Mmmm... yummy oil

Generally, when I read an article in a magazine, or a newspaper, that's it. I note it for its humor, or its interestingness, or lack thereof, and I never look at it again. But there are those rare few that I love to read over and over - well, at least every six months or so.

"The Oil We Eat" by Richard Manning is one of those. It originally appeared in Harper's magazine in February 2004, and it really resonated with me. I recently read it again, and this time I decided to share it with you:

The secret of great wealth with no obvious source is some forgotten crime, forgotten because it was done neatly. —Balzac

The journalist's rule says: follow the money. This rule, however, is not really axiomatic but derivative, in that money, as even our vice president will tell you, is really a way of tracking energy. We'll follow the energy.

We learn as children that there is no free lunch, that you don't get something from nothing, that what goes up must come down, and so on. The scientific version of these verities is only slightly more complex. As James Prescott Joule discovered in the nineteenth century, there is only so much energy. You can change it from motion to heat, from heat to light, but there will never be more of it and there will never be less of it. The conservation of energy is not an option, it is a fact. This is the first law of thermodynamics.

Special as we humans are, we get no exemptions from the rules. The rest here...

Dvorak Madness

So I have started learning a new language. Ok, no not really, but it feels like it. After reading an article from my Wikihow RSS Feed about how to switch to a Dvorak keyboard layout, I decided to give it a try.

For those of you who aren't aware, the common keyboard layout currently used everywhere in the U.S., the QWERTY layout, was invented in the 1860s by a guy named Christopher Sholes, who also invented the typewriter. Now, Sholes was a smart guy; when he played around with his invention, he noticed that it always jammed when he would type too fast. So, he came up with a layout that would slow down anyone who used it. Hence, QWERTY. Yes, the keyboard that we all use was designed to be as slow as possible.

In the 1930s, when typewriters were much better and hardly ever jammed, a man named August Dvorak thought it would be better if the keyboard was designed to be as fast as possible. Here's what he came up with:


All the vowels are on one side and all the most common consonants are on the other, on the home row, the place where you normally rest your hands most often. So you don't move your hands as much and you alternate hands more, which can make it a lot faster. A and M are the only ones in the same place.

I decided to switch to the new keyboard layout for three reasons:

1. I thought that the idea of a keyboard designed to slow me down was lame.
2. I never really learned to type the proper, Mavis Beacon way, where you don't look at the keyboard. I had a habit of being inefficient by liking the left shift more than the right, so I would reach over and hit, say, the T with my right hand.
3. The fastest typists in the world use Dvorak.

With this new layout, of course you can't look at the keys unless you want to rip them all out and replace them. No thanks. I just had to kind of remember where they were.

I started like 3 weeks ago and I've almost gotten to the same speed as before, but I make a few more mistakes, like messing up the vowels, and sometimes it's so fast that I CApitalize the first two letters of sentences more. It has been kind of like learning a new language, although not that hard, and a lot faster. It is interesting to feel the same feelings of getting comfortable with something that was just recently super weird.

Well anyway, I can definitely type the word "the" a lot faster now. At least there's that.

This article written completely in the Dvorak keyboard layout.