is exactly what should eventually be done with all of the MAGA-infected employees the Trump Administration inflicts on the federal government – hoist ’em on their own petard.
schrodingers_cat
@zhena gogolia: Neither did I. I was just talking about Trump voters. And especially megadonors like Musk.
tam1MI
Good luck getting any decent trade-in value for it. Maybe he could gift it to Qatar.
Matt McIrvin
@cmorenc:
But will they actually do it? Or will they decline, out of some misguided notion of fair play, or to avoid double-standard whining from the media?
Baud
@Old School:
I don’t trust them, but going after Medicare Advantage isn’t the most evil way they could do things.
trollhattan
Evidently, Donny and Greg Abbott wandered down to the border, where Donny was surprised at the warm greeting he got from beyond the fence.
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DJQN99Nz082/?igsh=MWprendrNGkyeDhpdg%3D%3D
schrodingers_cat
@Harrison Wesley: Called it yesterday.
Comment from earlier this morning
NaijaGal
@Matt McIrvin: Used LaTeX for my thesis (and early publications) until some journals started asking for Word documents!
Glory b
@different-church-lady: Presidents aren’t prosecutors.
The Attorney General is appointed by the president but is (or is SUPPOSED TO BE) using his or her own prosecutorial judgment.
Until recently. Civics isn’t taught enough.
Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.
Matt McIrvin
@Gretchen: Some years ago there was a study purporting that left-handed people had a shockingly lower life expectancy. It got a lot of press coverage–I remember it.
It turned out their method was to look at age of death in obituaries, then figure out (if they could) whether the dead person was left- or right- handed. You can see the huge problem with this: longer-lived people according to recent obituaries were educated further in the past, thus had more outside pressure to be right-handed.
Today this is used as an example of a confounding variable in statistics classes.
There were studies trying to gauge the health cost of being gay that had the same problem (and were cruelly touted by homophobes).
Denali5
@Miss Bianca:
This left hander has never had good handwriting. Where to place the hand so the ink doesn’t smudge is the problem. I am definitely going to investigate italic style.
Denali5
@trollhattan:
Did they forget the charging station it needs?
prostratedragon
Speaking of cursive …
@Matt McIrvin: Make him say it. Not that we didn’t guess.
schrodingers_cat
@Denali5: I have been watching a lot of art YT videos and its amazing that about 50% of art youtubers seem to be left handed.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
ICE has also been given quotas. I assume so far, they haven’t broken down the quotas by race.
Suzanne
LMAO….. FFOTUS is currently saying he won’t talk to Musk or take his calls.
Can we haz more hilarious tweets? I deeply enjoyed yesterday.
Sure Lurkalot
@Old School: They could end Medicare Advantage, the scummiest, scammiest giveaway to “health care” insurers and use the savings to plug the 20% “skin in the game” hole. While they’re at it, they could support a nationalized health care system which in many countries , covers more people at less cost with better outcomes.
But instead, we’ll shutter rural hospitals and elder care facilities, shove more doctors into private equity silos, defund the VA AND fuck Medicare over too.
schrodingers_cat
test
Eyeroller
@lowtechcyclist: I used the cartridge kind. Some purists don’t call them fountain pens, but it’s the same type of ink delivery. Some pens even can switch between bladder and cartridge.
And even as a right-hander I would sometimes drag my hand through wet ink. I can image it was very bad for lefties. But there’s no left-to-right writing system that’s really all that good for lefties.
Harrison Wesley
@schrodingers_cat: Nice catch!
Matt McIrvin
@Melancholy Jaques: RobWords! One thing that semi-facetious video was trying to do was break the association between runes and Nazis, who adopted them as a sort of mythic affectation.
Melancholy Jaques
@RevRick:
He means his money, his social media platform, and his general awesomeness.
When he is present at any event, he believes he caused it to happen. Babies are like that too.
NaijaGal
@trollhattan: “Chingas a tu madre!” And he goes “They like Trump…” I’m still laughing, couldn’t help it.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Denali5:
That really does seem to be a “thing” in left-handed world in terms of handwriting. We all either share it or struggle with it.
And then the people who hafta read it, as I mentioned above vis a vis written “blue book” exams, are the ones who suffer. ;)
Per another comment, my cursive has not only gotten worse from disuse but is also harder to do. Even something as simple as a signature. I look at mine now as compared to 40 years ago and I wouldn’t be surprised if somebody said “not the same person”.
prostratedragon
@NaijaGal:
And that is the beginning of the end (another LaTexer).
Harrison Wesley
@Sure Lurkalot: Believe me, I know how dodgy MA is. Unfortunately it’s all I can afford.
NaijaGal
@prostratedragon: It was so good for equations! Loved it. Don’t care for the equation editor in Word.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Harrison Wesley:
I’m sorry to hear that. The MA horror stories are legion. An old friend married a woman 10 years older than us and she’s the type who never admits she’s wrong about anything…and when we’ve asked about MA over the last 5 or so years, her normal “Lemme tell you…” ramble goes silent.
Which means she’s dealt with the horror stories but doesn’t want to admit she did something not ideal.
Decades ago when people ridiculed those of us who worked for Club Fed because we were “missing out” on all those private sector dollars are now the ones dealing with shit like MA whereas we Feds have our insurance plans that fulfill that same role at lower costs and better service.
Old School
prostratedragon
@NaijaGal: Does justified better if you need it, though I prefer not to. The leading can be fine tuned. Etc., etc.
Betty Cracker
@Sure Lurkalot: Excellent summary of the situation. Le sigh…
WTFGhost
So, folks, my wife got a broken hip, and a positive covid-19 test, all in the same day.
Does anyone know what to do if:
a) live alone (except for the wife)
b) don’t know if you need a proven case of Covid to get the meds to treat it
c) you’re pretty sure you’re symptomatic, but don’t have a good test?
(I’ve got stuffed sinuses, a minor cough, and obvious body aches. I have a high basal temp, and high-for-me temps for the past 36 hours. Much though I’d love to deny it, I’m betting it’s Covid-19, and not a random cold.)
I’ve contacted my doctors office for advice as well.
Something about this situation reminds me too starkly of 2020, where sick people couldn’t have visitors, what with me being eligible for quarantine. That said, I’m relieved my wife is in the hospital, if she’s going to have Covid-19 at all. She’s more at risk than I, and needs the extra monitoring they’ll give her more than I, and, they’ll pump her full of what she needs.
But I *was* expecting the blasted hospital wouldn’t let me see her, not that I shouldn’t be allowed into the hospital myself, because I’m infectious!
columbusqueen
@Professor Bigfoot: God help us all. I hate this timeline.
Melancholy Jaques
@Matt McIrvin:
So you saw it too! I always associated runes with Tolkien.
Melancholy Jaques
@Sure Lurkalot:
For reasons they never explain, Americans don’t find that prospect attractive.
Matt McIrvin
@Layer8Problem: Even the cheap basic slide rules they sold to high-school students usually had scales you could use to compute things like trig functions, square and cube roots and arbitrary powers, if you knew how. The fancy ones just had means of making these calculations more efficient. That’s what I’ve learned from reading and watching a bunch of stuff from slide-rule fandom.
For a few years I had a fancy but oddly specialized one that my dad bought when he was studying chemical engineering in college–it left off the trig scales entirely, but instead had a whole side taken up with these custom scales about atomic and molecular weights, molar volume computations, temperature conversion and vapor pressure. I never did learn much about how to use those scales because they only existed on that one model.
Paul in KY
@stinger: For governor or senator or something. Not for POTUS. Too much misogyny in this nation, IMO.
Matt McIrvin
@Melancholy Jaques: Check out the “Words Unraveled” podcast, also on YouTube, if you haven’t seen it– it’s RobWords and Jess Zafarris bantering adorably about the history of words. Great fun.
Matt McIrvin
@Suzanne: My sister (architect) became proficient with AutoCAD many years ago but I don’t know if she still uses it.
Paul in KY
@brendancalling: I gets your brain working in ways it might not otherwise.
Paul in KY
@dww44: Good point!
Steve LaBonne
@Melancholy Jaques: Oh, the white wingers will be happy to explain it, as long as they think you’re one of them.
Fair Economist
@Matt McIrvin:
I’ll take phonics seriously when they write it fonics.
Melancholy Jaques
@Matt McIrvin:
Sounds like my kind of thing. Thanks for the tip.
artem1s
@Jackie: Don’t be ridiculous. AI will read them for us!I kid of course. You can volunteer to help archivist transcript written documents. ZooniverseOne of the projects I helped with was transcribing hand written notes made by regular folks on 3×5 card documenting the nesting results of bluebirds in the 1960s. I don’t remember which agency was doing the research but it was pass thru funding to various state VO-AG universities throughout the country. Suburbanization of farmland throughout the country hit the bluebird population pretty hard. The loved to nest in wooden fence posts that had woodpecker holes. When those farms got broken up into subdivision, the fences were torn out. And of course PCB also decimated a lot of the bug eating song birds. Eastern bluebirds were considered a rare siting in Ohio where I grew up even back to when my dad was a school kid. So rare that when I saw one around mid 1970’s my father didn’t believe me. I remember the first time I saw it like it was yesterday. It was kind of a miracle to see a thing that blue in nature. They make blue jays look stodgy and staid in comparison. Once my father saw them for himself he started to build and set out bluebird houses for them. I seem to remember him taking part in similar study. Once people started to put out house and PCBs got banned they came back pretty quickly. They loved perching on telephone wires and grabbing bugs off well mown suburban lawns. So I was really jazzed to help transcribe those hand written scratchings.
Suzanne
@Matt McIrvin: The vast majority of firms switched to Revit or one of the other BIM softwares about 15 years ago. Some small architectural firms still do AutoCAD. And most civil engineers still use AutoCAD (and the rest of the team wonders why they’re stuck back in the Dark Ages).
Paul in KY
@Matt McIrvin: Abacuses are pretty cool too.
Paul in KY
@lowtechcyclist: Ha!
WTFGhost
@Fair Economist: Then your (hypothetical) children will be furious when they write a book report on “p-honics” and learn that they pronounced it laughably wrong.
More seriously: the whole point of phonics is so you can read a word like “phonics” without assuming it’s pronounced “puh hoh-nics”. You learn that a PH sounds like a F, and that, yes, it’s stupid, but “enough” is pronounced “enuff,” while “through” sounds like “throo,” but that means you look up “trough” in the dictionary to find its pronunciation, so you know if it’s “truff” or “troo.”
It’s not perfect. I never “got” the idea of putting the right emPHAsis on the wrong syLABle until I heard that joke spoken. And phonics didn’t keep me from embarrassment when I explained that a “mass-aj” (massage) was a rubdown – thankfully, I didn’t say “like a muh-saj!” – before having my pronunciation corrected. (“Why would I look such a simple word in the dictionary?” i thought, proving I hadn’t learned the really important lessons of phonics….)
Paul in KY
@schrodingers_cat: Not me. We need to give ourselves the BEST chance of winning in 2028 and (sad to say) I think (due to rampant misogyny in this nation) our nominee needs to be a dude.
Paul in KY
@siddhartha: I think Eisenhower fairly beat Stevenson those 2 times.
Paul in KY
@Harrison Wesley: It doesn’t.
Paul in KY
@WTFGhost: So sorry about this! My prayers for your wife and you!
Paul in KY
@Melancholy Jaques: Lots of propaganda by those who love for-profit healthcare. You can figure out whom that would be.
Matt McIrvin
@WTFGhost: I am convinced I learned to read by watching “Sesame Street” and “The Electric Company” on PBS, which were using a straightforward phonics approach to teaching letter sounds (“The Electric Company” particularly), though they didn’t call it that.
I hated phonics instruction in school but that was for a simple reason–I could already read, so it was pretty boring being taught stuff I already knew. It was sometimes interesting to learn the *names* for these phenomena.
WTFGhost
@Paul in KY: Thanks. We’re doing well. We’re both kind-of at our best in a crisis – problem solving mode goes into effect, we don’t think about “if only.” But I’m furious that my symptoms started showing today, so I don’t get to dash down to see her.
Of course, I couldn’t see her for long, if I did see her, because *she* is Covid+ too, but just to touch her, and hold her, for a few minutes, would be nice.
columbusqueen
@Melancholy Jaques: Bbecause the wrong people shouldn’t get benefits, even if it helps everyone. Stupid racist bastards!
Another Scott
@WTFGhost: Ouch. :-(
I’m glad your better half is being cared for. I’m sorry you can’t be with her.
I got a cheapish Fitbit watch thing a few years ago and wear it almost all the time. One thing I noticed when I got COVID a few years ago was that my resting pulse was about 10 points higher than before (and returned to normal-ish when I recovered). I don’t know if the flu has a similar effect.
A few months ago we got some combo COVID, influenza A, and influenza B test kits to try to be ready when we get sick. We haven’t used them yet.
Fingers crossed for both of you that the recoveries are quick and complete!
Best wishes,
Scott.
Miss Bianca
@Suzanne: It’s already happened.
Paul in KY
@WTFGhost: I sure hope you get to do that ASAP! Please get better soon!