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Measurements and Mediums


disturbman

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4 hours ago, chadbag said:

 

I am pretty sure that anyone that can handle math enough to use metric measurements can handle US customary (or Imperial if you are in UK) measurements.  

 

Really, no. It's the fractions. Sadly it's beyond the skillset of the average bod here to deal with them. I wouldn't even think of allowing any lumber or store guy to do math with fractions without checking it myself. I've seen too many goof-ups. I've learned to always do the math myself, no matter how simple it seems, and just give the simplest instructions. At least with metric, they can use a pocket calculator or even their iPhone. These days asking for higher mental functions than that will lead to disappointment. 

 

 

4 hours ago, chadbag said:

The Americans lacking math skills can't make change for a dollar without a machine spelling it out.  And a dollar is "metric" (100 based).  (Like the story I recently saw of someone having a drive through order that came to something like $15.25.  They gave the person $16.25 to get an even dollar back in change and the person couldn't understand and said they paid too much, and when the guy paying explained the person got the manager who said "we don't do that"  LOL)

 

This reminds me of just how seldom I use cash. Almost never, really. 😱

 

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2 hours ago, gavino200 said:

 

Really, no. It's the fractions. Sadly it's beyond the skillset of the average bod here to deal with them.

 


Yeah, it always surprises me how many people just can't cope with fractions when they ask me the time. 

Tell them it's a fifth past seven, and they look all perplexed and befuddled like they never took third grade math!
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Edited by Cat
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Yeah, I was shocked a few weeks ago to learn that a young woman at work (who is otherwise smart and functional) couldn't read an "analog clock"! 😱

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Cursive is also no taught much anymore and I’ve run into a few younger people that could not read it…

 

jeff

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12 hours ago, cteno4 said:

Cursive is also no taught much anymore and I’ve run into a few younger people that could not read it…


Heck, even last century, no one could read my cursive!
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Sorry not a joke, I was stunned to learn that myself. Cursive was a big savior to me in school as I did upper case fine but just could not do lower case, it was impossible to keep things correct. I saw the strip of the cursive letters below the others and asked the teacher what that was and she said cursive, that’s next year. I asked if I could try it and she gave me the book and it was much much easier than lower case as it all flowed together. Never really learned my lower case writing. Later discovered I was dyslexic and all this made sense.

 

jeff

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Surprising. Cursive is more or less the only thing we were though in school in France in the late 80s. It's quicker to write in cursive than in all unjointed letters.

Edited by disturbman
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I learned cursive in school. I never really liked how it looked and found pure cursive awkard. It never felt right for me. Quite late, I retooled and switched to block letters, which I like better. What happened over time is that I've developed a combination of both styles, keeping what I liked from both. This is faster and more aesthetic for me. 

 

I actually don't care about cursive or whether it dies out. Writing styles are in continual evolution. 19th and 18th century cursive styles are quite a bit different than our 20th century cursive and for many people are quite hard to read. The reason for the change is, of course, the evolution of pen technology. It's extremely difficult to write block letters with a quill or a fountain pen. You end up with blotches everywhere. That's the actual reason for cursive in the first place. 

 

But...with voice recognition getting better and better, don't be shocked if you live to see the day when kids tell you they don't do "manual writing". 😂

Edited by gavino200
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I have a number of writer friends who have compared stuff they wrote by hand, typed and dictated and they say they notice differences in their presentation and style in each. On writer friend will only do his art writing (ie stuff not for work) with a pencil and spiral notebook as he thinks it’s central to how his voice comes out in his writing and hates how he sounds in his writing when he types or even uses a pen. My design mentor loves using the computer for many steps, but still finds pencil on paper or sharpie on tissue to be fundamental in getting raw stuff out of his head, using the computer there just doesn’t work for him even with nice electronic pens and pads, something about the resistance on the surface and flow of ink or lead is hardwired in his brain.

 

All thru school and college I was a big fountain pen user as I could take notes in cursive very fast and easy. My cursive actually looks much nicer than with a ball point. But had to end in grad school as one spilled beaker and your lab notebook would be blank! Took a while to get use to ball point pen only—no erasing in lab notes allowed!

 

jeff

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26 minutes ago, cteno4 said:

I have a number of writer friends who have compared stuff they wrote by hand, typed and dictated and they say they notice differences in their presentation and style in each. On writer friend will only do his art writing (ie stuff not for work) with a pencil and spiral notebook as he thinks it’s central to how his voice comes out in his writing and hates how he sounds in his writing when he types or even uses a pen. My design mentor loves using the computer for many steps, but still finds pencil on paper or sharpie on tissue to be fundamental in getting raw stuff out of his head, using the computer there just doesn’t work for him even with nice electronic pens and pads, something about the resistance on the surface and flow of ink or lead is hardwired in his brain.

 

Yes, it's very interesting how the medium affects the message. I've never been much of a manual writer. My thoughts run much quicker than my writing speed. And I was always terrible at taking notes. I'm really not an auditory learner at all. I also make a ridiculous number of typos. For me typing - on a computer, not a typewriter - is a much better way to write. With a word processer, I can build a piece of writing, just like I were building something physical, and I can adjust it until I get it right. Occasionally I can actually do a halfway decent job. 

 

Apart from practicalities like this, there's probably an element of emotional nostalgia involved. It'll be interesting to see how the younger generation will feel about electronic pens and applications, having grown up with them. My bet is that they'll have the same warm fuzzy feeling about the digital versions, that many of us have for paper and ink. 

 

 

26 minutes ago, cteno4 said:

 

All thru school and college I was a big fountain pen user as I could take notes in cursive very fast and easy. My cursive actually looks much nicer than with a ball point. But had to end in grad school as one spilled beaker and your lab notebook would be blank! Took a while to get use to ball point pen only—no erasing in lab notes allowed!

 

jeff

 

I agree. I never really liked either the feel or the look of old style ball point pens. And I hated the smell of the awful gooey ink they used. I've gone through phases of using fountain pens. The script looks better than ballpoint for sure, and it can feel much better with the right pen. But they're hassle. Lately, I've discovered "gel pens", which I love. They're just as practical as a ball point, and they beat both ball point and fountain, in look and feel. I buy them by the box. I'm not sure if they're still technically "ball point pens" but they're considerably different that those awful things we had when I was a kid. 

Edited by gavino200
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A couple of friends teach art and graphic art courses at college level. They are now having fine arts majors in the computer graphics courses saying they cannot manually draw. These students can’t do a simple hand drawn comp of a layout, they insist they can only do it on the computer. These are fine art majors. The instructors insists they do the had drawn comps for the class or fail. Many learn to do rough sketches and my friends say they see it improve their overall work, but some just don’t really try and my friends say these all have very mediocre results all around. I think it boils down to the right tool for the right task that makes our brains work the best at tasks. This is even more crucial when you being creative.

 

a recent personal experience was writing a letter to a terminally ill friend who I knew may be (and was) my last connection with them. I struggled for hours typing out a letter. I got one together and edited and edited but it just didn’t feel right. I picked up pen and paper and relatively shortly I had a note that said what was in my heart. There were a few scratched out words and sentences and in 15 minutes I rewrote it with better penmanship and a few little improvements along the way. It was very true the medium really did allow the message to properly flow out of me.

 

in my multimedia education career it’s always been my first rule with clients we figure out what you want to say then that tells us how we are going to say it. Works beautifully and secret to home runs and smooth running production. But starting a decade or so slowly clients started becoming much more concerned about the way they were going to say things (the medium) than what they wanted to say. It’s gotten steadily worse to where now it’s almost exclusively being told go design it and then they will figure out what content to put into it. I’ve been called in by other’s with project on fire and I start to ask questions and as soon as I discover content design was put at the end I say goodbye, sorry little I can (or want) to do about this, at that point it’s open warfare between everyone trying o cram square pegs into round holes… I get RFPs now that have like 2 sentences on what an exhibit will present, but a page of must have bells and whistles. McLuhan had it right the medium is now the message.

 

jeff

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Wow, so much bizarreness. I've been thinking about this an I'm full of questions. How on earth does someone get into art school without being able to draw? As far as I remember getting into art school was a super difficult process. You had to build a "portfolio" full of all your best works. It would be judged quite thoroughly before someone would even be offered an interview. How are people getting  in now? Are we talking about design courses in an Art school? Or computer design course I'm really puzzled. 

 

I loved art when I was a kid. Unfortunately my high school couldn't afford an art teacher or art materials. I went to a super crap Christian Brothers school. If anyone has see the movie "Sing Street", the school in that is like a carbon copy of mine. Anyway, a bunch of students interested in art got together and organized to have an art teacher come in once a week for us. We payed him directly. Well it worked for about a year and a half. Then he just ran off with our money and disappeared. That was the end of my art endeavors. Lol.

 

With the exhibitions you're talking about, I don't really get how you can design those, form first - content second. Really, how would that even happen? They must have had some idea what they wanted to exhibit? How would these guys actually go about the process? 

 

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1 hour ago, gavino200 said:

How on earth does someone get into art school without being able to draw? As far as I remember getting into art school was a super difficult process. You had to build a "portfolio" full of all your best works. It would be judged quite thoroughly before someone would even be offered an interview. How are people getting  in now? Are we talking about design courses in an Art school?


I would say it depends on the art school and the course you intend to follow. You don't need to be able to draw to be an artist. There are plenty of other mediums that are not based on drawings; installation, performance, sound, video, conceptual art. Though the ability to sketch/draw can help visualizing and showing an idea.

Regarding writing, I find it strange to learn "block" writing. I guess society is mimicking its increased computerization. I also developed my own cursive later on, with a few block letters and inverted the loop of my F.

 

Edited by disturbman
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39 minutes ago, disturbman said:


I would say it depends on the art school and the course you intend to follow. You don't need to be able to draw to be an artist. There are plenty of other mediums that are NOT based on drawings; installation, performance, sound, video, conceptual. Though the ability to sketch/draw can help.

 

That makes sense. I would have loved to go to art school. I self-selected out of it as I couldn't draw or paint like a renaissance genius. Lol

 

 

39 minutes ago, disturbman said:

Regarding writing, I find it strange to learn "block" writing. I guess society is mimicking its increased computerization. I also developed my own cursive later on, with a few block letters and inverted the loop of my F.

 

Well, I was having legibility issues. Quite often I couldn't even read my own writing if a decent amount of time had elapsed. 

Edited by disturbman
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Interesting about cursive:  when my son was in school they had stopped teaching it and I asked why and they said it wasn't part of the curriculum they were using any longer. My daughter is 5 years younger and she goes (mostly) to the same schools as my son and she did learn cursive.  I guess it got put back in the curriculum.

 

Cursive is faster to write (for me) and I don't understand why they would stop teaching it.

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