A day and a half to go for your last chance to be part of the Kickstarter project. I’ve put up a small excerpt from the book in my latest update, to drum up support in the last couple days.
Category Archives: Social Commentary
The Post-Election Vilification Of Whites
…from an advice columnist.
All of this reverse racism from pseudoliberals gets quite tiresome.
TSA
Is the agency, as we currently know it, doomed?
I hope so. What a boondoggle.
Handwriting
Is it becoming obsolete?
I have no nostalgia for it, myself. I’ve always considered dragging a writing implement across paper to be sheer physical drudgery, and if I didn’t have a keyboard, I wouldn’t be a writer.
This is the key point:
Although these historical tidbits are fascinating—the chapter on the absurdly indecipherable script prevalent in Germany before Hitler banned it helps demonstrate how arbitrary and cultural our writing conventions are—they have one point in common. Every innovation in handwriting was designed to improve the speed and legibility of human communication. And here is where Hensher’s quixotic defense of the hand stumbles. For what is faster and clearer than typing? Weren’t you slightly relieved when the handwritten paragraphs in this review came to an end, leaving you on the sturdy shores of a new thought expressed in Microsoft Verdana? Isn’t it easier to catch my meaning, to pay attention, when you are staring at a nice clean block of type?
My emphasis. The other issue that she doesn’t really get into is that by “handwriting,” what is really being discussed here is cursive script, which I learned as a child, but abandoned for just printing around junior high, because I found it too time consuming. I never bought, and still don’t buy, the notion that by eliminating the need to lift the pen, it somehow sped up the process. Both my printing and my cursive are illegible to anyone but me, but printing goes faster, because I don’t have to spend time worrying about the loops and flourishes. I’m sure I’ve told this story before, but when I took my GRE, it said that I had to write (not print) a pledge on the cover. It had been so long since I’d written cursive that it took me a couple minutes to slowly remember how to form the letters in the single sentence required.
I do think that being able to write down thoughts, old school, traditional tech, will always be a valuable skill (well, barring the Singularity). But there’s no reason for most kids to learn cursive these days. That could just be a hobby or art, like calligraphy. Typing is a much more important skill.
Careful With The Stones
People in the cities are building glass houses.
I’ve always thought when walking on The Strand in Manhattan Beach (CA, not New York) that living in one of those houses, while having a beautiful view and a great location, would be like living in a fish bowl. I think it takes a certain amount of exhibitionism to want to do it.
The “S” Word
Derek Webber writes that settlement has to be an objective of our space policy.
The Augustine panel noted that if the goal isn’t space settlement, there’s no point in having a human spaceflight program at all. The private people (such as Elon Musk) get this, but Congress continues to fail to do so.
Jefferson And Slavery
“Maybe Lincoln didn’t understand what was going on as well as Paul Finkelman now does, but I regard that as unlikely.”
So do I. The notion that the nation could have been founded as one without slavery is profoundly historically ignorant. The Founders did the best they could do under the circumstances, and even with such an atrocious flaw it was still the best design of a government in human history up to that time.
Or since, despite the fact that about half the nation seems willing to abandon it.
[Update a few minutes later]
This seems related.
Diversity On Campus
You’d think with all of the money they spend on it, they’d get better results, but it’s almost impossible to prove discrimination, even though it’s obvious to everyone that it is occurring.
The Higher-Education Bubble
Is it an opportunity to take back the culture from the Left? If so, it’s one we shouldn’t miss.
Eco-Terrorists And Asteroid Miners
What’s not to like in a book like that?