Interesting Things

I thought I'd share a few random things that I've run across recently.

First, on a recent episode of the Ten Percent Happier podcast they had Emma Seppälä on as a guest to talk about recent findings from happiness research. One of the things she talked about was the amazing effectiveness of a dead simple breathing exercise. All the "exercise" involves is breathing out for twice as long as you breath in. That's it. For the life of me I can't seem to keep a consistent mindfulness practice (though I notice the benefits whenever I do manage it), but this I can do–and have done with good success.

Emma rolled out what was to me a fairly jaw-dropping list of studies and findings describing how effective this tiny exercise is, including the fact that it was one of the only effective treatments for PTSD for certain groups. The gist is that this type of breathing activates your parasympathetic nervous system, lowers your heart rate, and calms you down. In fact, a really interesting anecdote she also mentioned is that, just by making subjects breath in the same way that people breathe for a certain arousal state (angry, scared, calm etc..) they could actually induce that same state of mind in people. How we breathe can apparently be both cause and effect when it comes to our moods.

I recently purchased a fancy ortholinear split mechanical keyboard. I'm fairly sure this was what I've heard people refer to as a "covid purchase". I've been tired and overwhelmed a lot recently and this caught my eye and I couldn't let it go. When the more reasonably-priced one that I was leaning toward sold out I took that as the hand of fate telling me that I needed to get this other one–the Cadillac.

Anyway, it's nice and I like it but maybe the more interesting thing is that, since I was going to need to get used to an ortholinear layout (where the keys are all lined up instead of staggered) I might as well try out one of the alternate keyboard layouts I've heard about. In the end I landed on Colemak as my layout with a small modification that's supposedly really nice for ortholinear keyboards like I had. The layout supposedly has some really nice perks:

Your fingers on QWERTY move 2.2x more than on Colemak. QWERTY has 16x more same hand row jumping than Colemak. There are 35x more words you can type using only the home row on Colemak

It also has advantages like having the most-common letters associated with your strongest fingers, and low instances of the same finger typing subsequent letters. I found all of this very compelling. When it comes down to it, typing is what I do for a living, and it is really strange that we still today use a layout designed to keep mechanical keyboards from jamming up by moving common letters far away from each other (and supposedly also designed so that you can spell "typewriter" with the top row).

I decided to go all in rather than slowly rearrange the keys for a gentle transition, and the first couple of weeks were brutal. I dropped from around 75-80 WPM to something like 12. Very quickly my brain was confused enough that I couldn't even switch back to qwerty in cases where I needed to get something done quickly. But, I'm now back up to something like 45-50 WPM–enough to get work done and almost enough to not have to think about it and correct myself all the time.

One thing that I definitely notice that people warned about is that I'm worthless on a qwerty keyboard now. I can't use my wife's laptop without hunting and pecking–it's a bit awkward.

When I'm in a groove and typing along quickly, I do feel like I notice that my hands aren't moving around nearly as much as they used to. I really have no clue though whether that will eventually translate into faster typing or less RSI or whatever, and I can't say that I would recommend it to anyone. It was fun to learn either way though.

One really unexpected side-benefit of this whole thing is that I received a copy of a typing game called Epistory with my keyboard (yes, like an overly-expensive video card with stickers my keyboard game with a video game). Epistory is an absolute gem. Using just the keyboard you navigate an entire world that, as far as I can tell is in a would-be author's imagination. You're riding around on a giant fox and–I think–uncovering things in the author's life that is causing her to struggle with getting past the writer's block that she's experiencing. As the hero you unlock levels, vanquish foes, and use abilities all by typing words and phrases. It's hard to explain why, but it's just a joy to play.