Oddball, oddball. They keep using that word. What constitutes an 'oddball tone'?
OK, so I have the attention span of a fruit fly. Evidently they play a series of beeps all at the same pitch except for the occasional oddball at a different pitch, to see if or when the hippocampus takes notice. Except the owner of said hippocampus is otherwise unconscious. Fascinating..
“Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Beat me to it tho was gonna mention instead the exchanging of pieces of leaves part (engineering students in my uni just before 2020 were humanities averse/have compartmentalized knowledge and not well-read, 2 professors passionate about HHGG had their references meet a handful of knowing laughs in a hall of hundreds e.g. "bring a towel" and "this invisibility is powered by the Somebody Else's Problem field" and as you can see even you are seeing it on HN lmao)
Who gets to do the customizing though? Suspecting that "auto hide the taskbar" will suddenly become more popular. Oh no! "Your taskbar buttons will be back after these important messages"
Having observed a fair amount of computer based primary school, it seems to me anyway that the biggest problem is that kids just can't focus properly that way. Even if the machine is locked down to prevent open internet access, it's just too easy for them to become distracted by the medium itself. Books, pencils and paper may not be flashy, but isn't that actually desirable, in this context?
Yup. As a kid I could "entertain" (distract is the better word) myself by "drawing shapes" with the cursor, highlighting random things, switching between random cells in Excel, or just like... browsing through the system without any plan or reason.
Procrastination is hell of a drug.
I drew a lot of doodles and did things like that as well, but I think that they're less visually stimulating and simply "slower" so there's still some brain capacity left for learning.
People are saying, oh i used to doodle, blah blah. But doodling in the margins is very HELPFUL for the rest of your brain to focus and memorize what is happening in the lecture.
Even doodling on the margin can be distracting. Or doing little tricks with the pencil. But these don't distract the verbal part of the brain as much perhaps.
I was on the tail end of no-screen schools, and even then I could find anything to distract myself with, daydreaming if necessary. But mostly doodling the gutters.
It's arguably LESS distracting, since you can lock down the available actions on a Chromebook, for example, while I was doodling away in my notebooks as a 90's kid. I don't think you can really make sweeping statements about which is better overall.
Watch out, every little map zoom or slide seems to put another url in your browser history. Not exaggerating here, must have found over 100 of them after just a minute or so of playing with the page
OK, so I have the attention span of a fruit fly. Evidently they play a series of beeps all at the same pitch except for the occasional oddball at a different pitch, to see if or when the hippocampus takes notice. Except the owner of said hippocampus is otherwise unconscious. Fascinating..
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