Mother tongue: Polish Joined: Tuesday, February 18, 2003 Location: Poland
(removed)
RE: Right brain vs. left brain thinking
Thank you, Janus. That's exectly the kind of reassurance I needed before going to bed... Wake me up, please, when I start howling because of nightmares.
Mother tongues: English, German Joined: Friday, September 26, 2003 Location: Canada
RE: Right brain vs. left brain thinking
Nanna, I couldn't get through any of the articles. I tried one of the tests. I think they were put together by some kind of analytical person who categorized things artificially ahead of time. Anything disorderly had to be right brained, anything orderly had to be left brained. That's not exactly how it works. It was so stereotypical that one could guess the answers they want. For example, an artist might appear, to the left brained person, to be in disorder he may be anything but - however it's not a kind of order the other would expect. The paint brushes might indeed all be lined up.
Originally written by Jacek K. on October 28, 2009 12:42 AM
Thank you, Janus. That's exectly the kind of reassurance I needed before going to bed... Wake me up, please, when I start howling because of nightmares.
I’m just trying this RTE thingy out now, to see how it misbehaves with my own eyes. Testing with formatting around random quoted text:
Wow. Yeah, that is really atrocious. There does seem to be one silver lining, though: if things are jumping up and down and generally making a mockery of themselves (and more importantly, of you) when you’re trying to type and do your thing, just highlight all the text (Ctrl + A on Windows, Cmd + A on a Mac) and click the little eraser on the far right in the topmost of the three lines of buttons in the menu. That will get rid of all additional formatting and reduce the text to the most basic form of the HTML entity the text is enclosed in. Meaning, for those not too comfy with HTML, that if the text is wrapped in a ‘box’ that makes it “Header, level 1”, then the little eraser will remove all the extra colours and line heights and wings and bang and whathaveyous that the site you copied the text from may have chosen to add, and just display it as the very barest form of a “Heading, level 1”, which usually just means ‘big text’; and similarly with links, tables, lists, etc.: they’ll be reduced to their very barest forms.
Once that’s done, it should at least be possible to work more or less normally with things!
Edit: Now safely back in my comfort zone (the regular HTML mode), I can see that the code it spits out once everything has been ‘deformatted’ isn’t even so bad. Some unnecessary paragraphs and things, but cosmetic issues, nothing more.
[Edited by Janus Jacquet on Tuesday, October 27, 2009 20:01]
Mother tongue: Polish Joined: Tuesday, February 18, 2003 Location: Poland
(removed)
RE: Right brain vs. left brain thinking
Originally written by Janus Jacquet on October 28, 2009 1:56 AM
just highlight all the text (Ctrl + A on Windows, Cmd + A on a Mac) and click the little eraser on the far right in the topmost of the three lines of buttons in the menu. That will get rid of all additional formatting and reduce the text to the most basic form of the HTML entity the text is enclosed in.
Thank you, Janus, for explaining the meaning of that eraser. (That leaves us only 20 other buttons I have no idea what to use for...) But isn't that the function of the middle one of the three posting pads in the first row, the T one? (I don't know what the one to the left of it does BTW.) It guarantees an immediate pasting of anything, in a bare form completely stripped of any graphic features. Exactly what one would never want to do...
Mother tongue: Polish Joined: Monday, February 15, 2010 Location: Poland
RE: Right brain vs. left brain thinking
Piece of cake for all the right-brainers:
Tools for Thinking
[snip] A few months ago, Steven Pinker of Harvard asked a smart question: What scientific concept would improve everybody’s cognitive toolkit?
The good folks at Edge.orgorganized a symposium, and 164 thinkers contributed suggestions. John McWhorter, a linguist at Columbia University, wrote that people should be more aware of path dependence. This refers to the notion that often “something that seems normal or inevitable today began with a choice that made sense at a particular time in the past, but survived despite the eclipse of the justification for that choice.”
For instance, typewriters used to jam if people typed too fast, so the manufacturers designed a keyboard that would slow typists. We no longer have typewriters, but we are stuck with the letter arrangements of the qwerty keyboard.
Path dependence explains many linguistic patterns and mental categories, McWhorter continues. Many people worry about the way e-mail seems to degrade writing skills. But there is nothing about e-mail that forbids people from using the literary style of 19th-century letter writers. In the 1960s, language became less formal, and now anybody who uses the old manner is regarded as an eccentric.
Evgeny Morozov, the author of “The Net Delusion,” nominated the Einstellung Effect, the idea that we often try to solve problems by using solutions that worked in the past instead of looking at each situation on its own terms. This effect is especially powerful in foreign affairs, where each new conflict is viewed through the prism of Vietnam or Munich or the cold war or Iraq.
Daniel Kahneman of Princeton University writes about the Focusing Illusion, which holds that “nothing in life is as important as you think it is while you are thinking about it.” He continues: “Education is an important determinant of income — one of the most important — but it is less important than most people think. If everyone had the same education, the inequality of income would be reduced by less than 10 percent. When you focus on education you neglect the myriad of other factors that determine income. The differences of income among people who have the same education are huge.” ...
Public life would be vastly improved if people relied more on the concept of emergence. Many contributors to the Edge symposium hit on this point.
We often try to understand problems by taking apart and studying their constituent parts. But emergent problems can’t be understood this way. Emergent systems are ones in which many different elements interact. The pattern of interaction then produces a new element that is greater than the sum of the parts, which then exercises a top-down influence on the constituent elements.
Culture is an emergent system. A group of people establishes a pattern of interaction. And once that culture exists, it influences how the individuals in it behave. An economy is an emergent system. So is political polarization, rising health care costs and a bad marriage.
Emergent systems are bottom-up and top-down simultaneously. They have to be studied differently, as wholes and as nested networks of relationships. We still try to address problems like poverty and Islamic extremism by trying to tease out individual causes. We might make more headway if we thought emergently. ...
Forums Disclaimer: The views expressed in the forums are those of the authors and are not necessarily the views of the site owner and/or moderators. If the reader considers a post to cause offence, then she or he should address a complaint to the moderator of the forum concerned. The complaint should be dealt with within 24 hours, but please respect the fact that the moderator may be living in a different time zone. Use of the forums signifies your agreement with the Forum Posting Rules.
Language, Literature, Arts, Religion, Other 
TC Mobile |
Forum Settings |
Log On
Contact Us
Reply
Quote
Edit
Delete