Frank Lloyd Wright’s drawing for a house be built for his son, a house that may soon be demolished
Switching to Dvorak was hard – far harder, in my experience, than switching to a standing desk, or to Linux, or even to Vim. For a few weeks, I spent an hour or two per day doing drills in Master Key. Then I switched to using Dvorak in the morning, until my brain would hurt so bad that I’d switch to QWERTY by around 10am. When I could finally make it until noon using Dvorak, I quit QWERTY altogether, as code switching between the layouts was proving more difficult than Dvorak itself.During the transition, I was a slow typist (30-40 WPM for prose around the time of the final switch, down from 90-100 on QWERTY). This affected my work efficiency. Worse still, the stress of hesitating the slightest bit before each key press was actually making my wrist fatigue worse than it was with QWERTY. But I persisted. After about six weeks using Dvorak full-time, I was up to maybe 60-70 WPM. (I’m since up to at least my pre-Dvorak speeds.) And, most importantly, I finally started to reap the ergonomic benefits of Dvorak. I’m able to type with far less wrist movement than before, with the result that I have much, much more stamina – those 10-12 hour days tire my brain way before they tire my fingers. Totally worth it.
(Side note: A lot of people – people who are not touch-typists to begin with, I guess – put stickers on their keyboards to show the Dvorak layout, or even pop the keys off and rearrange them. I never did this. It forced me to learn the layout much more thoroughly. Plus, it is an order of magnitude more bad ass to type Dvorak on a QWERTY keyboard.)
The old pre-industrial community and culture are gone and cannot be brought back. Nor is it desirable that they should be. They were too unjust, too squalid, and too custom-bound. Virtues which were once nursed unconsciously by the forces of nature must now be recovered and fostered by a deliberate effort of the will and the intelligence. In the future, societies will not grow of themselves. They will be either made consciously or decay. A democracy in which each citizen is as fully conscious and capable of making a rational choice, as in the past has been possible only for the wealthier few, is the only kind of society which in the future is likely to survive for long.In such a society, and in such alone, will it be possible for the poet, without sacrificing any of his subtleties of sensibility or his integrity, to write poetry which is simple, clear, and gay.
For poetry which is at the same time light and adult can only be written in a society which is both integrated and free.
This time of year it’s at its best. I open the bamboo blinds in the morning to let the warming sunshine in, though later in the day I close them because I like the privacy and, more, the filtered light. When we bought a new sofa a few years ago we banished our old beat-up one out here, where it has become my favorite place to read. I also keep a small writing desk wedged in a corner — I’m sitting at it right now, in a cheap molded plastic chair — but reading is, to me, what this space is essentially for. When I lie on the sofa I look north into my back yard, where the branches of a silver maple hang just outside both the northern and eastern windows. The sunporch is at ground level on the front but the yard drops off so that the northeastern corner is about fifteen feet up and therefore right in the midst of the maple’s branching. It’s like reading in a treehouse.
What I’d like to add to Nick’s list is one observation: none of those predictions was completely unreasonable at the time. Heck, I might have made one or two of them myself. Which raises, I think, the key question: why has what some people call “the traditional classroom” — a group of students chosen primarily by age and secondarily by ability, placed in a room with one or two teachers, and relying heavily on printed paper for information and testing — been so resilient? Is it because educators are in general technologically retrograde? Or is there something rather functional about that setup? Or some combination of the two?
the history of Bond posters
Effective defenders of Christianity must sound like ordinary citizens. They must be fluent in the sceptical, irreverent vernacular of mainstream liberal culture. Is this so hard? Yes. For they must also convey the awkward seriousness and strangeness of faith, its otherness. They must also show that belief has changed the way their minds work.
What role will our hands play in the future? Will we still write by hand?