🎓 Doc Freemo 🇳🇱 @freemo@qoto.org

Wow, thanks to all of you Mohammad has raised nearly $900 in just the first day of fundraising! I just texted with him and he asked me to thank everyone for their #mutualaid support for his family. Individual family relief in #Palestine is every bit as important as donating to #UNRWA (which you absolutely should as well), as #Gaza has particularly collectivist culture and the more relief any one family has, the more they are able to help each other. Especially projects like this to rebuild their destroyed homes.

Thank you everyone so much for supporting Mohammad's family, I hope that by the end of the year we can reach his goal.

@freemo @lowqualityfacts If they should do.it by social pressure (which does exist), but don't, that is why I say they have some of the blame. I agree that government and society bear more of it.

Canadian friends: if you haven't yet, please sign petition e-4769, which asks our government to use open social networking protocols to connect with citizens.

https://www.ourcommons.ca/petitions/en/Petition/Details?Petition=e-4769

Israel’s Horrific Massacre at Gaza’s Largest Hospital https://jacobin.com/2024/04/al-shifa-hospital-siege-gaza-massacre

After the raid, the hospital resembled a slaughterhouse. Hundreds of bodies lay scattered in the dirt, mutilated beyond recognition. Bodies with heads and limbs severed were discovered both inside the hospital and in the surrounding area. Surgeons had been tied up and executed. Some bodies were buried under the rubble, with body parts protruding from the ground; others had been crushed and flattened by bulldozers, their hands and legs tied behind their backs.
___

Kirby meanwhile continues to say there is no evidence of Israeli war crimes.

So what? did the soldiers tie them up after killing them in a firefight?

@freemo I got infected a few months ago. It’s already terminal.

@freemo @SpaceLifeForm

Why woukd the order of strokes matter? Doesnt it look the same regardless of what order you execute the strokes in?

I can only answer as far as Japanese is concerned, but I expect Chinese has a similar reason for stroke order. In Japanese, it is considered to be a fundamental part of writing and uniquely defines each character. The main reason for the order though is fluidity. When written correctly, each stroke leaves you (mostly) where you need to be for the next; it aids in writing for both speed and legibility. A hand-written character done in the wrong order is more than not, easily identifiable as "incorrect". This difference is much easier to see when written with a brush or flat marker, but pen, pencil, chalk, rocks, burnt sticks ...they all leave a heavy and light side for each stroke made. The order in which strokes are made becomes even more important when writing similarly to the (not cursive) example @skyblond put above. Writing anything in this style would be impossible to read if strokes were not made in the correct order.

@freemo @SpaceLifeForm

As I found here: https://www.numbeo.com/property-investment/rankings_by_country.jsp

The house price to income ratio in China is almost 30, while in US is less than 5. So...

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

@freemo @SpaceLifeForm

If you rewind back to 200 years ago, in Qing Dynasty, the government actually enforced a style of essay called eight-legged essay. It defined the structure of a essay and is very limited. It's a standardized essay at that time. Writing anything other than that will be considered as non-mainstream and will be rejected by officals.

@freemo @SpaceLifeForm

Actually we use pen and pencil daily. Now we only use brushes when doing calligraphy or we need write something big.

The left side is how you should write and print. And you should write like that if you want others to easily read what you write. And in school it's required to be written in the correct order of storkes, which I think some are reasonable, some are not.

This passage is write for japanese but most of the idea works for Chinese too.
https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/kanji-stroke-order/

And now we're using simplified Chinese, which means much less strokes. In Taiwan and HongKong they still use traditional Chinese, which looks nicer, but with a lof ot strokes.

Some traditional Chinese looks like (copied from wikipedia):
漢字簡化運動可追溯至新文化運動中關於文字及語文教言和國家發展的討論。

The same text but in simplified Chinese:
汉字简化运动可追溯至新文化运动中关于文字及语文教言和国家发展的讨论。

@freemo

Just a simple demo to show how I normally write. The standard one is shown on the left side, they are 7, 5 and 8 strokes. And the left side is how I write those, the first one is 2 strokes because there is a separate dot there. The rest are 1 stroke.

A fun fact: In school teacher will not allow you to write like this.I was being criticized a lot when I was in school.

And because school don't allow and of course won't teach you how to write like this, almost everyone will develop their own way to write. So when talking about handwriting, unless it's intentionally write for others, it's hard to read other people's handwriting.

And I think I won't say it's cursive. The real cursive is much beautiful than this :)

@SpaceLifeForm

@m

I think you mean PinYin. For example you can represent a word like 我们 (means `we`) as wo3men2, but 我门 (means `my door`) is also pronounced as wo3men2. That will be tricky if you write something like wo3men2huai4le, it can be either 我们坏了 (means we are badass), or 我门坏了 (meaning my door is broken). And that's why early pinyin input method is a nightmare to use, because it often suggest unrelated candidate. Now with smarter software, the input method is more likely to suggest the later option instead of saying you're badass.

@freemo

@freemo Not really, for madarin and most dialect we use the character as is. We do use acronym for curse words. But Cantonese might be different, they use some latin letter to represent pronunciation (I guess?), but I don't know Cantonese so I might be wrong.

@freemo And for professional shorthand usage, PinYin is not the only option, there are special keyboards which designed to use custom key combinations to input character and/or word. But most of the time a qwert keyboard is working just fine. I think that special keyboard is not that need as we now have more advanced method to infer which word might fit your need based on your input context. I still remember when I was young, the default Chinese input method from WindowsXP is a nightmare to use. So we have to install dedicated software to replace it. Nowadays I'm super fine with the default input method from Windows10. And for linux, I think Rime is not that bad.

@freemo If I'm not misunderstanding, there is some sort of short hand in Chinese, but mostly for professional usage, like clerk, but nowadays we almost exclusively use computer and use PinYin to type Chinese charactors, I can achive about 90 to 100 wpm (or cpm, c for character).

Here is a picture I found on the internet, it shows the markers for some character.

I think the doctor still use that kind of shorthands? I can never read those.