Prediction Method Still Works; Dvorak Keyboard; Etc.

Posted February 8, 2005, 8:00 p.m.

You may remember my July 2004 opinion piece titled Rooting for the Home Team?, which included—among other things—my method for picking Super-Bowl winners.

I am happy to report that this system has worked again. The Eagles were the underdogs, but the Patriots had them beat on both uniforms and mojo. Thus, my system correctly predicted the winner for a fifth straight year (read the column if that all didn’t make any sense).

Not only that, but people thought my joke article was real! Ah, what a good Super-Bowl this was!

In other news, I’m learning the Dvorak keyboard. Most people aren’t aware that the de-facto standard keyboard layout you’re likely using (called QWERTY for the order of its first row) was designed for one purpose: to reduce jamming in manual typewriters.

That’s all well and good if you are still using a manual typewriter, but for most of us—whether we know it or not—it is not ideal.

The Dvorak layout—named for its creator, Dr. August Dvorak—was developed for typing efficiency. I’ll let you get the details from the provided link, but it significantly reduces finger movement and usually increases typing speed (after a learning period, of course). I’ve been using it on-and-off for the last week, and while my Dvorak keyboarding is still slower than my long-practiced QWERTY keyboarding, I am quickly gaining proficiency.

Aside from all that, I’ve been pretty bogged down with normal day-to-day junk. When I’ve had free time, it has mostly gone to wedding planning stuff. After I get a couple of those nagging wedding and life things done (like getting updated addresses for invitations and an oil change), I’ll get back into my big outstanding project: the poetry reorganization!

Scott Bradford is a writer and technologist who has been putting his opinions online since 1995. He believes in three inviolable human rights: life, liberty, and property. He is a Catholic Christian who worships the trinitarian God described in the Nicene Creed. Scott is a husband, nerd, pet lover, and AMC/Jeep enthusiast with a B.S. degree in public administration from George Mason University.

Quotes

There is an implicit but astonishing arrogance in the idea that all the apostles, all the church fathers[,] and all the millions of ordinary Christians were fundamentally mistaken about Christ for nineteen centuries, and only a few theologians, sitting at their desks, in a very different culture, nineteen centuries later, finally understood him.

Peter Kreeft

Almighty God would in no wise permit evil to exist in his works, unless he were so almighty and so good as to produce good even from evil.

Augustine of Hippo

Property must be secured, or liberty cannot exist.

John Adams

When men are uniform in their opinions, it affords evidence that they are sincere. When they are shifting, it gives reason to believe, they do not change from conviction.

Melancton Smith

But he who lives a hundred years, vicious and unrestrained, a life of one day is better if a man is virtuous and reflecting.

Siddhartha Gautama

There has never been a society or a nation without God. But history is cluttered with the wreckage of nations that became indifferent to God, and died.

Whittaker Chambers

I believe it is an established maxim in morals that he who makes an assertion without knowing whether it is true or false, is guilty of falsehood; and the accidental truth of the assertion, does not justify or excuse him.

Abraham Lincoln

But you can be certain, you want-to-be tyrants, that your slaves will take their revenge where they can, even if that means merely being much less than they could be.

Jordan Peterson

Remembering is a noble and necessary act.

Elie Wiesel

I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.

Edgar Allan Poe

There is a thin line between genius and insanity. I have erased that line.

Oscar Levant

Competition does a much more effective job than government at protecting consumers.

Thomas Sowell

Arithmetic is not an opinion.

Unknown

From the accepted doctrine that the United States is a government of delegated powers, it follows that those not expressly granted, or reasonably to be implied from such as are conferred, are reserved to the states, or to the people. To forestall any suggestion to the contrary, the Tenth Amendment was adopted.

Owen Roberts

How monotonously alike all the great tyrants and conquerors have been: how gloriously different are the saints.

C.S. Lewis

My faith in the future rests squarely on the belief that man, if he doesn’t first destroy himself, will find new answers in the universe, new technologies, new disciplines, which will contribute to a vastly different and better world in the twenty-first century.

Barry Goldwater

Although it has been said that every generation grows wiser and wiser, yet we have no reason to think they grow better and better.

Anonymous

The whole history of the world shows that legislation will generally be both unwise and ineffective unless undertaken after calm enquiry and with sober self-restraint.

Teddy Roosevelt

It seems to be a fact of life that human beings cannot continue to do wrong without eventually reaching out for some thin rationalization to clothe the obvious wrong in the beautiful garments of righteousness.

Martin Luther King Jr.

It is better, of course, to know useless things than to know nothing.

Seneca the Younger