Comic Discussion > QUESTIONABLE CONTENT
WCDT strips 3836-3840 (24 to 28 September 2018)
Jakk Frost:
How to almost burn your building down just by cooking rice:
Step 1 ~ Start rice boiling.
Step 2 ~ Check Facebook.
OldGoat:
--- Quote from: cybersmurf on 01 Oct 2018, 23:34 ---
--- Quote from: sitnspin on 30 Sep 2018, 23:12 ---There have been people at various stages in history who decried writing things down at all saying it eroded our ability to remember things and made us intellectually lazy. With the advent of the internet and how easy it is to look something up immediately when you are curious and then instantly forget it again cos you don't need to remember, I can kind of see their point.
--- End quote ---
The ability to store information beyond the capability of human brains made it possible to stockpile more knowledge than a single human could possibly hold.
Nowadays it's more important to know how to find what you need, and how to interpret information you can't or don't need to remember.
This all, of course, doesn't apply to basic knowledge, and a certain kind of people tries to justify being dumb as "I can look it up anytime I want!"
--- End quote ---
Exactly. The days of the polymath who knew everything there was to know are gone-gone-gone. We dull down in one area and sharpen up in another.
There's a similar and no doubt overlapping faction - those who decry the decline of cursive handwriting as a basic academic pursuit as the root cause of all the ills of Western Civilization. My great grandfather had amazing handwriting; his diaries are works of art regardless of the content and to look at it today the consistency makes one suspect it was machine generated. Some of the entries from his business college days describe this 20 year old man and his classmates practicing a single lower case letter. Then I look at his great great grandkid's handwriting that seemed to stop developing in 4th grade, about the time she started keyboarding everything she wrote - complete sentences, proper punctuation & use of capitals, and rate & accuracy that amazed her Old Man.
Our technology changes us. Maybe that's what QC is about.
cybersmurf:
--- Quote from: OldGoat on 02 Oct 2018, 09:52 ---
{cropped part about handwriting and knowledge}
Our technology changes us. Maybe that's what QC is about.
--- End quote ---
Yes, thank you. It does. For the better or worse, we can never tell.
And yes, among other things, this is what QC is about.
Where I live, hardly anyone learns nothing but cursive handwriting (or whatever thing it is over here). Being born mid 80s, I did most of my writing as handwriting, as typing it on a PC and printing it was frowned upon for some time. My handwriting sucks though, I never did train it to be a nice handwriting. My dad, who has a PhD in Electrical Engineering from the 60s had to learn to write in a certain way, immaculately, in case he had to create one of those wiring plans, as most of the fonts used are standardized (some of them might still be in use, but it's all electronic now). Most technical colleges and universities had a mandatory 'nice writing' class for drawings of all kinds (again, standardized fonts, and stencils did exist but were frowned upon).
Zebediah:
I was one of the last people who had to take a class in manual technical drafting back in my freshman year at NC State University. By the time I graduated the class had been completely revamped because it was all computerized. And yeah, we were told that the ideal was that all of our lettering on the plans would be indistinguishable from anyone else’s. I never quite mastered that.
My dad wrote that way for decades, though. And my mother had perfect Palmer Method cursive script. My own handwriting has gone to hell over the last few decades, and my son’s is atrocious.
OldGoat:
If they teach calligraphy as an art class, cursive will never be lost.
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