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Do we really need handwriting any more?

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cursive letter jBruce Sterling flags up a different kind of dead media in a Boston Globe story bemoaning the death of cursive handwriting:

“My first reaction was horror,” Florey said in an interview at her home, “then I thought, ‘Why would anyone use handwriting in today’s world?’ I write my books on the computer. I discovered two schools of thought: One is that it wouldn’t matter if nobody learned handwriting because we all have computers, and the other is that this is an interesting, historic, valuable, and beautiful skill that has been around for thousands of years, and we are just tossing it out.”

The thing to note here is that it’s not necessarily a computer-driven death of literacy, per se (although that’s a common enough complaint, despite the lack of solid evidence to back it up). People can still read as well as ever; it’s doing “joined-up writing” – as it was referred to when I was at school – that people struggle with, and I’m not sure that’s as terrible a loss as it could be. [image by tacomabibelot]

I still handwrite all the time, but I almost always use block caps because it’s faster and easier to re-read (though those familiar with my handwriting might disagree on the latter point, with some considerable justification). What the people bemoaning cursive’s decline seem to not realise is that styles of handwriting go out of fashion very quickly; in my day-job at a museum library, many of our visitors struggle to read copperplate script from less than a century ago, and most of them are highly literate.

There’s a clear argument that the lack of the ability to write by hand in any form would be a tragedy, and I suspect that schools may well be skipping over the skill in deference to computer use (which I suspect maybe closely related to the increase in dyslexia diagnosis), but to bemoan the loss of cursive is to miss the point. You might as well complain that not enough people design websites with Comic Sans as the main font…

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Hybrid fusion-fission energy generation a possibility

danceWe haven’t had too much luck creating energy-producing fusion reactors, but according to researchers at the University of Texas there is a possibility of creating hybrid between a traditional nuclear fission and a fusion reactor, a sort of fusion of the two ideas, to ameliorate the problems of fission:

“Most people cite nuclear waste as the main reason they oppose nuclear fission as a source of power,” says Swadesh Mahajan, senior research scientist.

The scientists propose destroying the waste using a fusion-fission hybrid reactor, the centerpiece of which is a high power Compact Fusion Neutron Source (CFNS) made possible by a crucial invention.

…

One hybrid would be needed to destroy the waste produced by 10 to 15 LWRs.

99% of the really dangerous transuranic waste from the first part of the cycle is consumed in the following part, so that overall the output is less harmful and remains so for less time.

[from Physorg][image from tanakawho on flickr]

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Archive drive: why we should be saving old websites for future generations

antique computerThe head of the British Library has warned that, unless measures are taken sooner rather than later, we stand to lose vital parts of our cultural heritage to the rapid technological and social evolution of the internet. But why should we care about old websites being replaced by new ones, never to be seen again?

… Brindley cites two examples of losses overseas. When Barack Obama was inaugurated as US president last week, all traces of George Bush disappeared from the White House website, including a booklet entitled 100 Things Americans May Not Know About the Bush Administration, which is no longer accessible.

There were more than 150 websites relating to the 2000 Olympics in Sydney, she continues, but these, too, vanished instantly at the end of the games and are now stored only by the National Library of Australia. “If websites continue to disappear in the same way as those on President Bush and the Sydney Olympics – perhaps exacerbated by the current economic climate that is killing companies – the memory of the nation disappears too,” Brindley writes. “Historians of the future, citizens of the future, will find a black hole in the knowledge base of the 21st century.”

When you think about it like that, it makes a bit more sense. The National Archives are storing government emails, and encouraging us to store our own as well; the problem is that, contrary to popular belief, Google and their competitors do not store a copy of everything on the web.

The falling prices of storage media will help matters somewhat, but someone still has to make the effort to copy and file them all… still, at least a hard-drive full of old emails will take up less space than a few years’ worth of paper correspondence. [image by Nico Kaiser]

But here’s a thought – how much more editable is a digital history? After all, if you can store something as ones and zeroes, you can manipulate those ones and zeroes into a new pattern. The embarrassing photos of your twenty-something fashion disasters, those mawkish and desperate chatroom sessions and forum threads from your teens… all could be smoothed and tweaked into something more in keeping with how you’d like others to see you. A photoshopping of the past, if you will.

Makes you realise that a verifiable archive of governmental websites and communications might be something worth having after all, doesn’t it?

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Better living through chemistry? Indian river water contains 21 pharmaceuticals

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assorted pharmaceuticalsThe world is full of ironies. Many people can’t afford or get access to the drugs they need to make themselves well; meanwhile, others get more drugs than they need or want, whether they like it or not. In Pantacheru (near Hyderabad in India), recent samples of river water showed concentrations of an antibiotic high enough “to treat everyone living in Sweden for a work week”.

And it wasn’t just ciprofloxacin being detected. The supposedly cleaned water was a floating medicine cabinet — a soup of 21 different active pharmaceutical ingredients, used in generics for treatment of hypertension, heart disease, chronic liver ailments, depression, gonorrhea, ulcers and other ailments. Half of the drugs measured at the highest levels of pharmaceuticals ever detected in the environment, researchers say.

Those Indian factories produce drugs for much of the world, including many Americans. The result: Some of India’s poor are unwittingly consuming an array of chemicals that may be harmful, and could lead to the proliferation of drug-resistant bacteria.

Good old MSNBC… just in case the plight of the Indians didn’t move you, they reminded you of the drug-resistant nasties that you might encounter in your own country. This is the nasty underbelly of globalisation; industrial production moves to where it can be done most cheaply, regardless of what corners get cut in the process. Outta sight, outta mind, right? [via BLDGBLOG; image by Amanda M Hatfield]

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Top ten skiffy gizmos verging on reality

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Either it’s a slow week over at New Scientist, or they decided to throw us science fictional types a bone… either way, we’ll point out their top ten list of science fiction gadgets and devices that are nearing reality*.

As such lists do, it includes the gloriously impractical (e.g. the long-fabled jetpack) alongside a couple of genuinely useful items (like a universal audio translator and an artificial gill for breathing under water).

It’s a shame there aren’t more things like reliable sources of drinkable water, effective renewable energy generators and cures for diseases… but that’s us science fiction geeks for you, always with our head in the clouds. If you could pick any sf-nal technology to make a reality, what would it be?

* It would appear, possibly unsurprisingly, that the New Scientist definition of ‘reality’ is one that includes you having a lot of money.

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