Experiment 2: Dvorak

My second experiment! I thought this day would never come! And the timing is quite nice, too. The polyphasic sleep experiment has become sufficiently routine such that it can no longer really be called an experiment. Incidentally, it was Caradoc (the friend who, as you may recall, chickened out of Uberman) prodded me into this one -- not that it took much prodding; I was looking to try something new anyhow. (On the sleep front, he is considering Everyman for next quarter. Finally!) Anyhow...

What is Dvorak?
The more appropriate question is, "Who was Dvorak?" August Dvorak (distantly related to the composer of the same name) created the eponymous Dvorak Simplified Keyboard, which is optimized for typing speed and ergonomics. The QWERTY keyboard, the current industry standard (and I write "current" in almost-futile hope that one day, Dvorak will gain widespread usage), was originally deliberately designed to slow typists down. Recall that the alphanumeric keyboard was originally designed for the typewriter, as the computer had not yet been invented. Typewriters, except for the electric models developed later, operated by means of mechanical hammers, sort of like the ones in pianos, with characters engraved on the striking surface of the typebar. These small moving parts jammed and tangled if too many of them were moving at once; hence, the keyboard was arranged to maximize the amount of time it took for a typist to move from one key to the next. Given that the advent of computers rendered such a system obsolete, Dvorak came up with an optimized keyboard. Unfortunately, because the QWERTY keyboard was already entrenched in the consciousness of the typing population, Dvorak never caught on.

Enough of the impromptu history lesson; I've probably bored you half to sleep. The experiment itself is pretty self-explanatory: I will try to retrain myself from QWERTY to Dvorak. I hope to pick up touch-typing along the way. (I never did learn how to type properly in the first place.) I'll track my progress using an online typing test; I think I like this one. I'm at about 57 wpm (words per minute) on QWERTY now. On Dvorak, it's liable to be 2 wpm.

Note: I typed this post entirely in Dvorak! (It took forever, but it happened.)