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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 :)
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!