people still like to actually feel stuff >>

I had a strange but enlightening moment today when one of my students with about 20 pieces of paper (printed out work) said 'this the most work I have done for ages'. the strange thing was he hadn't really done any more work that usual but because he was holding it in his hands he felt that he had worked harder?

I thought that most people under the age of 20-25 would consider things created stored and read, seen or watched didn't have to be 3-dimensional to realise they had achieved something. after all you can't hold a web site or a blog for that matter.

I remember probably 6+ ago now, I was at a seminar run by intel where one of the their development team was expressing his enthusiastic ideas of the future and that they had already developed a P5 to a P10 chip and dual core was the way forward, even mentioned that the reason we couldn't use them then was because good enough software hadn't been written yet?

then he stopped for a moment and said sadly of course we will never be able to reproduce the feeling of standing in the middle of a pond digging in the mud no matter how fast their processors get. the man was right.

wash your hands

for some reason I was quietly looking my computer while checking some stuff on the internet, and planning some teaching stuff. when I saw this photo.

I am not sure if I consciously remembered that I had a tee shirt the same as that when I was a similar age. unusually I followed it to find that it was used in for a promotion to get people to wash their hands which led me on to reading a whole load of stuff about washing hands and how infection is/can be controlled by doing this.
perhaps it is so simple that so many people take it for granted especially in northern europe. but in a short time today I noticed that most people didn't wash their hands as often as I do. even after using the loo, and before and after eating.
so easy to get obsessive as I always used to clean my hands before I could draw anything (I would be worried that I might make the paper dirty) I still find myself washing them before I use a computer. not such a strange thing especially in an educational setting as most computers are used by many different people through each day.
before I get paranoid I will stop and go wash my hands.
leaving you with a few links I followed while simply checking a good picture, (who ever was the picture editor for the campaign certainly caught my attention).
guardian
timesonline
telegraph
foodlink
dept of health