Curse the Cursive

Charles’ post on the slow death of cursive script brought back my own memories of remedial handwriting exercises. My teacher, Mrs. Bremner, discovered when I was in, oh, sixth grade that I was printing everything. So, since I was also completing all assignments in half the time it took anyone else in my class, she started assigning my handwriting practice. I couldn’t understand why print wasn’t good enough, and so I did the exercises with the same dedication with which one completes punishments consisting of the repeated writing of lines. If s looks like this, or like that, what does …

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Scientific Creativity, East and West

Malcolm at waka waka waka links to (and discusses) a fascinating debate about Scientific Creativity, East and West. Personally, I think there are factors in some East Asian societies that do play negatively on things like creativity, but it’s my limited experience and I don’t think it’s necessarily irremediable. Cutting out a lot of the rote learning that everyone agrees factors too largely in East Asian education systems would go a long way to changing things. When Kanazawa says “Asians can’t think”, he’s really saying something more like, “Asians aren’t really commonly equipped or rewarded by their culture and education …

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Hackers of the Free World: Unite and Humiliate These Bastards!

Hey, so I was reading a post at North Korea zone titled Do They Read NKZone in Pyongyang? and it pointed out that the official websites for the DPRK are mostly hosted on servers in China and Japan. Guys, ladies, if there’s someone who deserves continuous DOS attacks and having their site hacked and replaced with all kinds of hateful mockery, even more than Microsoft, it’s the DPRK. Come on, hackers. Show us that you really care about freedom in this world.

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