"Sovereignty cannot be represented."

"The English people believes itself to be free; it is gravely mistaken; it is free only during the election of Members of Parliament; as soon as the Members are elected, the people is enslaved; it is nothing. In the brief moments of its freedom, the English people makes such a use of that freedom that it deserves to lose it."

- from The Social Contract (1762), Book III, Chapter 15

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1. QWERTY, the basis of what we use now.

The QWERTY keyboard layout was devised and created in the early 1870s by Christopher Sholes. ... Sholes struggled for the next six years to perfect his invention, making many trial-and-error rearrangements of the original machine's alphabetical key arrangement in an effort to reduce the frequency of typebar clashes. Eventually he arrived at a four-row, upper case keyboard approaching the modern QWERTY standard.

...enabling salesmen to impress customers by pecking out the brand name "TYPE WRITER" from one keyboard row.

In the QWERTY layout many more words can be spelled using only the left hand than the right hand. In fact, thousands of English words can be spelled using only the left hand, while only a couple of hundred words can be typed using only the right hand. This is helpful for left-handed people.


Sholes typewriter, 1873

from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qwerty

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2. The Dvorak layout [patented 1936] was designed to address the problems of inefficiency and fatigue which characterized the QWERTY keyboard layout. The QWERTY layout was introduced in the 1860s [or 70s?], being used on the first commercially-successful typewriter, the machine invented by Christopher Sholes. The QWERTY layout was designed so that successive keystrokes would alternate between sides of the keyboard so as to avoid jams.

Dvorak studied letter frequencies and the physiology of people's hands and created a layout to adhere to these principles:


Dvorak Simplified Keyboard

* Letters should be typed by alternating between hands.
* For maximum speed and efficiency, the most common letters and digraphs should be the easiest to type. This means that they should be on the home row, which is where the fingers rest, and under the strongest fingers.
* The least common letters should be on the bottom row, which is the hardest row to reach.
* The right hand should do more of the typing, because most people are right-handed.
* Digraphs should not be typed with adjacent fingers.
* Stroking should generally move from the edges of the board to the middle. An observation of this principle is that, for many people, when tapping fingers on a table, it is easier going from little finger to index than vice versa. This motion on a keyboard is called inboard stroke flow.

The Dvorak layout was intended for the English language. In other European languages, letter frequencies, letter sequences, and digraphs differ from English. Also, many languages have letters that do not occur in English. For non-English use, these differences lessen the supposed advantages of the original Dvorak keyboard. However, the Dvorak principles have been applied to the design of keyboards for these other languages.

(Several alternatives to QWERTY have been developed over the years, claimed by their designers and users to be more efficient, intuitive and ergonomic. Nevertheless, none has seen widespread adoption, due partly to the sheer dominance of available keyboards and training. Studies are inconclusive as to whether they actually offer any real benefits.)

from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dvorak_Simplified_Keyboard and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qwerty

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1. Baseball pitcher, Dock Ellis:
June 12, 1970 no-hitter

No-hitting the San Diego Padres on June 12, 1970 despite being, as he would claim in 1984, under the influence of LSD throughout the course of the game. Ellis had been visiting friends in Los Angeles under the impression he had the day off and was still high when his girlfriend told him he had to pitch a game against the Padres that night. Ellis boarded a shuttle flight to the ballpark and threw a no-hitter despite not being able to feel the ball or clearly see the batter or catcher. Ellis claims catcher Jerry May wore reflective tape on his fingers which helped Ellis to see his target. Ellis walked eight, struck out six, and was aided by excellent fielding plays by second baseman Bill Mazeroski and center fielder Matty Alou. During the game, Ellis is reported to have commented to his teammates on the bench between innings that he was pitching a no-hitter, despite the superstition that discourages mentioning a no-hitter while it is in progress. Because the no-hitter was the first game of a double header, Ellis was forced to keep track of the pitch count for the night game.

As Ellis recounted it:
"I can only remember bits and pieces of the game. I was psyched. I had a feeling of euphoria. I was zeroed in on the (catcher's) glove, but I didn't hit the glove too much. I remember hitting a couple of batters and the bases were loaded two or three times. The ball was small sometimes, the ball was large sometimes, sometimes I saw the catcher, sometimes I didn't. Sometimes I tried to stare the hitter down and throw while I was looking at him. I chewed my gum until it turned to powder. They say I had about three to four fielding chances. I remember diving out of the way of a ball I thought was a line drive. I jumped, but the ball wasn't hit hard and never reached me."

from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dock_Ellis

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