Cursive

Homework machine prototype in action!
devalopr

Story on hackster.io

I wonder if anyone has developed software that can read cursive handwriting.

Via Schneier on Security

Wilma Mankiller

Wilma Mankiller Quarter

What a name. 'Killer' is a common enough nickname, but it generally doesn't mean that someone actually killed a person. Being as Wilma is a Cherokee Indian, I am sure one of her ancestor's came by the name legitimately. Of course, on a long enough time scale, we could all find someone in our ancestry that could have earned the name. Wikipedia has a page about her. Via Dad's Deadpool Blog.

Now I'm looking at this image and I notice the third line of the inscription. What the heck is that? Russian? No, silly, it's Cherokee. From Omniglot:

Cherokee syllabary

The Cherokee syllabary was invented by George Guess/Gist, a.k.a. Chief Sequoyah, of the Cherokee, and was developed between 1809 and 1824. At first Sequoyah experimented with a writing system based on logograms, but found this cumbersome and unsuitable for Cherokee. He later developed a syllabary which was originally cursive and hand-written, but it was too difficult and expensive to produce a printed version, so he devised a new version with symbols based on letters from the Latin alphabet and Western numerals.

Sequoyah's descendants claim that he was the last surviving member of his tribe's scribe clan and the Cherokee syllabary was invented by persons unknown at a much earlier date.

By 1820 thousands of Cherokees had learnt the syllabary, and by 1830, 90% were literate in their own language. Books, religious texts, almanacs and newspapers were all published using the syllabary, which was widely used for over 100 years.

Today the syllabary is still used; efforts are being made to revive both the Cherokee language and the Cherokee syllabary, and Cherokee courses are offered at a number of schools, colleges and universities.

Ask Google about Sequoyah and you open a whole can of worms, like this one.

 

Crossed Up

Part of a cross-written letter from Samuel Randell written in 1854

Reading The Ramada Inn at Shiloh by Allan Gurganus and I come across this:

"I have their letters, cross-written to save paper."

Cross-written? Never heard of it, but I'll bet Google knows, and sure enough it was a real thing. I find it curious that I can actually read it. Well, sort of. I can pick out some words, it's a little difficult, this image is a low rez copy of a 150 year old hand written letter. But just looking at the page the lines of writing going across the page stand out, and the vertical lines almost disappear.

I like cursive. Can't say why. Perhaps because I spent so much time learning it, or because it was so difficult to master. That was the fourth grade I think. Or maybe it's just because it's a nice change of pace from all the printed text I run into every freaking day, most of which is just garbage (the message, not the printed characters). I mean if someone takes the time to write anything out long hand, I am going to take the time to read it because it sure as hell isn't going to be some Search Engine Optimized piece of spamula.

"Cursive" has shown up in this blog a couple of times.

Via Posthip Scott.

Letters

The Coronation of Charlemagne by Friedrich Kaulbach
Illiterate promoter of literacy.

Came across this question on Reddit. The answer was so cogent I thought it worth sharing.

Q: Why do some letters have a completely different character when written in uppercase (A/a, R/r, E/e, etc), whereas others simply have a larger version of themselves (S/s, P/p, W/w, etc)?

A: First of all, let's talk about the words 'uppercase' and 'lowercase'. These words come from the early history of printing, when a person called a typesetter would assemble each page of a book letter by letter. Each letter was a profile on a piece of lead, called a sort. The sorts were kept in boxes called typecases, which had compartments for each letter. There would be a typecase for each font (also called a fount), which was a typeface at a specific size, at a specific weight (bold, medium, etc.), in a specific shape (upright, italic, etc.). A typeface is what we nowadays call a font on computers. There were actually two typecases for each font, and they were kept one on top of the other. The one on top was called the upper case, and contained the 'majuscule' letters; the one on the bottom was called the lower case, and contained the 'minuscule' letters. So the proper names for 'uppercase' and 'lowercase' are 'majuscule' and 'minuscule', respectively.

Now, on to your actual question.

Letters are just simple drawings that have phonetic meanings. (In other words, the symbols represent sounds.) The nature of the symbols is affected by the thing the symbols are written on. For example, one of the earliest writing symbols we have is cuneiform, which was written by making marks with a stylus in a piece of clay. The shape of cuneiform marks is strongly determined by the shape of the stylus.

This is important, because the majuscules and minuscules were originally two forms of the Latin alphabet that were used for writing on different materials, and the same thing applies to the Greek alphabet.

Majuscule letters were originally inscriptional, which means they were carved into stone. The Roman emperor Trajan had his military victories depicted on a carved stone column called Trajan's column; at the base of this column is some writing, in the style of Roman square capitals: this style is common on Roman monuments, but Trajan's column is one of the best known examples. These letters were designed by a scribe painting them on to the stone with a brush; a stonemason would then carve out the painted areas. The motion of the brush created little flairs at the beginning at end of each brush stroke; these flairs are now known as serifs.

However, Romans writing out documents would use Roman cursive. Roman cursive, like all cursive writing forms, is basically a bunch of shortcuts in writing the 'proper' letters.

After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, Roman culture continued to hold considerable sway amongst the barbarians. The same writing styles were preserved, until the Carolingian Renaissance under Charlemagne (Charles the Great) in the Frankish Empire (now France) in the 800s. Charlemagne was a great believer in literacy, and despite never learning to read himself, ordered the creation of a single style of handwriting to be used across his empire, to prevent documents from being misinterpreted. The end result was a pairing of these two writing styles into the majuscule and minuscule letters of a unified alphabet. The minuscule letters, being easier to write quickly, were use normally, but the majuscule letters, with their grand and elegant forms, were used for proper nouns and emphasis. Over the succeeding thousand years, different nations would slowly adapt these letter forms and the relationships between them to their needs: the Italians developed the Humanist minuscule, which later became the italic script; the Germanic peoples developed the blackletter scripts; the Irish developed the insular script. This development continues today, with hundreds of typefaces released each year by type designers.

I don't know why we need hundreds of new typefaces every year. You don't have to go too far down that rat hole before you can't see any difference between supercaligoobilicous and adventualicus. Well, I can't. Those are probably fighting words for people who live in that world.


Cutting letters into stone v-CUT lettering carving letters
Realized while I was working on this that printing and fonts are a recurring topic here.

Cursive

Purple Noon - Identity Theft
When I was at Lafayette Elementary School in West Seattle, they taught penmanship, otherwise know as cursive writing, in the fourth grade. Our teacher, Dorothy, was constantly admonishing us to hold our hand and forearm up and not rest them on the table. This was virtually impossible for me. I did manage to learn to write the letters in cursive and I can write legibly in cursive, mostly, now, but it's not what you would call fluid or elegant. Passable, I suppose.

I never figured out what Dorothy was on about until I saw the movie Plein Soleil (above, aka The Talented Mr. Ripley) as part of a French film class in college. In the movie Tom Ripley practices forging his target's signature by writing it in really big letters on the wall. He is using his whole arm to do this. His hand and wrist are a rigid extension of his forearm. This is what my teacher was trying to tell us. I have tried practicing writing using this technique but it's a hard habit to develop. If I had been trying to write great big letters on the blackboard back in elementary school, I might have had more success, but trying to develop fine motor control of my whole arm was, at that point, beyond me.

There might be a video out there that demonstrates this technique, but I have been unable to find one.

Inspired by Bayou Renaissance Man

Update January 2018 replaced missing video.

Tell Tale Pen

Lernstift Handwriting Recognition Pen

What we have here is a pen that recognizes what you have written and tells you when you have made a spelling error. How would it know?  The only people who still use cursive are old fogies, most of their handwriting is so atrocious that it can take some real effort to decipher it. So maybe they are doing hand printing recognition, which is at least plausible. On the other hand, they are talking about writing on air, that is, just making writing motions in the air with your hand. I can see doing cursive writing on air, but how do you do hand printing in the air? How do you tell when you've lifted the pen off the "paper"? 

Well, that's what they claim it will be able to do, if and when they get around to building one. From the number of buzzwords packed into this piece I'm wondering if they have even made a prototype, or whether this is just vaporware. 

It does have the advantage of doing away with the keyboard, though I am not sure that this is altogether a good thing. I mean, didn't we come up with the keyboard because the pen was so much work? I'm not sure my kids even know how to write in cursive,

I cannot think of a worse application for Linux. I think this is a case of microprocessor buzzword injection phenomena, although they labeled the computer as a "mini". Last time I saw a mini computer it was the size of refrigerator. And why do they need WiFi? Maybe because their pen will not have enough processor power to perform handwriting recognition on it's own.

I suppose that if you could combine this pen with a system that could project icons in your field of view (Google glass can do that, right?) you could have a truly wearable computer. This might be a challenge for the RF engineers (in order to maintain enough bandwidth on enough channels), though they seem to be able to handle a room full of cell phones without any trouble.

Via Posthip Scott.

Syaffolee Goes to Vietnam

Floating Market in Can Tho

.. and she sends back pictures, including this one, which is probably the least picturesque of the lot, but I like it. She is also posting photos of her very clear, hand written journal. I have no trouble reading it. I wonder if my kids can read it. I'm not sure whether they were exposed to cursive in school or not. I wonder what the NSA would do with messages such as that.

This isn't the gun you are looking for.

Ce n'est pas un coup de pistolet, c'est une image d'un pistolet.

I don't recall how I stumbled over this picture, but something about it grabbed me. Maybe it's the elements that make up the style: the hand painted orange background, the detailed but somehow comic-strip-ish drawing of the gun itself, the French caption in (possibly handwritten) cursive. And then there's the caption itself, which threw me for a bit. What do you mean it's not a pistol? Are they making a distinction between an automatic and a revolver (this is a picture of a revolver)? Or maybe a pistolet is a little gun, and this gun is not a little gun, it is a big SERIOUS gun. Actually, the point is, it's not a gun at all, it's only a picture of a gun. Evidently some people have a hard time making that distinction.

Update October 2016 replaced missing picture.

Truths For Mature Humans

I usually read lists once and forget about them, but this one had too many items that hit close to home. From Steve.

1. Nothing sucks more than that moment during an argument when you realize you're wrong.
2. I totally take back all those times I didn't want to nap when I was younger.
3. There is great need for a sarcasm font.
4. How the h*ll are you supposed to fold a fitted sheet?
5. Was learning cursive really necessary?
6. Map Quest really needs to start their directions on # 5. I'm pretty sure I know how to get out of my neighborhood.
7. Obituaries would be a lot more interesting if they told you how the person died.
8. I can't remember the last time I wasn't at least kind of tired.
9. Bad decisions make good stories.
10. You never know when it will strike, but there comes a moment during the day when you know that you just aren't going to do anything productive for the rest of the day.
11. Can we all just agree to ignore whatever comes after Blue Ray? I don't want to have to restart my collection...again.
12. I'm always slightly terrified when I exit out of Word and it asks me if I want to save any changes to my ten-page technical report that I swear I did not make any changes to.
13. I keep some people's phone numbers in my phone just so I know not to answer when they call.
14. I think the freezer deserves a light as well.
15. I disagree with Kay Jewelers. I would bet on any given Friday or Saturday night more kisses begin with Miller Lite than Kay.
16. I wish Google Maps had an "Avoid Ghetto" routing option.
17. I have a hard time deciphering the fine line between boredom and hunger.
18. How many times is it appropriate to say "What?" before you just nod and smile because you still didn't hear or understand a word they said?
19. I love the sense of camaraderie when an entire line of cars team up to prevent a jerk from cutting in at the front. Stay strong, brothers and sisters!
20. Shirts get dirty. Underwear gets dirty. Pants? Pants never get dirty, and you can wear them forever.
21. Sometimes I'll look down at my watch 3 consecutive times and still not know what time it is.
22. Even under ideal conditions people have trouble locating their car keys in a pocket, finding their cell phone, and Pinning the Tail on the Donkey - but I'd bet everyone can find and push the snooze button from 3 feet away, in about 1.7 seconds, eyes closed, first time, every time!

Update February 2017 replaced missing picture.