Thursday Things: Rewind Edition
11 March 2021. Vol 3 No 10 By Dan McGirt. #83
Welcome to Thursday Things! If you enjoy this edition, please click the heart icon in the heading or at the end of the post to let me know. You can also post a comment by clicking the dialogue bubble next to the heart.
“I prefer print. Paw print.” Photo by Nathan Riley on Unsplash
As an author and a reader, I found this article especially interesting. How Reading Ebooks Changes Our Perception (And Reviews) One main point is that readers report it is harder to recall or retain details of what they are reading when reading an ebook, rather than print. But why?
Readers in these surveys say it’s harder to flip back to sections or lines on a device rather than with a print book. This complaint of lacking tactile aspects appear in other studies too. The “implicit feel of where you are in a book turns out to be more important than we realized.”
Studies show when people try to locate a piece of information, they often do it based on “where in the text it appeared,” “including size, color of binding, and the location of information within a page and in the sequence of pages.” Researchers “suggest a lack of ‘spatiotemporal markers’ in the electronic version as a possible explanation. Physical book readers can often mentally flip back to specific information. Whereas, reading online tends to involve unbroken strings of text and lots of scrolling.”
Among reader complaints are “that a novel was dragging because they simply couldn’t comprehend the length of a novel when viewing it in digital form. They complain when they can’t flip back to find a section and have trouble tracking large casts or timelines.”
I’ve had this experience. I don’t think I’d tackle War and Peace as an ebook. Ebooks do have their advantages — I love being able to instantly look up a word without having to put down the book, and being able to highlight text and make notes without leaving permanent marks in a book. But print is still king as far as I’m concerned.
Which reading experience do you prefer — print, ebook, or different formats for different types of reading? Let me know in the comments below!
(Yes, you can leave comments!)
Obviously, cats domesticated us, not the other way around. Ancient DNA Shows Cats Domesticated Themselves – Why Are We Not Surprised?
The two lineages of cats—the European forest cat (felis silvestris silvestris) and Southwest Asia/North African wildcat (felis silvestris lybica)—are solitary hunters that lack any strong social hierarchy, which would make them poor candidates for domestication by humans, to start with.
It was the cat, itself, who came to prize the territory around the homes of the ancient farmer, or the wharf of the ancient mariner. They were drawn to a plentiful supply of prey in the form of rodents—which brought their species and ours to be inseparably linked.
YARRRRRH! Skeletons discovered in the wreckage of legendary pirate 'Black Sam' Bellamy's ship
The legendary pirate Samuel Bellamy was never found after his ship got wrecked in 1717.
But archeologists discovered his ship, the Whydah, off the coast of Cape Cod, Mass., in 1982. This week, they found the skeletal remains of six pirates — one of which could very well be the man known as "Black Sam."
Is disturbing the bones of a long-dead pirate such a good idea? Pirate ghost? Hello?
Following up last week’s item about the decline of cassette players, let’s take a moment to pay our respects. Lou Ottens, Inventor Of The Cassette Tape, Has Died
Lou Ottens, who put music lovers around the world on a path toward playlists and mixtapes by leading the invention of the first cassette tape, has died at age 94, according to media reports in the Netherlands. Ottens was a talented and influential engineer at Philips, where he also helped develop consumer compact discs.
"Lou wanted music to be portable and accessible," says documentary filmmaker Zack Taylor, who spent days with Ottens for his film Cassette: A Documentary Mixtape.
If you need to know the phases of the moon on particular dates from 1301-1400, have I got a link for you! Phases of the Moon: 1301 to 1400
Thank you for reading Thursday Things. Please click the hearts, comment, and use the share button to send this issue to a friend who might enjoy it. See you next Thursday!