Comments on: Is Hand-writing Necessary?

By: lawyer

lawyer — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 14:42:16 +0000

I doubt that there is a causal relationship between handwriting and thought process. On the one hand, for centuries MDs and pharmacists have become known for their poor handwriting. I notice that my handwriting has declined over the last decase due to increased use of keyboards, however, as far as I am aware, my mental faculties have not declined.

By: etbe

etbe — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 23:51:30 +0000

Ben: The iPaQs that I bought for less than $1000 about 6 years ago run Linux nicely. I’m pretty sure that you could get some 38xx or 39xx iPaQs really cheaply if you spent some time polling ebay.

64M of RAM and 32M of flash is all you really need for a PDA. After 24M of flash is used for the OS the remaining 8M is an immense amount of text! JFFS2 also supports compression.

By: Ben Finney

Ben Finney — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 22:42:05 +0000

> My PDA has removed the need for writing notes to myself. PDAs are getting cheap, you might want to consider buying one.

Are they still cheap once you eliminate the ones that don’t run a free software operating system?

By: etbe

etbe — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 03:50:45 +0000

I deleted Kate’s comment. Her web site had a loop that caused Iceweasel to crash. As a quality issue I am not going to leave links on my blog that do bad things to random readers, so if your web site loops then don’t expect any comment which references it to remain on my blog.

By: etbe

etbe — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 01:42:29 +0000

Kate: I’ve observed a three year old teach himself to read cursive. I don’t think that there is any doubt about the ease of reading it (if it’s written clearly).

In Australia laptops are currently price competitive with desktop machines, and all the really cheap machines on sale are laptops (I just bought a $300 NetBook – there’s no way I could buy a new name-brand PC for that price). So it’s safe to assume that people can keep using computers for at least two hours after mains power goes out – and maybe as much as eight hours!

By: Alex

Alex — Sun, 12 Aug 2007 12:57:19 +0000

Well, I did say the article wasn’t directly relevant :) I think it helps show that people tend to overestimate their speed using keyboards, though, and I don’t think the “pushing buttons in various orders” input method is ever going to rival those we’re naturally endowed with.

The input method you’re thinking of is Dasher. I wouldn’t be so sure that the speed wouldn’t be keyboard equivalent assuming that it’s prosaic input; the predictive system ought to reduce input requirement sufficiently to make up for the inefficiency of input. I don’t know if anyone has trained on it long enough to see, but I could well imagine you can get very high speeds.

I would disagree telepathy is either near or a text replacement. Telepathy might be a replacement for speech, but literacy has different use cases. Reading and writing is traditionally used to communicate with someone temporally removed, and books have been very good at that: the author can speak to you over centuries. But literacy is just one way of recording our communications, and I’m not sure it’s particularly the most natural.