They Claim to Speak English Here

I am an American. Yet, I have no freaking clue what these are supposed to be.

5 Minutes of Juggling-Day VIII

Santa Maria della Salute

So, I had to take some time off from the juggling routine to go do awesome things like visit Venezia* with the lovely spouse and sleep in a room with a view of the Grand Canal and Santa Maria della Salute.

I also learned, via Carl Zimmer, that juggling will make my brain even beefier and more awesome than before.

The Juggled VIII

Drops: 4
Musical Accompaniment:

*Being the 21st Century, it seems like high time we get around to calling people’s cities what they call them. That’s just good manners.

Virtual keyboards and QWERTY alternatives

With virtual keyboards so common, it’s should be easy for alternative, more efficient keyboard layouts to make headway, since, as we’ve all heard, the default QWERTY layout was designed to slow typists down. So why aren’t more devices (or at least the iPhone) giving you options, like the Dvorak layout? From the Hartford Advocate:

If you consider all of the ways that technology has changed, even in the past four or five years, it seems strange that the majority of us continue to use something as outmoded and inefficiently designed as the QWERTY keyboard.

Our things are constantly being tweaked and updated and resold to us as more comfortable, more useful, easier to manage and better organized. But keyboard-comfort improvement is basically limited to gel pads and little flip-out booster legs to prop the thing up. Unless you’re willing to make a drastic change, your keyboard options are slight, limited…

The WSJ story reported on the frustrations of Dvorak users with their iPhones, which didn’t come with a Dvorak keyboard option.

I’d be willing to give Dvorak a try, but I just don’t see this other alternative being useful:

What will more likely become standard-issue might be a virtual version of the Fast Finger Keyboard that came out a few months ago, which a lot of bloggers dismissed as stupid. It has function keys that say “ASAP,” “BTW,” “BRB,” “LOL,” “IMO,” etc

Be Anti-Evo and be miserable

I get unsolicited mail:

ProEvo: Pro Evolution – Guideline for an Age of Joy

Being on a variety of evolution vs creationism mailing lists, I wasn’t initially surprised to receive an apparently evolution-related book in the mail. Continue reading “Be Anti-Evo and be miserable”

Apocalypse 1958: The Tide Went Out

A Nuclear Eco-Catastrophe

Fans of British apocalypse novels a la Wyndham and John Christopher ought to enjoy Chalres Eric Maine’s The Tide Went Out, another story focused the catastrophic disintegration of British society in the context of a world-wide disaster. Journalist Philip Wade writes a speculative story about the potential adverse geological effects of nuclear testing, and inadvertently almost reveals a tightly held state secret. The recent nuclear tests of ‘Operation Nutcracker’ have busted open the earth’s crust, and the oceans are draining away into the earth’s interior. Wade has his story pulled at the last minute by mysterious government officials. But oddities offer clues: frequent earthquakes trouble seismically mild Britain, and the tide steadily decreases. Soon shipping is impossible, and Britain (and the rest of the world) goes into crisis as the world dries out – no clouds, no rain, no crops, etc.. Continue reading “Apocalypse 1958: The Tide Went Out”