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Thumbs Are the New Fingers for GameBoy Youth
An anonymous reader writes "Reuters is running an interesting story on how the use of gadgets such as mobile phones and GameBoys has caused a physical mutation in young people's hands. The use of the thumb is a deviation from the use of the index finger..."
If I play a musical instrument then I don't look at my fingers anymore (either when playing the piano or guitar), does that mean that I have mutated in a musick playing monster?
I think the author mixed 'learning' with 'mutating'
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If code was hard to write, it should be hard to read
It's not evolution! It's common sense! Use your thumbs more, and they'll become stonger, more flexible, and more dexterous. Not evolution, muscles.
But they are talking about a change of the use of the thumb in the article - not a physical change in it.
Interestingly, there could be a physical change.It is known that digits will adapt to their primary use. For people who use their feet in a hand like manner (for reasons including the lack of hands) the toes lengthen and take on a distinctly finger like appearance over time. The same thing happens when a toe is moved to the hand to replace an amputated finger.
Ignoring the nonsensical use of "mutation"... I've noticed that little kids use their thumbs like adults use their forefingers. But the current crop of kids are the first generation that grew up with buttons on EVERYTHING, and were introduced to it right out of the crib. How many kids nowadays have ever seen a rotary dial telephone?
I think it's the natural effect of a transition from gadgets where the forefinger or a thumb-and-fingers grip was the reasonable choice (such as rotary phone dials and rotary controls on TVs, stoves, etc) to gadgets that are button-driven, so any digit will do the job.
If you watch toddlers, you'll notice they try to press buttons with their thumbs far more often than they try to press them with an index finger. To a toddler, everything is for gripping (not for poking) so the gripping member (the thumb) is the natural choice.
If you grow up with buttons on every gadget in the house, it's likely that you'll continue to use your thumb, rather than getting retrained to use an index finger (as getting your thumb damnear ripped off by a phone's rotary dial will enforce in a hurry).
This is no different from the sort of retraining that happens with any interface transition. It just happens to coincide with a physical action that comes more naturally to little kids, hence is easy to continue doing as they grow up.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Quantum Particles arent random at all, we simply dont understand them so they SEEM random.
Wow. It looks like a 19th century classical physicist has invented a time machine, zoomed forward 100 years, and opened a Slashdot account! That would be exciting. I have a sinking feeling, though, that you are not a time traveler from the pre-1920 era, but rather, you're just another scientifically illiterate 21st century creationist.
Physics went through this debate about 80 years ago and decided that you are wrong. Unlike the rolling of dice, etc., where randomness is only apparent because of our ignorance of all the details of the situation, events on a quantum level are truly random. If you're going to say otherwise, you have to provide a mechanism (like little fairies deciding when a nucleus will decay).
But even rolling dice is a bad example of a deterministic process- we figured this out in the eighties. To predict the outcome, you need such exquisite detail of the initial conditions that even minute contributions from quantum processes cannot be ignored.