Should Cursive Be Replaced by Typing Education?

I’m terrible at writing in cursive. I was in the hospital for a chunk of time during first and second grades when my public school taught the majority of cursive writing techniques (I’ll never forget the worksheets I had to do). Luckily, it didn’t hold me back much.

I understand the “kinesthetic benefits” of learning with cursive, however I do wonder…

Great comments and discussion on this Ask Reddit thread about cursive education:

AskReddit: “Do you think that cursive writing education should be replaced by typing education for 1-2nd graders?”

Remembering Aaron Swartz

Great piece from a mainstream publication about an open web hero:

Why We Should Remember Aaron Swartz – Businessweek: “Swartz wasn’t an anarchist. He came to believe that copyright law had been abused, and was being used to close off what, by law, should be open. It is hard to find fault with his logic, and there is much to admire in a man who, rather than become a small god of the valley, was willing to court punishment to prove a point. The world will have no trouble remembering Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg, and this is as it should be. But it should remember, too, people like Aaron Swartz, the ones who make those empires possible.”

How Gorillas Got Their Name

Learn something every day…

Gorilla – Wikipedia: “The American physician and missionary Thomas Staughton Savage and naturalist Jeffries Wyman first described the western gorilla (they called it Troglodytes gorilla) in 1847 from specimens obtained in Liberia. The name was derived from Greek Γόριλλαι (Gorillai), meaning ‘tribe of hairy women’, described by Hanno the Navigator, a Carthaginian navigator and possible visitor (circa 480 BC) to the area that later became Sierra Leone.”

Hanno was a fascinating person (as were many Carthaginians).

There’s even a crater on the moon named after him.

Here’s the source that started my Sunday afternoon rat-hole into the life of Hanno…

A History of Ancient Geography Among the Greeks and Romans: From the Earliest Ages Till the Fall of the Roman Empire, Volume 1 (on Google Books for free).

Aaron Swartz on “Digging In and Fighting Harder”

Such grand thoughts by a passionate person who has been taken from us…

Look at yourself objectively (Aaron Swartz’s Raw Thought): “In moments of great emotional stress, we revert to our worst habits: we dig in and fight harder. The real trick is not to get better at fighting — it’s to get better at stopping ourselves: at taking a deep breath, calming down, and letting our better natures take over from our worst instincts.”

Happy 30th Birthday to the Internet

Vint Cerf writes a great post about how the modern-day internet (no, not Facebook and Twitter and TMZ.com) came to be during a tumultuous switchover in 1983:

Marking the birth of the modern-day Internet | Official Google Blog: “In an attempt to solve this, Robert Kahn and I developed a new computer communication protocol designed specifically to support connection among different packet-switched networks. We called it TCP, short for ‘Transmission Control Protocol,’ and in 1974 we published a paper about it in IEEE Transactions on Communications: ‘A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication.’ Later, to better handle the transmission of real-time data, including voice, we split TCP into two parts, one of which we called ‘Internet Protocol,’ or IP for short. The two protocols combined were nicknamed TCP/IP.”