One-Handed Keyboard

We Made a One-Handed Keyboard
HTX Studio

I have been thinking about a One-Handed Keyboard off and on since college, some 45 years ago. I wrote up some thoughts I had on the subject and posted them here back in 2007. That's all I've done, I never got any farther than that. I doubt I could adapt to one now.

Typewriter

Qwerkywriter S

Michigan Mike muses:

I wrote a lot on manual typewriters. If this jammed and made too much noise it might be okay.

I remember hearing typing on a manual once and it really annoyed me. I certainly did enough myself, in apartments. I wonder if my neighbors hated me.

You could actually feel it in your feet. You had to hit each key solidly or risk  backing up and hitting it again. I wonder if good ribbons were wool?

The sound a mechanical typewriter makes when being heavily used could be very annoying or reassuring, depending on context.


Speed Typing Test (Halda Star Typewriter)
I found the above video right off, but then I found this video, which mentions ASMR, and when I look that up, I found this one:


ASMR 10 Triggers to Help You Sleep

I use a Dell plastic keyboard. I tried being particular about my keyboard once, but then I got pulled out of my cocoon and had to use some other random keyboard and it was so disturbing that I forswore all custom keyboard input schemes.

Don't Blink

Awesome Christopher Walken Impressions
Natalie Hubert
Last week, or maybe the week before, we're watching the Olympics on TV, in particular we're watching men's figure skating. Some of these guys are what Arnold would call girly-men, and that's fine, we want to see what they can do on skates. Adam Rippon finishes his performance and he's walking away and he blinks his eyes and the way he does it, I think it was the speed, it was slower than normal maybe. Whatever. In any case, I see that and my brain immediately registers him as a woman. I mean, there was no thinking involved. I saw that and my brain immediately concluded 'woman'.

I've asked several people about this and none of them have recognized this phenomena.

Anyway, I'm looking for any kind of supporting evidence and I'm not finding any, but I found the above, which kind of gives you an idea of what makes Christopher Walken so unique. Blinking has got nothing to do with it.

Update November 2025 replace missing video with one with the same title.

The Power of Mockery

An interesting story in the NY Times about some grass-roots techniques. Via Burro Hall.

Politics, Allies & Loyalty

I kind of think I have figured out how the world works, but putting it into words is another matter. Here is one more attempt.

There are two levels of politics in the USA. One level is the public show put on for the population as a whole. The other is the wheeling and dealing done behind closed doors by the powers that be. Half of the wheeling and dealing is done to finance the public show. All the stuff that is written on the web and published in newspapers and magazines is basically irrelevant. It gives those of us who are concerned with the issues something to do, which keeps us from having enough time to go out and make real trouble. TV is pretty much the only thing that counts.

Some people like to throw their weight around. People like that are unpleasant to be around so if you have options, you will avoid them. People who can't avoid them might look for someone with a bigger throw weight and ally themselves to him/her for protection. A quick indicator of throw weight is physical height and mass, which explains why leaders are often taller. Other indicators are intelligence and the size and substance of their personal network, but those are harder to evaluate.

Allies are your best protection against trouble. This is why people became social: to defend themselves against trouble from other groups. Protection is still people's number one concern. Food, water, housing, even money are of no concern when there are maniacs chasing you with pitchforks/machetes/rocks/missiles/what have you.

This is why fear mongering can be such an effective method of gaining followers: you and me are the same, those other guys are different and they are out to ruin and/or kill us. Join me and we will defeat those agents of darkness and live happily ever after!

Fairy tales. Loyalty is ephemeral, a fantasy if you will. Family members are generally loyal to each other, but not always, and loyalty outside of the family is hard to come by. Groups who have endured harsh situations together, like combat troops, apparently develop some loyalty to their comrades. Of course, harsh circumstances can also engender enmity, which is pretty much the opposite of loyalty.

There is little to no real loyalty in business. People will continue to do business with each other as long as it is to their advantage, either short term or long term, but business is based on money, and if there is no money, there will be no loyalty. Some people are ruthless and will feign loyalty if they can gain even a slight advantage. I'm not talking about them. They are scum and will end up floating face down in the bay eventually.

I am talking about people with the best of intentions, who would never give up on their fellows. Except what does the employer do when there is no money to pay the employee? What does the employee do? How about the supplier who isn't getting paid? Occasionally there are cases where people will continue in a business relationship even though they are not getting paid (most famous of these are the secretaries of the private detectives in the trashy murder mysteries). But if the business is not viable, all those relationships that were built solely on that business will eventually crumble.

That is all I have for now.

Hoarding

Tonight's episode of CSI dealt with hoarding. Laurence Fishburne quoted Erich Fromm, which is a name I hadn't heard since high school, on the topic of life. Seems there are two kinds of life: having and living, and in our culture having sometimes gets out of control. There are over 2 billion square feet of public storage space in US. That's like 7 square feet per person, which isn't much, except nobody anybody knows is using it. So it must be a small minority of hoarders who have overflowed their homes and have had to expand. I am not using any public storage (yet), but my basement is getting filled up with stuff. Most of it is useful, but it never gets used.

Frequency

Watching one of those YouTube videos of a record playing on a turntable, I realized that if your eye can pick up 30 frames per second, and your ears can hear down to 20 Hz, you should be able to listen to something vibrating at 20 Hz and see it move. Is the eye really faster than the ear? At what point does a tone start to sound like individual thumps?

9-11 Airfare Bargains

My wife tells me that airfare for travel on September 11th is really cheap. Evidently even years after the event, people are still afraid to travel by air on that day. Book your flight now.

Red versus Blue

It just occurred to me that although the Republicans are generally accusing the Democrats of being bleeding hearts, they are ones wrapping themselves in patriotic rhetoric about love for your country, and whenever the Democrats want to spend some money on a social program it's a foolish waste, but whenever the GOP wants another trillion for defense it's all about fighting terrorism.

It's all about love and money. Love is the emotional side of the argument, and money is hard nosed, logical side. People, being people, are affected by both. Seems to me the Republicans are making a big emotional stink to cover up their theft of the missing two trillion dollars.

Logically, I know that the Democrats are just as bad. Any time you get people in positions of power there are going to be abuses. I'm just pissed that things were going so well under Clinton, and then good ol' GW got in and things went straight to heck. Those fool rednecks drove this country so far into the ground we may never get out.

But hey, "we" voted for them, so that's what we get.

Alcohol Civilization

I've got a new theory as to why alcohol is our preferred drug: it makes people gregarious. Most of your other drugs like marijuana and opiates send people off to dreamland. They lose interest in people around them. Alcohol allows people to be in close confines with people they ordinarily couldn't stand without starting a fight. Mostly. No wonder every movie with an office scene has a guy pulling a bottle out of his desk drawer. At 4% I suspect alcoholism is our number one medical problem, but without alcohol our civilization, such as it is, could very well collapse.

3%

I found this on Sipsey Street Irregulars. As near as I can tell, the numbers are all conjecture, but they do sound reasonable.

During the American Revolution, the active forces in the field against the King's tyranny never amounted to more than 3% of the colonists. They were in turn actively supported by perhaps 10% of the population. In addition to these revolutionaries were perhaps another 20% who favored their cause but did little or nothing to support it. Another one-third of the population sided with the King (by the end of the war there were actually more Americans fighting FOR the King than there were in the field against him) and the final third took no side, blew with the wind and took what came.

You can read the whole thing here.

Bedrock of Civilization

I have come up with yet another excuse for a public works project to put all the unemployed to work: Civilization depends on it!

Look at the Ancient Egyptians. Their civilization lasted for thousands of years. And look at the Roman Empire. It lasted for thousands of years, too, or at least hundreds. What were these two civilizations known for, and what did they leave behind? Giant things made out of rock. The Egyptians put thousands of people to work for hundreds of years building the pyramids. The Romans put thousands of people to work building roads, theaters and aqueducts out of stone.

So in order to preserve our civilization what we obviously need to do is put millions of people to work making things out of rock. Roads and bridges would be a good place to start. Buildings are another possibility. If that isn't enough, we could work on building a wall along the border, either the Canadian or Mexican border. It doesn't really matter. The point is to put people to work. If we still haven't put everyone to work, we could make our own set of pyramids. That would certainly take up the slack.

Wouldn't have to pay them much. A dollar a day, enough food to do the required work, free medical care. Sundays off to attend an all day religious service that would be especially designed to keep you happy carrying rocks the rest of the week.

No pension, no retirement. Work until you die. Retired people have too much time on their hands. They just sit around and think of ways to make trouble. Full employment from the time you are able to lift a rock until you can't carry one anymore.

Boys & Girls

My daughter cut up a watermelon for a fruit salad this afternoon. I have never seen anyone cut up a watermelon by cutting the rind off first and then cutting up the fruit. The way I've always done it, and the only way I've ever seen it done is to slice up the watermelon, rind and all, and then separate the rind from the fruit. Where do these kids get these weird ideas?

Update February 2017 replaced missing picture.

The New Jim Crow

I just read a column by Leonard Pitts Jr. in our local paper, which prompted me to start writing this. At first I thought it was a column by William Raspberry, but then Wikipedia points out that William retired in 2005. So I got them confused. They are both black, and their columns sometimes show up on the opinion page.

Anyway, today's column (Google found it here) is about how the justice system is effectively persecuting blacks. The civil war was, what? 150 years ago. Since then there have been several landmark bits of legislation that have attempted to make blacks equal with whites. I suppose the last one was the Civil Rights Act of 1964. I am beginning to wonder if we are fighting a loosing battle against human nature.

I like to think that I am not a racist, but then I live in an all white suburb in all white city in an all white state. I would have to go pretty far out of my way to discriminate against a black person. Now there are some things that are associated with blacks that I don't like (that whole gangsta / hip-hop thing mostly), but there are also things that are associated with whites that I don't like (opera, symphonies, art museums). Mostly I don't discriminate based on color. I mostly like people I know, and don't like people I don't know, never mind what color they are.

America is founded on certain principles, and they have served us very well. Well, most of us anyway. Some blacks have been able to succeed in our society, but apparently most haven't. Every time you turn around some one has uncovered another concerted effort to screw the black man. So I am beginning to wonder if we aren't trying to push big a rock up a hill, and the rock just doesn't want to go. Maybe it would be better if we were separated.

Then again, part of human nature is to wage war on our neighbors. The biggest sport among the South Seas Islanders was attacking neighboring tribes. Same with American Indians. Western Europeans did the same thing, but they did it on a bigger scale, and we made up some speeches full of fine words to justify it. We weren't simply slaughtering our neighbors, we were showing them the light, or the error of their ways, or more likely, eliminating heretical vermin from the earth.

So maybe we just don't have enough outlets for violence, especially for the police, who are trained in all sorts of violent techniques, but then are told never to use them unless circumstances warrant, and then they are supposed to pull these techniques out and dispense violence at a moments notice. Maybe that's why we still have laws against drugs. It provides an excuse to wage war on your neighbors. But we have a rule that lets people be excused from playing. If you aren't dealing drugs, we aren't going to bother you, but if you are, you are fair game. And if you hang with people who deal drugs, well, hey, we thought he was a dealer, that's why we shot him.

National Brotherhood Week

There is nothing new under the sun.

Tip of the ball cap to Roberta X.

Alien Concept for the Day

At lunch today we are talking about traffic jams and Dennis suggests that we just haven't found the right music. With the right music, he says, traffic jams do not bother you at all. I cannot imagine such a thing, possibly because the only music I like is hard driving rock and roll. Soothing ballads and other such "relaxing" music just bores me to tears. If I want to relax, I want quiet. I am either on or off. No such speed as slow.


Sammy Hagar - I Can't Drive 55
Update November 2015. Replaced missing video. UMG complained so YouTube took it down, but here we've got the same video again. The mechanic advising Sammy at the beginning is Claudio Zampolli, a star in his own right.

Preference Cascades

This is an excerpt from a longer article written in 2005 by Glenn Harlan Reynolds, aka Instapundit. Mostly I don't care too much for what he says, he says too much about too much stuff, but then I suppose that's what a modern day pundit does. But this is pretty good.

Three years ago, I looked at the phenomenon of "preference cascades" -- in which people who have been obliged to conceal their true beliefs by social pressure or sheer force suddenly discover that a lot of other people feel the same way -- and wrote:

"This illustrates, in a mild way, the reason why totalitarian regimes collapse so suddenly. (Click here for a more complex analysis of this and related issues). Such regimes have little legitimacy, but they spend a lot of effort making sure that citizens don't realize the extent to which their fellow-citizens dislike the regime. If the secret police and the censors are doing their job, 99% of the populace can hate the regime and be ready to revolt against it - but no revolt will occur because no one realizes that everyone else feels the same way.

"This works until something breaks the spell, and the discontented realize that their feelings are widely shared, at which point the collapse of the regime may seem very sudden to outside observers - or even to the citizens themselves. Claims after the fact that many people who seemed like loyal apparatchiks really loathed the regime are often self-serving, of course. But they're also often true: Even if one loathes the regime, few people have the force of will to stage one-man revolutions, and when preferences are sufficiently falsified, each dissident may feel that he or she is the only one, or at least part of a minority too small to make any difference.

"One interesting question is whether a lot of the hardline Arab states are like this. Places like Iraq, Syria, or Saudi Arabia spend a lot of time telling their citizens that everyone feels a particular way, and punishing those who dare to differ, which has the effect of encouraging people to falsify their preferences. But who knows? Given the right trigger, those brittle authoritarian regimes might collapse overnight, with most of the population swearing - with all apparent sincerity - that it had never supported them, or their anti-Western policies, at all.

"Perhaps we should think about how to make it so."

Who Do You Trust?

My wife and I went to see The Receptionist this afternoon. It was a play put on in the old Armory building. I didn't really know what to expect. I had heard nothing about it. For about the first half of the play I'm thinking it is just a light hearted comedy about the wide variety of problems a receptionist has to deal with. And then it takes a left turn into the vicious world of torture. At first I am not even sure that is what they are talking about, maybe the playwright is just playing with words and it's going to come out that they are talking about something totally innocuous. I mean they are talking about it right out in the open in the office as if it just some ordinary daily occurrence. Turns out they are talking about torture and they are talking about it like it is a daily occurrence because it is, that is their office's stock in trade. A grim little tale.

There were a couple of good lines. Things really turn the corner when the head of the office is himself taken to the "Central Office" for interrogation. At this point the professional woman asks "who can you trust when you do not know who to trust?", or something along those lines. A bit later the receptionist says "If they took him in for interrogation, he must have done something wrong." It is not too much later before she herself is taken in for interrogation. After all, she must know something. She's been working in this office for two years. How could she not know anything? They will find out.

I'm looking through the program afterwards and there is virtually nothing in there that talks about the play itself. There was one page that talked about office politics. I was aghast at the kind of petty, pointless drivel that was being promoted as advice. I dunno, maybe that's what most people are really like: petty and pointless.

Discipline

I just finished rereading Stranger In A Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein. I first read it a long time ago, probably when I was a teenager. It was an interesting book. This is the new uncut version. I thought some of the passages were a little overlong. On the plus side, every few pages there was either a word I hadn't run across before, a bit of history I didn't know, or a line or two I thought worth quoting. I ended up with a page of page numbers. Someday I'll go through them and write up all that info.

After mulling it over for a while, I decided that one of the main points of the book is discipline.

With three kids in college I also have been wondering about the value of a college education. Someone said that college thought you to think. I am thinking now that the point of college is discipline.

Matter of fact, I suspect the whole point of all education is to teach people self-discipline. The accumulation of knowledge is just a side effect. In order to acquire knowledge in things that have no apparent relevance to your life, you need a certain amount of self-discipline to force yourself to learn these things. For some people, learning things is easy. They will not learn much about self-discipline. Others manage to learn the material by dint of hard work. They learn the material, and they get some experience with self-discipline. Others can't be bothered and learn neither the material nor any discipline.

I suspect that discipline is at the foundation of the British Empire. Seems I read that the old (1700's) British technique of having a double line of men facing the enemy was something that took extensive training to be able to deliver in time of actual combat. Enemy armies of the 3rd world were more often than not referred to as an "undisciplined rabble".

At one time I was working on a theory as to why some people are rich are some people aren't. I came to the conclusion that the rich were better able to control their emotions. I no longer believe that that is the sole essential difference, but it is a contributing factor.

Wasn't the whole point of the training of Shaolin monks in Kung Fu to teach self-discipline?

Last week one of my friends at Thursday lunch made the point that the economic success of any area corresponded directly with the education level achieved by women in that area.

Anyway, I just want to reiterate my idea that the only kind of foreign aid the West should be offering is education. And it should be a long term commitment of 50 years or more.

Passive Agressive

Took the family to see Mel Gibson in Edge of Darkness yesterday evening. Ross wanted to see Mel Gibson getting in people's faces, and he did that. There were any number of holes in the plot, but over all it was very satisfying. The bad guys were appropriately smarmy, and they got theirs. The clean up man almost stole the show, especially when he wraps the whole thing up. That's not giving away anything, is it?

It was a remake of an old BBC movie that starred Joe Don Baker. There was an excellent scene in the original where Joe has brought a couple of bars of plutonium in a briefcase to a conference on nuclear something-er-other. In the briefcase the bars are packed in foam that keeps them about a foot apart. At the meeting he takes the briefcase up to the dias, opens it, takes out the two bars of plutonium and brings them together in his hands. The bars get excited and start shooting out light and presumably lethal radiation. Joe doesn't care, he's already received a fatal dose, and these people at the conference, well, they are responsible for the whole mess he's been trying to sort out. Needless to say, the people in the conference hall get very excited and start heading for the doors.

So back when I was looking at Jack's failed smoke detector (more here:

• Velocity,
• Velocity, Detour,
• Velocity, Detour, Part 2,
• Velocity, Part 2 and
  
• Velocity, Part 3)

I did a little reading about plutonium. Seems there are several isotopes. Some are fairly inert and can be handled safely with nothing more than a pair of gloves. Others are highly radioactive and just being in the same room can be very unhealthy. Funny thing is, the safe-to-handle stuff is what gets used in bombs and reactors, while the dangerous forms are not good for much of anything. Just the opposite of what you might think.

To get radioactive material to do anything useful, you need to have a large enough concentration that the radiation it gives off finds enough targets to start a chain reaction. The amount of the material controls how fast the reaction procedes. Smaller amounts in nuclear reactors give you useful heat, larger amounts give you runaway reactions: i.e. a bomb.

Question I have is would Joe Don Baker's stunt have produced any visual effects? Or would everyone in the room have just fallen over dead?

And then there is radiation poisoning. There is radiation wherever you go, you are constantly exposed to it. Normally it is at a very low level and it doesn't appear to have any detrimental effect on a person. Man made radioactive material can be much more dangerous. We can generate enough radiation to kill a person in short order. The amount of radiation you receive determines how sick you will get.

If you get some radioactive material in your body, that's a different issue. Most radioactive materials are heavy metals, and heavy metals are poisonous all by themselves. Just look at mercury and lead. Don't look at gold or silver. They're special. If you happen to swallow some radioactive material, that's not too bad. What's bad is what happens afterward. If it just passes through you, not too much harm done, but if it gets absorbed by your body, then it's in there permanently, and it will continue to give off damaging radiation. That way even a small amount can become fatal.

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My wife told me about an elementary school kid getting suspended for bringing a two inch long G.I. Joe gun to school.

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Then we have a case here at PSU in Portland where a tenured economics professor has been suspended for accusing one of his students of being a spy for the FBI. As usual, it's a little hard to tell from the story in the paper just what's going on, but it kind of smells like politically correct anti-gun pacifist meets imprudent gun evangelist.

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What these stories all have in common is small people getting fed up with the way things are going, no one is listening to them, so by God they are going to do something about it.

I hear about all the crap going on in the world all the time. The corruption, the stupidity, the arrogance of those in power and I think: geez , what is wrong with people? Well, the simple answer is that they're corrupt, stupid and arrogant. Not to mention greedy. In other words, they are people. And it doesn't have to be everyone. One bad apple can upset the whole applecart, to mix my metaphors. Who shall I blame? Do you blame the guilty parties for being scumbags? Or do you blame the "good guys" for not putting a stop to it? It's just the way it is. I like to think that in general (taking the whole world in consideration), things are getting better. America seems to be suffering right now, but I'm pretty sure we can still put a chicken in every pot on Sunday.

But consider this: it costs a million dollars to keep a US soldier in the field for a year. One hundred thousand soldiers will cost one hundred billion dollars. Do this for ten years and you've spent a trillion dollars. Now most of that money ends up as wages paid to people who provide the goods and services used to support the troops in the field, so that money goes back into the economy. But those goods and services? They are gone, consumed, ate up. Is Iraq ever going to be a stable, contributing member of the world community? Who knows, but by the way we conduct our foreign policy, I doubt it.

I read a story in The New Yorker last week about Haiti that ended with saying it was going to take billions of dollars of nation building to get Haiti to the point where they could take care of themselves. That is absolutely the wrong approach. The West has poured billions in Africa, and Africa is a bigger mess than ever. I suppose there is some improvement, but for every country that manages to make some headway towards being civilized, another one seems to slip back into anarchy.

The only kind of foreign aid we should be giving to other countries is education, and we shouldn't expect any results for 50 or 100 years.