Tuesday 3 July 2007

Hands

Mastery of a skill is always a plus. especially ones that involve working with your hands, its really great to see your works in front of you, self expression takes many forms, being unique, i guess that was the beginning of arts.

well, if you practice a skill and you watch your hands over the time, you will see that you hands take different shape depending on the skill you have developed and for me at least, a craftsman equates to an intellectual because each has something unique.. sometimes i wonder why labor men are so much underpaid, though they have remarkable skills..

I have a friend who is a painter, and when i used to see him sketching, i used to enjoy watching how he draws the lines, moves his wrist, holds the brush, another one was a pizza boy who used to make the dough, i enjoyed his sense in cutting it and shaping it to exact weight portions based on experience, its like your hands can work together with your memory and senses to refine a calibrated mode with practice. its amazing.

The joy you get when working with your hands is worth it, playing an instrument or playing with clay, play dough, chef like skills such as chopping something so fast, have a sense for textures,, painting the walls, cross stitching, making cards, planting with mud all over your hands,, carpentry or even playing with yoyos..

These are different and stimulating kinds of exercise and its more joyful when you have company.


9 comments:

Maher said...

nice post..
The yoyo guy is amazing, ana n7awalet!

Tala said...

lol Maher

Devil's Mind said...

Computers can do much of the handwork... And -personally- I don't see the point of paying someone to do something a computer (or machine) can do!!

Certain craft's jobs are highly paying... Furniture for example can be very expensive, especially a well finished product. Painted masterpieces are also very expensive... So highly paying handcreafts are basically limited to talented people.

Tala said...

Hey Zaid,

sure computers and automated solutions give precise design match and perfect finishing, but don't you think these systems make people dependant and helpless once deprived of it, before, resources were limited but the efficiency of one being was higher, nowadays, you have everything but when it comes to your skills, its became limited as well, think of the 70s engineers, they didnt have calculators, they used to have slide rulers to do their computations (complex computing), people used to put more energy into doing what the do and they had to know it.. but now, you dont have to, but i beliebe its something worthy being lost, we have more users now rather than scientists and researchers and this is one reason. skill.

for example, don't you miss recieving a letter from people abroad ,, the feeling of holding a written paper you didnt write.. how often do you write except for your school notebook, isn't handwriting a skill? do you see where i am going?

old days craftsmen were way better than the ones today. this is a loss in my opinion that we dont value, but if you get to be a skillful person with brains, thats definitely something.

Devil's Mind said...

Quite the opposite, computers help us stop bothering with the "donkey work" and focus on problems that really matter. So an architecture engineer for example, can use AutoCAD to make designs, focusing on the designs themselves instead of waisting his time on pointless paper work.

Sure I don't miss holding letters by hand, emails are superior to regular mail especially in terms of speed of delivery. When you have important things to say, and the email reaches within a minute you'll appreciate the difference. If you really want to feel the paper, print the email.

Another advantage to electronic writing is that you don't have to struggle with bad handwriting.

"we have more users now rather than scientists and researchers and this is one reason. skill." - You are mistaken, the technological advancements in the past 50 years, is many times more than the technological advancements in the 1000 years before them.

Its like science now is on steroids...

Tala said...

software make engineering work much easier, but sometimes i feel like professors try to communicate their past experience when they were students and how it was more practical when they wanted to perceive theory. i mean in the sense of "how you base your understanding for concepts" and the common saying that when you solve something using your hands it sticks to your memory regardless of the time it consumes since you are learning.

i think what counts is having proper foundation of principals no more, because there is no way to master all disciplines in 5 years. thats why its important in an undergrad's case to solve everything from scratch. this way you can count on having a skill in addition to proper thinking.

he technological advancements in the past 50 years, is many times more than the technological advancements in the 1000 years before them

yeah, i agree to this, but i think it grows, saturates, convolutes and so forth.

what i wanted to stress on is think if you were deserted with no technological aid, would you survive? another thing is, i think we are overloading our heads virtually and forgetting about the potential of human - mind body system. and there is creativity to this as well.

Who-sane! said...

DAMN! this guy is like the Bruce Lee of yoyos!

Devil's Mind said...

"yeah, i agree to this, but i think it grows, saturates, convolutes and so forth." - If science was like the sea, ignorance is like the ocean.

Always, what is left to know outweighs what you already know. It won't "saturate"!!

"what i wanted to stress on is think if you were deserted with no technological aid, would you survive?" - Yes I would survive, and Humanity would recreate technology just where it left!! As long as we have humans with great minds, things will keep moving forward not backward!!

Tala said...

who-sane: watch out, its a lethal weapon =D

Zaid: ok, as you wish my friend, but a technology is made for a purpose, and when the purpose of the design is pushed to extreme and no longer serves the upgrade due to limits and constraints, one thinks outside the box and a whole new approach becomes valid. this is what i mean with saturation. when the upgrade is served by a whole different alternative structure.

but knowledge never saturates, agreed.