Some people are bemoaning the death of cursive writing. I hope this is premature. Writing in journals and diaries has always seemed to me a bit of an artform, scrawling out one's innermost thoughts and feelings in inky expressive curls and loops. One could almost feel the angst and repressed romance and frustration in the flowing soul scratchings. It takes effort to write, signifying a moral dedication to express something that needs to be said. An imperative to disclose the secrets of one's soul, else why write it out? And then there is the personalizing style cursive adds to one's signature, making it almost like a finger print that identifies you as you.
"Just how long have humans been using cursive writing? Scholars credit Niccolo Niccoli, a 15th Century Italian, for "inventing" our modern-day cursive, although it had been evolving long before his day.
As the new script from Niccoli and his colleagues radiated from Italy, it became known as "italic."
Niccoli's cursive was simple, sans curly-cues, and not every letter was connected. It was much easier to read than 19th Century cursive, which was pretty ornate by today's standards and known as Spencerian, for Platt Rogers Spencer.
In the early 1900s, Austin Norman Palmer became the cursive king, promoting his Palmer method as a quicker, less fancy and more readable alternative to Spencerian.
By the 1920s, the Palmer method was used in most American schools.
The D'Nealian method, named by inventor Donald Neal Thurber, came onto the scene in the late '70s. While the Palmer method used "stick-and-ball" or vertical printing, D'Nealian cursive involves the connection of printed letters with "tails." Although D'Nealian cursive isn't as elegant as Palmer, advocates say it is easier to learn because students don't have to learn cursive from scratch; they just learn to connect the tails.
Today, styles range from teacher to teacher. Those using the formal, no-tails methods usually refer to it by the supplier they use, Zaner-Bloser Inc. being the market leader. But the formal methods that succeeded Palmer, including Zaner-Bloser, are less ornate than Palmer.
Although few elementary schools have abandoned cursive altogether, penmanship is losing its luster.
In fact, Susan Jonas and Marilyn Nissenson officially eulogized it in their book of 20th Century icons, "Going, Going, Gone: Vanishing Americana" (Chronicle Books, $19.95). The smell of burning leaves, girdles, paper boys, the unanswered phone and, yes, penmanship, the authors say--all gone."==http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2003-...man-palmer
Being from the south, I am familiar with hominy. Hominy with cheese, hominy grits, posole, and masa. All the magical results of soaking hard field corn in lye! Seems like a lot of trouble to go thru. But what else were you goin to do with that field corn?
EXCERPT: All the talk about the Jade Helm military exercises targeting Texas as "hostile territory" has turned the mainstream media into its usual self: finger-wagging denialists who pretend nothing is ever a threat unless they say so first. Jade Helm is no threat to your safety, they insist, but a tiny measles outbreak in Disneyland that killed no one should have you screaming in total panic. (Did you properly put on your measles paranoia tin foil hat before getting injected at Walgreens?)
According to the status quo media, nothing nefarious is ever planned by governments. Never mind the fact that nearly every act of genocide and war in the last two centuries was planned and carried out by governments. The phenomenon is called "democide," and in just the last century or so, over 260 million people have been mass murdered by governments.
The clueless mainstream media also has a very short memory. It can't remember world history, American history or even what it reported five years ago. As I show here, the very same things the media is now reporting as facts were derided as "conspiracy theories" just a few short years ago.
EXCERPT: Western nations continue to see a flow of people, mainly young adults, attempting to enter Syria and Iraq to either fight for ISIS or to marry into the marauding army. Despite efforts at the State Department to counter enemy propaganda with some harsh realities about life the so-called caliphate, ISIS’ attraction has continued almost unabated. While Westerners may be mystified at the phenomenon, the Department of Justice’s National Security division warns that people have underestimated the sophistication and reach of ISIS propaganda. It has become Mad Men for mujahideen...
EXCERPT: [...] In addition to the infrastructure destruction, there is the social fracture; the sensitive issue of dealing with rape and sex trafficking committed by ISIS on thousands of girls and women. The big question is how will these women who were taken as sex slaves be reaccepted into the society? How will the parents, brothers and husbands deal with these women? What will be the future for their children? Who will guarantee the safety of these victims and protect them from domestic abuse? Most of these women will need psychological and medical help. Is there a plan to provide them with what they need? Not to mention, many of these women have already become widows and orphans as their families have been killed by ISIS....
RELEASE: If consumers have their way, self-driving cars will enable parents to keep tighter reins on teen motorists. A survey conducted by the College of Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University reveals that people are soundly in favor of putting parental controls in high-tech cars of the future. One thousand people, aged 18 to 70, were polled to learn which freedom-foiling attribute they deemed most important.
Roughly 84 percent all respondents wanted to control: a car's speed, the number of friends who can pile into the car and the driver's curfew time. Women (87 percent) were strongly in support of this capability, as were 91percent of people aged 66 to 70. Even 81 percent of the youngest polled, ages 18-24, favored these novel features.
Implementing these types of control technologies could save lives, prevent injuries and reduce costs associated with accidents. In 2013, 2,524 teenagers perished in motor vehicles crashes, making vehicle accidents the leading cause of death for teenagers. Compared to older drivers and miles driven, teen drivers are three times more likely to be in a fatal wreck. Young, inexperienced drivers tend to speed and drive too fast for road conditions. Further, teens are more likely to crash when they have teen passengers in the car.
When it comes to curtailing the distance teen drivers can travel, men (62 percent) and women (61percent) closely align on this point. This notion, however, did not resonate well with 18- to 24-year-olds. Only 54 percent of them opted for this feature, whereas nearly 65 percent of drivers aged 36 to 45 would constrain a car's geographic range.
The one area where 18- to 24-year-olds outscored all other age groups was in their receptiveness to having a parental text display in the car. Surprisingly, 69 percent of the youngest respondents thought this was useful while only 53 percent of people aged 56 to 65 would consider this option. Women (63 percent) tended to be more receptive than men (57 percent) to this communication feature.
About the survey: Carnegie Mellon, the birthplace of autonomous vehicle technology, has a 30-year history of advancing self-driving car technology for commercialization. The college polled 1,000 people to gain insight into what consumers are looking for in self-driving cars. In the survey, a self-driving car was defined as having sensors and computing technology that allows the car to safely travel without a driver controlling the steering wheel, gas and brake pedal. The vehicle would automatically move at safe speeds, keep a safe distance from surrounding cars, change traffic lanes, obey traffic signals and follow GPS directions to destinations
RELEASE: Hillary Clinton once famously said, "It takes a village to raise a child." It turns out that's been true for centuries: New research by a University of Utah anthropologist explains how and why mothers in ancient societies formed cooperative groups to help raise their children.
Karen Kramer, an associate professor of anthropology, published a study in the Journal of Human Evolution titled, "When Mothers Need Others: Life History Transitions Associated with the Evolution of Cooperative Breeding."
Her research examines how mothers underwent a remarkable transition from the past -- when they had one dependent offspring at a time, ended support of their young at weaning and received no help from others -- to the present, when mothers often have multiple kids who help rear other children.
"We simulated an economic problem that would have arisen over the course of human evolution -- as mothers became more successful at producing children, they also had more dependents than they could care for on their own," said Kramer of her research. "We found that early in that transition, it was a mother's older children who helped to raise her younger children and only with more modern life histories did mothers also need the cooperation of other adults. This suggests that early human families may have formed around cooperating groups of mothers and children."
Her findings are departure from earlier hypotheses by other anthropologists. Most hypotheses about who helped mothers in ancient societies point to other adults. Kramer's study, however, found that it is a mother's own children who were the most reliable as helpers.
Other key points in Kramer's study include: -- Human motherhood has undergone a remarkable transition from a past when mothers likely nursed children until the age of 5 to 6, did not nutritionally support children after weaning, and received no help raising the children. Going back in time, it might be possible to find groups of mothers and cooperating siblings who helped to raise other children. As time progressed, mothers have relied on other adult relatives and fathers to help out.
-- Mothers make tradeoffs. Do they take care of the children they already have, do they have another one, or do they do something else with their time? These same decisions that mothers made in the past are still being made today.
"Human mothers are interesting. They're unlike mothers of many other species because they feed their children after weaning and others help them raise their children. As an anthropologist, I live and work in traditional societies where, like other researchers, I have observed many times that it takes a village to raise a child. Not only do mothers work hard to care for their young, but so do her older children, grandmothers, fathers and other relatives. But this wasn't always the case," Kramer said.
"Deep in the past, mothers likely received no help and consequently had much lower rates of fertility and lost many children. So we have to ask, why do others cooperate with mothers and help them raise their children? This is an important question because you could do many other things with your time beside help someone else raise their children."
Kramer's research methodology used a set of mathematical formulas, plugged different variables into them in order to simulate the evolution of families from the past to the present. She said there is still much to learn in the field of anthropology about how humans began to cooperate and how cooperation became more complex over time.
"Humans are extraordinary cooperators. However, most research has focused on adults and we know very little about how cooperation develops in children," Kramer said.
"We know that the psychological mechanisms that prepare us for a life of cooperation -- such as a sense of fairness and the ability to show empathy, share food and help each other -- begin to develop in very young children. What we need to explore is what children actually do -- how they cooperate and at what price -- in societies where they still play an important economic role."
EXCERPT: [...] Over the years Dawkins has been among the most frequent (and valued) Edge contributors, and our pages are filled with his elegant writing and brilliant thinking. On a trip to England this month, it occurred to me all of his contributions on Edge had been the result either of his public speaking or his writing. I realized that I had never asked him to sit down for a one-to-one videotaped interview. After making arrangements, we met at noon on Saturday, April 11th, in the Enthoven Room of New College to have an Edge conversation. I am pleased to present the video and the transcript below...
[...] My conjecture is that if there is life elsewhere in the universe, it will be Darwinian life. I think there's only one way for this hyper complex phenomenon which we call "life" to arise from the laws of physics. The laws of physics—if you throw a stone up in the air, it describes a parabola, and that's it. But biology, without ever violating the laws of physics, does the most extraordinary things; it produces machines which can run, and walk, and fly, and dig, and swing through the trees, and think, and produce the whole of human technology, human art, human music. This all comes about because at some point in history, about 4 billion years ago, a replicating entity arose, not a gene as we would now see it, but something functionally equivalent to a gene, which because it had the power to replicate and the power to influence its own probability of replicating, and replicated with slight errors, gave rise to the whole of life. If you ask me what my ambition would be, it would be that everybody would understand what an extraordinary, remarkable thing it is that they exist, in a world which would otherwise just be plain physics. The key to the process is self-replication....
[...] My vision of life is that everything extends from replicators, which are in practice DNA molecules on this planet. The replicators reach out into the world to influence their own probability of being passed on. Mostly they don't reach further than the individual body in which they sit, but that's a matter of practice, not a matter of principle. [...] There are two kinds of unit of selection. The difference is a semantic one. They're both units of selection, but one is the replicator, and what it does is get itself copied. So more and more copies of itself go into the world. The other kind of unit is the vehicle. It doesn't get itself copied. What it does is work to copy the replicators which have come down to it through the generations, and which it's going to pass on to future generations. So we have this individual / replicator dichotomy. They're both units of selection, but in different senses. It's important to understand that they are different senses....
[...] One of the things that I've always done is not make a clear separation between books that are aimed at popularizing, books that are aimed at explaining things to other people, and books that explain things to myself, or explain things to my scientific colleagues. I think the separation between doing science and popularizing science has been overdone. And I have found that the exercise of explaining to other people, which I suppose I've been fairly successful at, is greatly helped by the fact that I first have to explain it to myself....
EXCERPT: Despite toilet paper having been around since at least the 6th century AD (initially in China), it wouldn’t be until the late 19th century when toilet paper would be first introduced in America and England and it wasn’t until the 1900s, around the same time the indoor toilet became common, that toilet paper would catch on with the masses. So what did people use for wiping before toilet paper...
EXCERPT: [...] I think old timers soaked them in wood ash and water which caused them to swell. They then dried them and they would be soft and fluffy. [...] when the [Sears&Roebuck] catalogs were all gone, there was always a couple of buckets of cobs. Most of the cobs were a reddish-brown color, but some were a creamy white. I asked my grandpa what the difference was and with a wink he told me, "First you use a brown one and then you use a white one to see if you need to use another brown one."
EXCERPT: You refer to chapter 13 of Gargantua, the cockeyed epic by Francois Rabelais (1483?-1553). Frank's reputation as a comic genius is proof that if you tell enough dirty jokes, write in French, and wait 400 years, posterity will proclaim you one of civilization's leading lights. In the chapter in question, the giant Gargantua tells of his efforts to find the ultimate in sanitary comfort:
"Once I did wipe me with a gentlewoman's velvet mask, and found it to be good; for the softness of the silk was very voluptuous and pleasant to my fundament. Another time with one of their hoods, and in like manner that was comfortable; at another time with a lady's neckerchief, and after that some ear-pieces made of crimson satin; but there was such a number of golden spangles in them that they fetched away all the skin off my tail with a vengeance. This hurt I cured by wiping myself with a page's cap, garnished with a feather after the Swiss fashion. Afterwards, in dunging behind a bush, I found a March-cat, and with it daubed my breech, but her claws were so sharp that they grievously exulcerated my perineum. Of this I recovered the next morning thereafter, by wiping myself with my mother's gloves, of a most excellent perfume of Arabia. [He continues in this vein for several pages.]
But to conclude, I say and maintain that of all arse-wisps, bum-fodders, tail-napkins, bung-hole-cleansers and wipe-breeches, there is none in this world comparable to the neck of a goose, that is well downed, if you hold her head betwixt your legs: and believe me therein upon mine honour; for you will thereby feel in your nockhole a most wonderful pleasure, both in regard of the softness of the said down, and of the temperate heat of the goose; which is easily communicated to the bumgut and the rest of the intestines, insofar as to come even to the regions of the heart and brains. And think not that the felicity of the heroes and demigods, in the Elysian fields, consisteth either in their Ambrosia or Nectar, but in this, that they wipe their tails with the necks of geese."
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