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The massive irony is that the rice-engraving artist may well have then stood the chance to get a decent head start in medicine. I've long theorized that copying

The massive irony is that the rice-engraving artist may well have then stood the chance to get a decent head start in medicine. I've long theorized that copying/transcribing information can be a great way to meditate in a way conducive to retaining and learning new data. Depends on their skill level, and how much focus there was on the process of engraving vs temporarily memorizing the next block of info to transcribe.

agumonkey 5y ago
I never went to med school, but in HS I had my beloved modded HP48 that could store loads of text. I didn't manage to wire it to my computer so I resorted to type everything manually. After a whole day of char-by-char input.. I knew everything by heart and didn't need to look it up in the calculator.
- no1lives4ever 5y ago
  Reminds me of my attempts to make cheat sheets that I would use during exams. I would write out a small cheat sheet the night before I never needed to use those cheat sheets as I would always remember whatever I had written on them. After a few cases when I remembered the whole contents of those sheets, I would just use them as last minute revision aid and discard them before getting into the examination hall.
  - agumonkey 5y ago
    Good old the last minute L1 cache warm up.
  - yonaguska 5y ago
    I had some professors in high school that would encourage us to write a cheat sheet, with the caveat that you had to fit everything into a standard note card. Unfortunately, there was a foreign student that was so ahead of everyone, that he simply increased the difficulty of the tests and would curve them, excluding that one student from the curve. It was normal for most of the class to get 60s-70s, while this student would get 90s on his exams. I say unfortunately, but only jokingly.
    - munk-a 5y ago
      One of my high school teachers used an accumulating curve just for this reason - a number of pre-written tests were rotated out pretty randomly and your grade was scaled in relation to everyone who had ever taken the test. It did fail to account for anomalies like the teacher discussing a subject particularly poorly one year but it was pretty fair feeling.
    - maximus-decimus 5y ago
      You would think you would ignore outliers when bell-curving. "Timmy missed the exam because her grand-ma is dead, so I'm giving him a 0 everybody else an extra 10%"
      - rbanffy 5y ago
        > "Timmy missed the exam because her grand-ma is dead, so I'm giving him a 0 everybody else an extra 10%" Years later, police discovered evidence Sally replaced Timmy’s grandma’s insulin bottle contents with glucose in order to pass that test.
      - ummwhat 5y ago
        Even worse, sounds like a perverse incentive to kill Timmy's grandma.
        maximus-decimus 5y ago
        That's how I've always seen bell curving. In Quebec, to get into something like medicine they look at your z-rating, which if how far ahead of the bell curve you are... so at best it selects for people who pick easy classes and at worst for people who actively sabotage other students. To me it always sounded like a great way to end up with psychopaths as doctors.
    - 988747 5y ago
      Some of my high school professors treated cheating differently depending on the type of the cheat sheet used: handwritten ones would get ignored, but printed one would be punished.
  - alasdair_ 5y ago
    I did the same, with the added part of chanting the contents of the sheet in my head when entering the exam room and then re-creating the sheet from short-term (rather than long-term) memory. Fortunately more recent exams that I've taken allowed the use of a single sheet of paper as a cheat sheet.
  - dotnet00 5y ago
    I used to do the same, often used to get weird looks from others, presumably thinking that I was going to cheat during the exam. I used to intentionally dispose of or put away the sheet in a way that it was seen to avoid suspicion.
- GekkePrutser 5y ago
  It also had infrared so you could even use chat apps. It was attenuated for short range precisely for this reason but obviously that protection was useless in the hands of electronics students. I still have my 48GX. Though I never used it at an exam. As computer science student I simply never had any exams that required a calculator. I just had it for personal interests.
  - Joeri 5y ago
    I only ever used that infrared to control the classroom vcr, to the absolute befuddlement of the teacher. Only time I’ve seen someone tap the side of a vcr to fix whatever is broken with it. I used the serial cable to hook it up to my computer and loaded it with minigames, to play during class. You can tell I was not the best of students.
    - db48x 5y ago
      I remember the time I took a 1200 baud modem and a phone cord to school with me so that I could log into the county library system, which provided shell accounts, and check my email during class. My physics teacher didn’t seem very appreciative, but the kids with lesser calculators were impressed.
  - agumonkey 5y ago
    It was just a resistor away from full range ? I keep dreaming of modding a 48 series to snatch an esp mcu in it.
- shinjitsu 5y ago
  In my high school a few years before me there was a legendary cheating ring that would tap out the answers to each other in Morse code which was presented as tapping a pencil eraser on the desk like they were thinking. Unfortunately for them it was long enough ago that one of the teachers knew Morse code and so it didn't last.
  - antifa 5y ago
    Should have used rot13.
  - agumonkey 5y ago
    Oh weird, a HS friend that was failing urged me to follow this idea. I don't know if he heard of it or if he invented it on the spot (necessity mother of invention etc). We only used it once and it raised his grades by a lot obviously.
glfharris 5y ago
How is that any different from the rote memorisation that's been the mainstay of most education systems up to the 21st century? It doesn't really aid understanding, doesn't incorporate active recall, and tends to become inefficient for a large corpus of knowledge.
- ASalazarMX 5y ago
  "Doc, I have this small lump in my back that doesn't hurt, but hurts if I poke it." "Oh, I remember I saw something like that in school, let me Google it!" Medicine, like law, involves a lot of memorization.
  - GekkePrutser 5y ago
    Bad example though. I'm sure MDs actually look a lot of stuff up because they can't remember every fringe thing during their entire career :) Also it's an ever changing field of course.
  - alasdair_ 5y ago
    >"Oh, I remember I saw something like that in school, let me Google it!" This seems like a good thing, not a bad thing. I'd MUCH prefer to have a doctor verify a diagnosis with reference material than to have them rely on their memory.
    - ASalazarMX 5y ago
      It's a double-edged sword. If he googled "lipoma" or similar it would be good, if he googled "painful lump when poked" I would be very wary of him. Double wary if he clicks on a random blog.
  - glfharris 5y ago
    By chance, I am a doctor. I spend a lot of time looking things up, even things I'm 80% sure about. Yes, it's useful to have that knowledge already, and to that I'd say that copying out a textbook is a poor way to learn. It's far better to know the processes behind things or to learn through experience.
datavirtue 5y ago
I have to learn maths by engraving the algorithms in source code.
chx 5y ago
At university one of the exams allowed a single sheet of handwritten paper to be brought in. People got real damn creative in squeezing as much information they could on it, completely oblivious to the fact they actually learned the subject matter while preparing their "cheat sheet".
- CodesInChaos 5y ago
  That does not match my experience. The primary benefit of these papers is that you can look up the difficult to remember stuff during the exam (mostly formulas and precise definitions in my case).
  - menage 5y ago
    But you get to do that in real life too.

agumonkey 5y ago

I never went to med school, but in HS I had my beloved modded HP48 that could store loads of text. I didn't manage to wire it to my computer so I resorted to type everything manually. After a whole day of char-by-char input.. I knew everything by heart and didn't need to look it up in the calculator.

no1lives4ever 5y ago
Reminds me of my attempts to make cheat sheets that I would use during exams. I would write out a small cheat sheet the night before I never needed to use those cheat sheets as I would always remember whatever I had written on them. After a few cases when I remembered the whole contents of those sheets, I would just use them as last minute revision aid and discard them before getting into the examination hall.
- agumonkey 5y ago
  Good old the last minute L1 cache warm up.
- yonaguska 5y ago
  I had some professors in high school that would encourage us to write a cheat sheet, with the caveat that you had to fit everything into a standard note card. Unfortunately, there was a foreign student that was so ahead of everyone, that he simply increased the difficulty of the tests and would curve them, excluding that one student from the curve. It was normal for most of the class to get 60s-70s, while this student would get 90s on his exams. I say unfortunately, but only jokingly.
  - munk-a 5y ago
    One of my high school teachers used an accumulating curve just for this reason - a number of pre-written tests were rotated out pretty randomly and your grade was scaled in relation to everyone who had ever taken the test. It did fail to account for anomalies like the teacher discussing a subject particularly poorly one year but it was pretty fair feeling.
  - maximus-decimus 5y ago
    You would think you would ignore outliers when bell-curving. "Timmy missed the exam because her grand-ma is dead, so I'm giving him a 0 everybody else an extra 10%"
    - rbanffy 5y ago
      > "Timmy missed the exam because her grand-ma is dead, so I'm giving him a 0 everybody else an extra 10%" Years later, police discovered evidence Sally replaced Timmy’s grandma’s insulin bottle contents with glucose in order to pass that test.
    - ummwhat 5y ago
      Even worse, sounds like a perverse incentive to kill Timmy's grandma.
      - maximus-decimus 5y ago
        That's how I've always seen bell curving. In Quebec, to get into something like medicine they look at your z-rating, which if how far ahead of the bell curve you are... so at best it selects for people who pick easy classes and at worst for people who actively sabotage other students. To me it always sounded like a great way to end up with psychopaths as doctors.
  - 988747 5y ago
    Some of my high school professors treated cheating differently depending on the type of the cheat sheet used: handwritten ones would get ignored, but printed one would be punished.
- alasdair_ 5y ago
  I did the same, with the added part of chanting the contents of the sheet in my head when entering the exam room and then re-creating the sheet from short-term (rather than long-term) memory. Fortunately more recent exams that I've taken allowed the use of a single sheet of paper as a cheat sheet.
- dotnet00 5y ago
  I used to do the same, often used to get weird looks from others, presumably thinking that I was going to cheat during the exam. I used to intentionally dispose of or put away the sheet in a way that it was seen to avoid suspicion.
GekkePrutser 5y ago
It also had infrared so you could even use chat apps. It was attenuated for short range precisely for this reason but obviously that protection was useless in the hands of electronics students. I still have my 48GX. Though I never used it at an exam. As computer science student I simply never had any exams that required a calculator. I just had it for personal interests.
- Joeri 5y ago
  I only ever used that infrared to control the classroom vcr, to the absolute befuddlement of the teacher. Only time I’ve seen someone tap the side of a vcr to fix whatever is broken with it. I used the serial cable to hook it up to my computer and loaded it with minigames, to play during class. You can tell I was not the best of students.
  - db48x 5y ago
    I remember the time I took a 1200 baud modem and a phone cord to school with me so that I could log into the county library system, which provided shell accounts, and check my email during class. My physics teacher didn’t seem very appreciative, but the kids with lesser calculators were impressed.
- agumonkey 5y ago
  It was just a resistor away from full range ? I keep dreaming of modding a 48 series to snatch an esp mcu in it.
shinjitsu 5y ago
In my high school a few years before me there was a legendary cheating ring that would tap out the answers to each other in Morse code which was presented as tapping a pencil eraser on the desk like they were thinking. Unfortunately for them it was long enough ago that one of the teachers knew Morse code and so it didn't last.
- antifa 5y ago
  Should have used rot13.
- agumonkey 5y ago
  Oh weird, a HS friend that was failing urged me to follow this idea. I don't know if he heard of it or if he invented it on the spot (necessity mother of invention etc). We only used it once and it raised his grades by a lot obviously.

glfharris 5y ago

How is that any different from the rote memorisation that's been the mainstay of most education systems up to the 21st century? It doesn't really aid understanding, doesn't incorporate active recall, and tends to become inefficient for a large corpus of knowledge.

ASalazarMX 5y ago
"Doc, I have this small lump in my back that doesn't hurt, but hurts if I poke it." "Oh, I remember I saw something like that in school, let me Google it!" Medicine, like law, involves a lot of memorization.
- GekkePrutser 5y ago
  Bad example though. I'm sure MDs actually look a lot of stuff up because they can't remember every fringe thing during their entire career :) Also it's an ever changing field of course.
- alasdair_ 5y ago
  >"Oh, I remember I saw something like that in school, let me Google it!" This seems like a good thing, not a bad thing. I'd MUCH prefer to have a doctor verify a diagnosis with reference material than to have them rely on their memory.
  - ASalazarMX 5y ago
    It's a double-edged sword. If he googled "lipoma" or similar it would be good, if he googled "painful lump when poked" I would be very wary of him. Double wary if he clicks on a random blog.
- glfharris 5y ago
  By chance, I am a doctor. I spend a lot of time looking things up, even things I'm 80% sure about. Yes, it's useful to have that knowledge already, and to that I'd say that copying out a textbook is a poor way to learn. It's far better to know the processes behind things or to learn through experience.

datavirtue 5y ago

I have to learn maths by engraving the algorithms in source code.

chx 5y ago

At university one of the exams allowed a single sheet of handwritten paper to be brought in. People got real damn creative in squeezing as much information they could on it, completely oblivious to the fact they actually learned the subject matter while preparing their "cheat sheet".

CodesInChaos 5y ago
That does not match my experience. The primary benefit of these papers is that you can look up the difficult to remember stuff during the exam (mostly formulas and precise definitions in my case).
- menage 5y ago
  But you get to do that in real life too.