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Grafitti Causes Paralysis?
wtpooh writes "Some researchers at Johns Hopkins have found that writing on PDAs like the PalmPilot can cause a special kind of paralysis, as your mind has to adjust to a new kind of writing. Check out the story "
(please don't send me flame mail for posting satire... I just
thought it was funny, but considering I can't feel much below
my neck after moving furniture all day, I might be wrong :)
I Can't belive how many times I have endorsed a check at the bank, only to realize that I have written my entire name in one block (each letter on top of each other), and in graffiti. It certenly shakes up the bank teller...
Plus it happens a lot more at work...at work I cary a little notpad about the size of my palm pilot, and I naturlay write near the bottom every time...I have to actualy make shure I'm writing across...but I still have a hard time not writing in graffiti.
http://www.xpurple.com
"written my entire name in one block (each letter on top of each other), and in graffiti. It certenly shakes up the bank teller"
Back in my PDP-11 assembler days I spent three hours trying to figure out why my checkbook didn't balance, only to find that at some point I had started doing the arithmetic in octal. I fixed that problem - I stopped balancing my checkbook.
sPh
I bought a Pilot this week and I started reading this in disbelief. I use both the dvorak and qwerty keyboard layouts without problem and I was thinking, what a bunch of wimps that cannot adapt to a minor handwriting dialect.
Oh, this article had me fuming at the possible lawsuits about the latest technology. I hit the floor laughing when I saw this comment. This was a rich one that came a month and a week too late!
As far back as I can remember, my handwriting has been terrible - both cursive and printing. My cursive has always been much slower than my printing. Now if I have to write cursive for anything besides my illegible signature, I have to really really concentrate on it. My printing has suffered alot since I've switched to typing most everything. When I write things now, I have to watch as I write things, otherwise I don't get useful stuff on the paper. The really weird part is, sometimes I skip letters, and I havn't really thought about it much, but I think there's a correlation to which letters I miss... I think most of the letters I miss are ones that I would type with the other (left) hand... Now I'm gonna have to pay attention tommorow when I write something at work, and see if that theory holds up...
The more I think about it, part of it is probably that I type much faster than I can print... So I'm probably thinking too far ahead, and getting buffer overruns. Part of it might also be the fact that there's no backspace key on the paper.
I'll definately have to do some tests at work tommorow and see if I can see the pattern.
It's gonna be a royal pain to have to use paper for the exam when I finally get up to 13wpm with morse code... Wonder if I can convince them I have to use a keyboard/typewriter to copy code.
I'd say this post serves as a fairly accurate measure of how many slashdot readers actually read and/or finish the stories posted, and how many just skim the title, maybe the first paragraph, look at 1 or 2 comments, and then spout off.
--
Ian Peters
I suffer from this too, even writing a paragraph or two causes me considerable pain, but I can type a small novel on my M$ Natural (1.0) keyboard with out even minor irritation. Thank god I'm graduating in 48 hours, these last essay tests about did me in. I think if I have to ever write any essays again, I'm going to get special permission to bring a lap-top to class. Maybe this is something that should be seriously studied, even if the "PIP" is total crap, I could see how neglecting to write a substantial amount could lead to a loss of penmanship or rapid muscle fatigue when being forced to write. I too have a signature that is wildly variable, thank god no one checks.
When in danger or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout. --Robert A. Heinlein
Me too, me too...
I've actually had someone question my signature. The bank computers asked me to do it again a while ago. I've recently radically simplified my signature, and I've _almost_ got it down. I'm 25 - pity me.
Seriously, who writes anymore? I can't remember the last time I hand wrote more than a single sentence.
Kris.
Win a Rio (or join the SETI Club via same link)
I noticed that if I ever write anything anymore I (besides having terrible handwriting) I tend to skip letters too.
Do you tend to also swap letters around? That is begining to really get on my nerves. I haven't looked at the patern yet. Think I'll do that.
This sig is false.
It might be real, but I dont buy the explanation.
He says first: "By the time our signature stabilizes," explains Miezkowsky, "so does our
personality. Hence, a change in signature often signals a major shift in personality." Ok,
so changes in signature are an EFFECT of changes in personality. Fine.
but then he says, tantamount thereto, imho, that forcing change in ones signature can CAUSE problems (with personality?): "With PIP, it's not a signature change but a radical departure from one's individual style of writing, and this alteration can lead to big, big problems."
I dont know why he says "its not a signature change", because that links back to the first statement, suggesting he's thinking of it as a CAUSE to things similar to personality change.
I dont think its a two way street bub.
While I dont doubt that some people can get neurological impairment from various suprising
things, and this may be one of them, I think his reasoning is off (or at least his attention to the logic grammar in his statements is incorrect).
Similar sindromes have been known with typing versus handwriting, stenography versus handwriting, etc.
It just happens to some people (usually if they change the way they work after 30-35).
And this does not mean that it happens to everyone of course.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
I read through this article, getting a little nervous as I scrolled down. Then I stopped. Heck, I'm 17, addicted to caffeine, suffering from mild carpal tunnel, and I perpetually drive 80mph. Degenerative heart disease on my dad's side, diabetes on my mom's. I'm allergic to almost everything. I'll die young, leave a pretty corpse...
I shrugged, took another swig of espresso and rubbed my wrists.
Then I read the disclaimer.
...
Dang.
Thank you, Rob, for making everyone's day a little more surreal...
--RawkettPenguiN
"My Palm Pilot is named Arthur. Perhaps that's why it locks up."
Can't sleep, the clowns will eat me...
Of course, I get this already and I don't even have a PDA. I just type so much that my writing skills are vestigial. He talks about anxiety over signing a check - I got that. Well, maybe not the anxiety bit, but I take a long time to remember what the heck my hand is supposed to be doing.
--
--
Jason Eric Pierce
Heh, I find it hard to use a "normal" (algebraic) calculator... I'm so tempted to just do 1 2 3 + +
As for writing, I transpose letters and drop them (or half-write them), which gets worse the faster I have to write (aka "taking notes"). No wonder my notes are so illegible to me.
Better yet, I don't make much sense sometimes, when the ideas come too fast for the transcription medium (keyboard/writing/speaking)... What I need is a neural interface (and I can't upgrade the buffer... it's way too small for my needs now).
Blah, I think it's getting to me, now.
I really hope Taco wasn't taking that at face value (viz. "from the that-ain't-so-hot dept.").
As I was reading it, I thought "gee, I wouldn't be surprised to read something like this in The Onion". Imagine my contentment at having my judgement about a 'news' story shown correct.
Althought, there is something to be said for the concept. I know a little about scriptanalysis, and while the jury is still out on the completeness of the theory, there is something to it.
Certain personality types seem to correlate with particular styles of writing pretty strongly.
Intense people tend to have spiky, angular writing, while easy going people tend to write in rounder letters. The nuances of crossed t's and dotted i's suggest certain personality traits - but it's far from an exact science. It's pretty interpretive, much like dreams and free association exercises.
But it makes me wonder. If there are in fact correlations, and one's writing style betrays one's personality, then why could it not work the other way? After all, it might be a bio-feedback mechanism - just like facial expression and posture.
Consider that changing one's tempo of writing, slowing it down and concentrating more on the spacing between words and other penmanship artifacts just might feed back onto one's personality. This puts all those penmanship lessons in Catholic school into a different perspective. The good nuns intended for us all to have nice handwriting, but they were also shoehorning us into a uniform personality type. Another example of religious brainwashing.
Now, a PDA, with it's typically jerky and disjointed grafitti might instill those tendencies in the user.
Give a little thought to the appearance and style of your handwriting. Is it small and intense - focused on details and careless of the reader's experience? Is it permeated by short, angular upstrokes into sequencial letters in a word? How about that bursty tempo? And the afterthought crosed t and dotted i? Is it pretty and elegant, or more concerned with getting the meaning across?
Congratulations, you intuitive, cerebral, stressed egomanical hacker type.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
"The South to the Future World Wide Wire
Service is a weekly feed of technology and media news commentary and satire published by the San Francisco Bay Guardian. Quotations attributed to public figures who are satirized are often true, but sometimes invented. Some fictional statements may, in fact, be true. Any other use of real names is accidental and coincidental. "
Fooled you all!
No, I must confess, I did not read the part at the end where they say they are a satire mag. Someone at work forwarded the link to me, and I fell for it all the way. I've got a feeling he'll be coming over and laughing at me any time now.
Of course, if I had known it was a joke I would still have submitted it, but I wouldn't be quite so red-faced now :).
I realize that the artice was a joke, but I've actually seen something similar. I decided to learn how to type on a Dvorak keyboard a few years ago, and almost totally immersed myself in it for a few months. At first, I could switch back to QWERTY without any problem, but once Dvorak felt "natural", it was suddenly a lot harder. I would sit at a QWERTY keyboard and know what I wanted to type, but my hands refused to move for a couple seconds while my brain "switched keymaps".
Oddly enough, once I started typing a sentance (just a couple of letters in, even), it would come back to me effortlessly, but as soon as I stopped for a few seconds, I'd have that hesisation again!
Oh, and for those who think that Dvorak is overhyped-- you're right. My objective with learning Dvorak wasn't speed. I was in a dorm room where *everybody* wants to check email on any computer they can beg their way onto. Changing the keymaps was a pretty effective deterrant.
Humorous aside: Dvorak may be "optimized" for typing in English, but UNIX commands (and programming symbols like ";") are clearly optimized for typing in QWERTY! To type "ls\n" on a Dvorak keyboard, you hit the QWERTY keys "p;\n" -- three consecutive little finger keystrokes. Ick! And if you mess up while learning and accidently type in a QWERTY "ls", a dvorak keyboard will show "no". It's quite odd to be at a bash prompt, tell your computer a simple command like "ls" and have "no" appear on the screen. I thought my computer was rebelling against me the first time I did it!