This is definitely sad news. From I remember, the early Internet seemed to be inhabited mostly by deadheads. When you think of open source, remember the music and the thousands who would tape and share the experience of Bobby playing with the band to millions.
Analog clocks are interesting in that they exercise your brain when you read them. You have to do calculation (what is the number system for each hand), spatial reasoning (where is each hand) and categorization (what is each hand).
There’s a program called Arrowsmith that has a summer program called the Cognitive Intensive Program. It’s basically 3-4 hours a day of speed reading analog clock for 7 weeks. You start out at 2 handed and work up to 8 handed.
Changed my son’s life. He was a completely different student afterwards, for the better.
All good points, particularly the control group piece. Scrutinizing control groups makes it easy to invalidate most studies about treatments in this space because control groups are so difficult to assemble. You should see the variance in autism spectrum.
It still worked for my son and my friend’s two children.
I have no affiliation with the program at all. I talk about it because it worked for us.
I latched onto it because I know the type of things that I have struggled with my entire life, but just learned a lot of coping mechanisms. I’m also very self aware. I pay a lot of attention to how my own brain works because of the need to develop those coping mechanisms. When I saw the full program, everything made perfect sense to me and I absolutely believe that it would have helped me when I was younger.
Had I been able to tolerate working half days for 7 weeks, I would have participated in the program myself.
That is the program, yes. I’m not trying to sell you on it, just sharing our experience.
I found out about it from one of my neighbors who has two children with dysgraphia who did the full time program for 3 years each. He tells everybody about it.
I toured that location when my son was going into 3rd grade and we ended up sending doing just the summer program after 7th grade. What I saw on the tour would have helped me when I was a kid and my sons brain seems to work just like mine.
If you threatened me with 3+ hours a day of speed reading clocks instead of a normal summer I'd probably double down on effort too. And probably not in a way that's healthy long term.
Well, it wasn't a threat. He knew exactly what he'd been struggling with from 1st grade on (officially minor ADHD) and we were trying really hard to keep him off of medication. Since the program has finished he's asked to do it again several times (but we haven't because it's expensive). I've thought about teaching him programming by having him build his own clock trainer.
It's hard to explain to random people on the internet but here's the difference we saw.
- Went from doing homework everyday after school until 10pm to always being done by 6pm at the latest.
- Went from forgetting to turn in that same homework and sometimes major assignments frequently to rarely. 7th grade year he had over 20 zero's for assignments that he did and simply kept forgetting to turn in. 8th grade year he forgot two homeworks all year.
- Went from years of extreme disorganization to...still disorganized but a significant improvement.
- Went from uncertainty about whether he was going to be able to keep up with the workload in high school to, for lack of a better way of saying it, a star student. Teacher reports changed. GPA is a 3.7 (he's in 11th grade now). Juggling seasonal sports, Scouts, school, clubs, social life, honors/AP classes with no assistance from us at all.
It's hard for people to understand when you watch the same patterns and struggles for 6 or 7 years and then they just stop being a struggle. That 7th grade year, all that my wife and I did after we got home from work was try to make sure he would get his work done. It consumed our life to the point that, after me trying to convince my wife that this could help (because she was very skeptical too) that it was bad enough that she finally agreed it was worth a shot.
He and I were actually going to fly across the country to stay in Seattle for 7 weeks to have him do the program in person because I didn't think he would be able to pay attention to the virtual. The hotel that we had booked a couple of blocks from the school cancelled our reservation due to renovations and we ended up pivoting to the virtual program at the last minute. He did surprisingly well in the remote class format. The hotel was also close to Microsoft's campus and I got the impression that Microsoft had paid them to renovate to prepare for a lot of people they were going to have in town.
Well that is interesting and if you had results then that's all that matters for your family of course.
But sorry to clarify I'm still hung up on the "8 handed clock" thing - what does that mean? What information is displayed on the clocks other than hours, minutes, and seconds?
I didn’t sit in on it so I can’t say for sure. My son got up to the 2nd version of the 6 handed clock. You have to have perfect accuracy within a certain amount of time to advance to the next tier.
Even with the 6 handed I don’t remember exactly what each was though. I asked Grok and this is what it said.
> In the Arrowsmith Program’s Cognitive Intensive Program (CIP), the primary exercise is the Symbol Relations exercise, commonly known as “Clocks.” This involves reading analog clock faces that progress from 2 hands to up to 8 (or sometimes more) hands.
Each hand on the clock represents a separate time (an independent position pointing to a specific hour/minute on the clock face). Participants must interpret the positions of all hands simultaneously, understand the relationships between them (e.g., angles, relative positions, and sequences), and record the times accurately under time pressure.
The multiple hands do not represent different concepts symbolically (like hours, minutes, seconds); instead, they increase cognitive load to train the brain’s ability to process and relate multiple pieces of information at once. This strengthens the Symbol Relations cognitive function, which supports logical reasoning, comprehension, seeing connections between ideas, cause-and-effect understanding, and abstract thinking.
Progression adds more hands as mastery is achieved, making the task more complex to build capacity in handling interrelated symbols and concepts. The CIP focuses intensively on this exercise to accelerate improvements in reasoning, processing speed, and related skills.
> Analog clocks are interesting in that they exercise your brain when you read them. You have to do calculation
Interesting, for me it is the opposite. With a digital clock I need to do a division/comparison to know how much part of the day/hour has already passed. With an analog clock I can read a proportion directly.
Hours, minutes, seconds, degrees, arcminutes, arcseconds... I could try to read 6, but honestly I doubt I'd even be able to see the arcseconds hand, it would be moving so quickly.
I can read analogue clocks only because I was taught in school, and prefer digital ones for all use cases I have myself (other than maybe decorative?), and even when I do read an analogue clock face, I convert that to digital time in my head before I can properly parse it, so I have a hard time blaming them. There aren't many analogue clock faces I need to read in my life, and there are probably even less in theirs. The last time I strictly needed to be able to read one was, funnily enough, teaching kids how to read one.
I'm the wrong person to ask this about, since I prefer digital time, so time is just a number to me. But Technology Connections made a video atleast talking about it,[1] so hopefully that get part of the point across. To him and plenty of other analogue-first people, time is a progress bar, or a chart, or something along those lines, and that's the natural way to perceive time, and converting it to a number is meaningless beyond expressing it as digital time.
The only reason we have analog clocks is because digital ones were much harder to build. That time is of course over for good. It was a compromise imposed by limited technology.
Tell that to my glasses. At any sort of distance where this could be an advantage, the clock is just going to be a blur anyway.
Not to mention, how often are you in a situation where you want to know what time it is, but the nearest clock is far enough away that it being analogue becomes an actual advantage?
Interesting, I also have glasses and am short-sighted, but for me light-emitting objects blur much faster than solid objects. It depends very much on the light type, frequency and brightness, but most LEDs, which most digital clocks use, tend to have an overgleaming effect, which makes them unreadable due to being a block of light.
> Not to mention, how often are you in a situation where you want to know what time it is, but the nearest clock is far enough away that it being analogue becomes an actual advantage?
All the time? Being in a train station, sitting in a (class)room (during exam), in the kitchen, walking on the street, etc.
Sure, but why would I look down, when there is a clock in every direction I look at. I wristwatch would also be analog again.
> My last 7+ exams were all done on a computer. That clock was a lot closer than any that happen to be on a wall.
I have no clue how your university does prevent cheating, but ok. Here any kind of network-connected(/connectable) device is forbidden. And then there is math, where the only thing you are allowed to have is a pen and the formulary (and maybe a ruler).
> when there is a clock in every direction I look at.
This does not reflect my life. Clocks are out there, but not to the point of there being one a just turn of the head away no matter where I am. My phone is the closest device with an accurate sense of time the vast majority of the time.
> wristwatch would also be analog again.
Smart watches exist. Digital wrist watches also exist, but seem to have gone out of fashion.
> I have no clue how your university does prevent cheating,
By not having shit exams. Most (all?) of mine were open-book. I didn't take maths in uni, but they're also done digitally, although I don't think they're open-book. There you probably only get the formulary.
> This does not reflect my life. Clocks are out there, but not to the point of there being one a just turn of the head away no matter where I am.
That part was specifically about train stations and classrooms.
> By not having shit exams. Most (all?) of mine were open-book.
We also now have mostly open-book exams, the rule to be allowed to use everything, that does not do network calls is the rule for open-book exams. Personally I don't like when exams need to be done on a computer, there is always something that breaks and now you are personally responsible for it. With pen and paper you have peace of mind, the only thing is that you need to have a working pen and even that can be borrowed in an emergency.
> That part was specifically about train stations and classrooms.
Depending on where I'm standing inside a train station, I'll be much more likely to see a digital sign saying when the next one arrived in minutes rather than a clock (a fair amount do have clocks, but they all have digital signs that give you what you actually want more quickly anyway, while being a whole lot more visible). If I'm at a tram or a metro stop, I'll definitely have the sign, but probably no clock.
I've had a computer and thus a digital clock in front of me in class since high school.
To me time is somehow both, but more so an analog thing. It is a multimodular linear scale, that turns logarithmic, the moment I focus on any specific point.
If it's something I want people to read, I'd never dare write it in cursive, because if I did, I wouldn't count on them being able to read it.
I'll write in (not great) cursive for myself, but for other people? Writing in block or print is basically an accessibility feature. Even if my cursive was perfect, plenty of people would not be able to read it.
I grew up in a world where everyone knew cursive, and until this sort of discussion became popular in recent years, it honestly wouldn't have occurred to me that there were many people who didn't know. But I guess they had to cut some things out of the curriculum and it's not as useful as it used to be.
> Cursive is an outdated skill for when it was the fastest way to get words written to paper.
There was a class signifier aspect to it as well. Poor kids couldn't spend as much time practicing and perfecting penmanship. In a world where much got done through handwritten personal letters, good penmanship would make an impression similar to having properly tailored formal attire vs a tattered coat.
My grandma went to public school but grew up in an era where that sort of thinking was widespread, so she got extra tutoring. She learned to write freehand with a ruler flat baseline and machine like consistency in each letter. You could recognize a card or mail from her instantly just by the addressing on the envelope.
I wasn't taught that strictly but I did spend years of elementary school with those Red Chief notebooks copying letters page after page much to the frustration of my young ADHD brain.
I doubt I could properly write cursive today. I barely ever hand write notes anymore, so there's no real point.
I'm confused. How do you write if not in cursive? Do you just write in block capitals? With each letter on its own? Do you just not hand write anymore?
>>Cursive is an outdated skill for when it was the fastest way to get words written to paper.
But....It still is? Without using some kind of machine of course.
Block capitals? no. It's print. With upper and lowercase letters.
I rarely handwrite now. The last time I really did was in college.
> But....It still is? Without using some kind of machine of course.
But of course this is HN where most people are technical. We all have some sort of machine at our disposal otherwise we'd not be writing back and forth to one another.
So like.......not linking the letters together then? Doesn't that just actually take more effort than just writing cursive? And is slower?
>>But of course this is HN where most people are technical.
For sure, and as a professional programmer I keep a notebook with hand written notes - the fact that I have a keyboard and multiple monitors in front of me doesn't change the fact that hand writing is still the best(for me) way to save and recall information.
> Doesn't that just actually take more effort than just writing cursive? And is slower?
Probably yes to both counts.
However, when I'm handwriting I'm generally not in a position where speed or effort is the most important thing. To me, it's not much more effort to print and I get the added bonus of legibility. When I write cursive, it can be hard for me to understand what I wrote when I come back to it. I'm just a little too sloppy. It would take effort for me to get to the point where my cursive is neat and I frankly just don't handwrite enough to warrant that effort.
Consider this, do you use shorthand? I'd assume not. But why not? It's the fastest way to write anything. Cursive, by comparison, is both a lot of effort to write, is slower, and it wastes space.
I'd say for (some of) the same reasons you likely don't write shorthand, I don't write in cursive.
I don't get your point of not writing cursive. It is literally the same as what you are already doing, but just stopping raising the hand between letters. It is also not like you have that specific cursive, and then it is unreadable. It is a continuous tradeoff of faster vs. readable, so you can just slow down for some letters and not for others.
The thing that needs effort is learning to write, why did you waste time on learning to not connect your letters?
> why did you waste time on learning to not connect your letters?
As someone who learned cursive by learning a new script first, you're making a big assumption here. Nobody learns to not connect their letters.
I didn't learn to not connect my letters. I learned to write without connecting letters, and never properly learned to connect them (until much later in life), because that was never required (and never emphasised while I was in school anyway). If I were to write as I did before, but attempt to connect the letters, it would turn into an unreadable mess. So I didn't. Not until I learned to write in a new script and could transfer that back to my original handwriting. I still don't write a cursive lowercase F, because Cyrillic doesn't have that glyph, and the one that I'm supposed to use never looks right. Not that it matters, since I only write in cursive for myself.
> If I were to write as I did before, but attempt to connect the letters, it would turn into an unreadable mess.
Oh, okay. They did not tell you in which order and direction you should write letters in print? They focused on that here, but maybe that was actually part for the preparation of learning cursive.
A part of me wants to learn it as well. It looks so alien that it seems interesting to learn.
Because of this conversation I've been reading up on it. There are multiple systems, but for English they all pretty much revolve around representing words phonetically. One form (Pittman) uses different line widths for different sounds, making it work best with a pencil or fountain pen. Gregg doesn't do that. Gregg is most common in the US and Pittman is common in the UK.
I'm a person who mostly types, writes tons of code, but also is a graphic designer, and I also have pitiful penmanship. I can write regular sans-serif (all caps or properly capitalized), as well as cursive, but ultimately the concept of fonts make more sense to me than anything else in terms of an expression of letters and typography.
There are a million ways to articulate a glyph, from thick to thin, clear to murky, big, small, harsh, soft, whatever. Some people still use typewriters or typeset a printing press. Others use spray paint or marker.
End of the day for me it's just about communication and expression and aesthetic and clarity (or sometimes intentional LACK of visual clarity in honor of a style), not technique or medium. I dunno.
I do think every bozo should be able to pick up a pen and make his mark, and I think humans should practice the art of crafting a sentence and turning a phrase, but I really don't focus on the how, and more on the what, the message.
Even the Zodiac Killer had a unique and bizarre style with his handwriting and cipher LOL can you imagine if it was just bog-standard 5th grade cursive?
I write with mix of cursive and sorta print letters. The sorta print letters are more readable, actually.
Based on what teachers said, kids use cursive while they are forced to and switch to sorta print when they can. But everyone invents their own "font", so it is a challenge to decipher them.
Most people do not hand write anything more than a short note in 2025, and paper is not usually the target medium for longer texts. A desire to write without access to some sort of machine is a bit quaint.
Of course to be pedantic, modern pens are machines too.
>>Most people do not hand write anything more than a short note in 2025
Is this like....a personal feeling? Or something with actual data behind it? But even if so - why does it matter? If you write short notes, do you not write them in cursive?
>>Of course to be pedantic, modern pens are machines too.
That's beyond pedantic, I struggle to imagine that anyone other than the a professional linguist would call a ball pen a machine.
It's an impression from my own social circle. I looked for data briefly because of this comment, but didn't find anything conclusive.
It does make sense to hand write short notes in cursive if you're hand writing short notes at all, but many people never learned it, or are so rusty it would take deliberate practice to restore proficiency.
I'll be honest I actually prefer my words to be lasting and have weight so I prefer block letters carved into lead which doesn't benefit much from cursive
okay, but if you care about recall and activating regions of the brain that create a better understanding of what you're learning, handwriting wins according to research.
Can you link to some of that research? The last time I saw such research get shared on HN, the researchers were limiting the typists to 1 finger (per hand?), which is patently absurd.
More than that, I would be curious to see research that controls for proficiency at writing/typing. My theory is that if more kids were taught to properly touch type from an early age, the alleged differences between writing/typing would be far less dramatic. I was taught since kindergarten and there's no doubt in my mind that I absorb and understand information better through typing than writing. I'm also much, much, much faster. Brief Googling suggests I'm at least 10x faster than the average WPM for handwriting
Instead, here we are talking about how cursive should actually still be taught.
But is there a difference between cursive and block lettering? I fully agree with your overall point about handwritten notes being far superior to typed notes. It forces you to filter out extraneous information instead of being a live transcriptionist of your professor.
I've found drilling notes via method of loci of visualized flashcards/facts for this to be superior for myself which I always sourced from typed notes. Not really familiar with the research that cursive would improve over it.
This is not the case in the US (anymore) and atleast some places in Europe. Print gets taught first and you learn to write with that, then cursive comes later, by this point usually as an afterthought.
These aren't really comparable. Cursive handwriting varies considerably between people. One person's might be very clear, another might be impossible to discern.
This sort of thing is some of the weirdest pseudointellectualism I've seen. Most adults and seniors also can't tell where they are by the position of the stars, or write with a fountain pen, or use a sliderule, or read a sundial. Because now we have Google Maps, ballpoint pens, calculators, and analog clocks.
> Most adults and seniors also can't tell where they are by the position of the stars, or write with a fountain pen, or use a sliderule, or read a sundial.
I maybe give you the stars, but all the others demand a "Citation needed".
You should talk to teachers, lot of kids can't answer test questions because they don't even understand the words in the question... A growing proportion of kids are close to non functional, with multiple years of delay compared to previous generations.
The etymology of the word “Jazz” originates on the west coast and migrates east to meet up with the new music as musicians emigrate north to Chicago and New York audiences. Jazz is truly improvisational and very much American in origin.
Jazz, Rock, Gospel, Blues, Funk, R&B, Disco, Hip Hop, and even House all originated in Black America. Queer spaces in America also were also crucial in the development of House, Disco, and even Hip Hop
While the band Death did evolve into a reggae band and Bad Brains, the undisputed originators of hardcore did have a reggae component, I would have to say that punk rock roots are very much rock 'n roll.
Fun fact, the song "Buffalo Soldier" was directly inspired by The Banana Splits theme song.
Sell the spectrum and let them compete fairly in the marketplace of ideas. Half the country should not be forced to fund broadcasting they do not agree with.
You're mad about a 'split of opinions on new thing' story from nearly 4 years ago?
I don't believe you're serious. If Mr Rogers were broadcasting for the first time now opponents of public media would be deriding it as woke propaganda and worse.
Nobody is forced to fund broadcasting, now that Trump has taken away NPR and PBS funding. That has nothing to do with spectrum: nada, zilch, nichts, rien, ma'yuk...
The free spectrum granted to NPR and PBS represents a huge amount of gov funding. Spectrum is worth quite a lot, it should be auctioned and proceeds used to pay down the national debt.
You should submit Hernando Barragan's story as a top-level post on HN. Many people do not know of this and he certainly deserves all the recognition he can get.
I have a special kind of hatred for people who steal other folks work (even if it is freely given) without any acknowledgement.
It would be just desserts if Barragan teamed up with some high profile lawyers and went after Qualcomm/Arduino like the Winklewoss twins went after Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook.
I keep a Mac IIci that I purchased at a thrift store for $12 to remind me that we haven't progressed that far. It's not fast, but it runs Photoshop, Illustrator, and Vim. Not bad for a 35+ year old machine that will do 80% of what you need. No GPU, but I think that's losing the plot when people can't afford to pay their electricity bills while billion dollar companies continue to scale out the data centers that jack up prices for AI slop nobody wants.
And since we normally see with binocular vision, a stereoscopic view adds another layer of realism you wouldn't normally perceive otherwise. Each eye sees subsurface scattering differently and integrates in your head.
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