by eric swanson on April 27, 2012
Between 7th and 8th grade, on the recommendation of my mother, I took a summer school class on typing class at Mango Junior High…probably the single most useful class I had and probably the only thing I continue do on a daily basis that I learned back when I was 13 years old. Mr. Shultz would establish the cadence of the strokes—“L-L-L, S-S-S.” How many times did I type “Lee Leeds?” But at the end of the 6 weeks I could type. Onion skin paper was the best and a bottle of White-Out covered most every typo. Back in the day we used a capital “O” for the number zero and a lower-case “L” for the number one. To have both a 0 and an O would be redundant…on a typewriter. The keyboard layout was designed back in the 1870’s to maximize speed by preventing the letter levers from striking at the same time and therefore jamming. The keys were laid out in diagonal columns (they still are) to give each lever its own horizontal space for striking the paper. When you got to the end of a row one had to manually hit the carriage return and slide the roller and paper to the right…allowing you to start a new row. All of the vowels are in the row above the “home row” and although over 3,000 words can be typed by the left hand alone, only around 300 words can be typed with the right hand. Additionally, 57 percent of the keys are touched by the left hand so the key board slightly favors lefties.
In 1936 Dr. August Dvorak, while consulting young student writing (typing, I presume) her Masters thesis on typing errors, designed a faster, more ergonomic keyboard. In typing competitions, trained typists, using the Dvorak layout consistently walked away with the top honors. The fastest typist in history, one Barbara Blackburn, could consistently type at 150 words / minute over long stretches of time and had gusts of 212 words per minute when she really wanted to get down to business. So why didn’t the world’s typists, convinced by the evidence, adopt the more efficient technology? The simplest answer is because by then, using the QWERTY layout was so widespread, the cost efficiency of retraining typists just didn’t make economic sense. Sometimes we say that change comes about when, “the pain of change is less than the pain of staying the same.” In this case, the pain of change was greater than the cost of staying the same.
So today we don’t have a problem with keys jamming. Our keyboards are laid out in diagonal columns even though most users have never even seen a manual typewriter. The Dvorak (or “American”) layout is available as an alternative layout on the MAC operating system and it’s simple to pop the keys off and rearrange them and a few raving fans have done this but the rest of us persist on using QWERTY.
What QWERTYs do I have in my life? Where does the pain of change exceed the pain of staying the same…but I still need to make the change? That’s what I’ll think about today.
by eric swanson on March 10, 2012
TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) is a global set of conferences formed to disseminate "ideas worth spreading." TED’s mission statement begins: “We believe passionately in the power of ideas to change attitudes, lives and ultimately, the world. So we’re building here a clearinghouse that offers free knowledge and inspiration from the world’s most inspired thinkers, and also a community of curious souls to engage with ideas and each other.” TED attracts some of the brightest people on the planet as presenters and as curious participants. A distinctive feature of TED talks is that they have a set time limit. Some talks are 18 minutes (though I’ve seen a few that go over 18 minutes), 12 minutes and 5 minutes. It’s amazing how much focused energized content one can pack into a short amount of time. Those of you who speak know it’s much more difficult to give a great 20 minute talk than it is a great 45 minute message. Expressing the same concept Abraham Lincoln once wrote to a friend, “I would have written you a shorter letter but I didn’t have time.”
I have often enjoyed TED talks so as I was working on my 2012 goals I determined to average one TED video for each of the 365 days of the year. It’s pretty easy to do. In the morning when I go to the gym I simply go to my TED app on my iPhone and watch the featured video of the day. Sometimes with the shorter videos I watch two of them. There are over a thousand TED videos posted so I won’t exhaust my source any time soon. I had to spend some time thinking about it but here are my top ten of my first 75 TED talks
- Eric Whitacre’s Virtual Choir—To see how beauty is created…can’t beat Whitacre! I’ve probably used this video more than any other TED to inspire “what could be”
- Benjamin Zander on music and passion—Check out his enthusiasm and confidence. Could you imagine a pastor beginning a talk by saying, “In the next 20 minutes all of you will want to become followers of Jesus Christ”?
- Jane McGonigal’s Gaming can make a better world—If you have 20 minutes to invest to learn how gamification will be to this decade what social media was to the last, watch this one.
- Steven Johnson’s Where good ideas come from—I’ve used this a few time at Leadership Network to describe the social space we use for new ideas to emerge.
- Kathryn Shulz on being wrong—this one was a sleeper…counterintuitive but I believe she is right…but I could be wrong about her
- Jane Fonda’s Life’s third act—You’ll love the passion and enthusiasm Jane brings to the encore generation. Her talk is (unknowingly) built around, “the outer man is decaying but the inner man is being renewed day by day.” What are we renewing?
- Jenna McCarthy’s What you don’t know about marriage—humorous…but a great commitment to marriage
- Philip Zimbardo’s The Demise of Guys—also humorous but a true commentary of young men today
- A.J. Jacobs’ year of living biblically—You’ve heard about this guy. He writes down all the commands of the Bible and tries to obey them all. He says “giving thanks” continually was transformational for him. He is now a “reverent atheist.”
- Erica Frenkel’s The universal anesthesia machine—I had to cut a lot of good talks before I decided on number 10. I think of this invention was compared to cell phone technology and landlines. Someone just thought differently regarding “what could be”
So there are my top ten. A couple months from now I’ll have watched 60 or more TED videos and try to distill my next group of ten. Obviously I’d encourage you to watch all of these but more importantly to think about the people and message behind these talented people. Personally I’ve always been attracted to people who are passionate about what they do…whether I personally like their subject matter or not. I’m glad that whatever is broken in this world…or for what longs to be created, God has put people on this planet whose heart desire is to do that thing…and do it with passion.
Between 7th and 8th grade, on the recommendation of my mother, I took a summer school class on typing class at Mango Junior High…probably the single most useful class I had and probably the only thing I continue do on a daily basis that I learned back when I was 13 years old. Mr. Shultz would establish the cadence of the strokes—“L-L-L, S-S-S.” How many times did I type “Lee Leeds?” But at the end of the 6 weeks I could type. Onion skin paper was the best and a bottle of White-Out covered most every typo. Back in the day we used a capital “O” for the number zero and a lower-case “L” for the number one. To have both a 0 and an O would be redundant…on a typewriter. The keyboard layout was designed back in the 1870’s to maximize speed by preventing the letter levers from striking at the same time and therefore jamming. The keys were laid out in diagonal columns (they still are) to give each lever its own horizontal space for striking the paper. When you got to the end of a row one had to manually hit the carriage return and slide the roller and paper to the right…allowing you to start a new row. All of the vowels are in the row above the “home row” and although over 3,000 words can be typed by the left hand alone, only around 300 words can be typed with the right hand. Additionally, 57 percent of the keys are touched by the left hand so the key board slightly favors lefties.
