For a long time, I have hated the layout on all keyboards I’ve ever laid hands on. It’s not just that I prefer Dvorak to Qwerty; it’s that the slanting of the rows causes an awkward bending of the left wrist, that the space key is far too large when you [...]]]>

Ideal Key Layout

For a long time, I have hated the layout on all keyboards I’ve ever laid hands on. It’s not just that I prefer Dvorak to Qwerty; it’s that the slanting of the rows causes an awkward bending of the left wrist, that the space key is far too large when you only ever hit it in one spot; that of the keys such as Esc, Meta, Hyper, and Ctrl you can find a board which gets some right, but not all. For a long time I’ve pined for a keyboard with a layout like that depicted on the right.

I want a split keyboard, that slants the rows slightly, to favor of the natural angle at which your forearms approach anything directly in front of you. I removed the space, turning it into two individual normal-sized keys under resting position of the thumbs. Inside the thumbs arc we place the modifiers: Meta, Hyper and Ctrl. Although this might make Meta-Ctrl difficult to press (use a thumb for each), it does easily allow any of these three to be combined with Shift.

I am not the only one to have really specific demands as to the layout of my keys. Any internet search reveals many hackers with the same obsessions. Unfortunately, we each want a slightly different layout. Fortunately, we will actually pay a high price (because it’s actually a low price when amortized over a year of with use more than 4 hours every day) and we’ll spend the day to customize it.

There’s been a big advancement in multi-touch surfaces. So, you don’t actually need switches and circuitry to build a keyboard any more. Really, you just need a set of keys that can bang a point onto a multi-touch surface. The surface records an x,y position of the strike, and software takes care of the physical coordinate to key-code mapping. Multi-touch takes care of chording (a necessary feature for shift and other modifier keys).

My last idea of a multi-touch surface keyboard didn’t have any hardware for tactile feedback. But this one is different, we get to keep the tactile feel, because the physical stand-alone keys can be spring-buckling, scissor, or whatever: as long as it can bring down a strong point on the multi-touch surface.

Even if nobody ever picks up on the multi-touch surface keyboard, the above layout can still be mass produced as shown. I think most people will find it easy to adapt to.

Promotion of silver as a form of money.

You and I both share a preference for the GOP candidate Ron Paul, who advocates a return to hard money. His ‘End the Fed’ campaign has successfully [...]]]> I sent the following letter to Mike Maloney, CEO of GoldSilver and WealthCycles. Let’s see if he answers back.

Promotion of silver as a form of money.

You and I both share a preference for the GOP candidate Ron Paul, who advocates a return to hard money. His ‘End the Fed’ campaign has successfully influenced rhetoric surrounding the government’s monetary policies. I believe that you will find, at his rallies, a youthful exuberance for experimentation and an excitement about putting words into action. You will also find his supporters to be the most sympathetic for a return to hard money.

At any political rally, we also find various vendors, usually selling t-shirt and other paraphernalia bearing slogans and promotional imagery. Because Ron Paul’s supporters will be the most sympathetic for a return to hard money: I propose an experiment that just might grab the campaign some newspaper headlines.

Prior to a rally, inform everyone gathered that you will have several booths (clearly marked) which will exchange the government’s paper dollars for silver coinage. Because most vendors ware’s are usually less that ~$30 you should have at the exchange coins smaller than 1oz. Encourage the vendors to accept only the silver coins (and promise that you will exchange them back into government paper if they wish). The goal is to have, for the duration of the rally, a ‘hard money fair’ in which actual silver coins operate as the money (as would tokens/tickets at the fair).

Successfully pulling off this stunt accomplishes several goals: 1. It gets a small portion of the populace familiar with using silver coins as money. They can go on to spread the novelty. 2. Nothing like this has been done at any political rally. The novelty should attract some media attention. 3. It allows the campaign to ‘put its money where its mouth is’, in a way that no other campaign could possibly replicate.

I give you this idea freely, because I am not personally in a position to carry out such a plan, but it seems to me that you have the resources and might be sympathetic to the concept, as radical as it may at first appear.

Your customer,
Eric Hennigan

Can the same be done with education? That is, [...]]]> In the beginning, Apple Computer was a hobby in Job’s garage, advertised through computer hobby magazines. Dedicated hackers were busy building their community, and Apple was one of the hobby friendly architectures. Key here is the small, but critical, start-up costs: advertisement in a targeted venue.

Can the same be done with education? That is, do the people that desire education in programming have some few consumption habits which can host advertisement? Let’s speculate:

Target: High School students.
How to Reach: Probably through the instructor, if the instructor is dedicated enough to follow an education magazine. Likely that most instructors are not so dedicated.

Target: Working class looking to better their career.
How to Reach: TV advertisement. Possibly, some individuals are savvy enough to be using free internet resources. In this case: YouTube channel + WebSite is the best way to be discovered.

Target: College students undeserved by lecture, looking for tutoring.
How To Reach: Advertise in the programming courses on campus; Recommendations through peers and counselors.

It’s likely this last group that will help to build the foundation of stable clientele. Also, going the route of online education means that joining forces with a rising star (Kahn’s Academy) is probably better than going it alone.

One is that the fractional reserve and central banking systems are very much akin to a Ponzi scheme; except that once it reaches scale, it doesn’t necessarily have to collapse. Bankers can rake in [...]]]> I’ve been reading quite a bit about the economics of the financial sector, and have come to two interesting conclusions.

One is that the fractional reserve and central banking systems are very much akin to a Ponzi scheme; except that once it reaches scale, it doesn’t necessarily have to collapse. Bankers can rake in a hefty sum by arbitraging the difference in interest rates. You deposit (lend) money to the bank for which they pay out a ‘generous’ 5%. The bank then lends out 90% (or more) of that deposit to fund car and house purchases, small business loans, etc; on which they collect 15%. Assuming a finite amount of money in the system, some of these loans will go bust, allowing the bank to acquire the collateral (a tangible asset of real value). The fact that much of the money is created via loans, instead of being backed by physical reality, guarantees that some debtors go bankrupt; an evolutionary pressure for debtors to succeed in business.

The second is that this system represents an unstable equilibrium. As long as people manage to find ways of paying back the credit, things go smoothly. But this cannot last, for the compounding interest causes defaults; which eventually become large enough to disrupt the fabric of the system. For the banks are really only as good as the loans they handed out. FDIC and other government measures have encouraged banks to take on more risk (and promise of higher profits). New mathematical wizardry has allowed the banks to sell that risk to other institutions. So that we now have such a complicated web of debt not even ratings agencies can accurately compute the risk. If one bank with enough ties to the system defaults, the credit stress it puts on fellow institutions can cause them to tighten their belts (or go under). The reduction in credit proceeds as a cascade failure throughout the system.

I have a modest proposal that might help to alleviate these problems. First, we need open accountability, so that we can asses the risks in individual banks, and the system as a whole. This can actually help the banks when dealing with each other; no longer do they have to partner on the faithful basis of reputation. They can make these decisions rationally on the basis of financial solvency as it appears in the public record. But how to represent this information in a meaningful form?

I’ve already described the world of finance as a network of credit and debt. Money flows between institutions in the form of loans and payment for services. Clearly it’s possible to draw a balance sheet in this manner. Lifehacker’s article on financial network maps was the only place online that I could find where this idea has been carried out. I’m sure it’s not well practiced among business accountants. If each bank publishes such an account, then we can collect them and form a global financial network of money flow.

The cascade failure in the banking network is the same as that in other systems: species extinction in ecology, wide-scale power outages in the electric grid, etc. Based on the research that I did previously, Preventing Cascade Failure in Networks and Revisiting Cascade, I don’t know if any mechanism of decentralized autonomy with localized response can really solve the problem.

In any case, risk is no longer a simple calculation. Once you take into account the counterparty potential for default, the risk function looks decidedly non-linear. However, an easily calculated metric would be some variant of PageRank, TrustRank or network centrality measure.

Should you teach [...]]]> Since much of programming is about creating and manipulating abstractions, it figures that a large amount of education is going to be about leaning those abstractions. Things like classic data structures, the useful sloppiness of O-notation for algorithm analysis, and Design Patterns. But how should we introduce these things to our students?

Should you teach the abstraction first, because that’s what you wind up working with as a programmer? This risks disengagement and confusion. Without a clear concept of what is being abstracted, it’s hard to understand and pay attention. It’s difficult to see the benefit.

Should you teach the old methodology first? This risks building bad habits into the students. They typically feel resentful when you force them through muck and then reveal the pristine diamond-studded gold-brick road they could have used instead.

It’s important to know not only what is being abstracted, but also how and why.

Joel Spolsky, in his post, The Law of Leaky Abstractions notes (emphasis added):

The law of leaky abstractions means that whenever somebody comes up with a wizzy new … tool that is supposed to make us all ever-so-efficient, you hear a lot of people saying “learn how to do it manually first, then use the wizzy tool to save time.” [...] tools which pretend to abstract out something, like all abstractions, leak, and the only way to deal with the leaks competently is to learn about how the abstractions work and what they are abstracting. So the abstractions save us time working, but they don’t save us time learning.
And all this means that paradoxically, even as we have higher and higher level programming tools with better and better abstractions, becoming a proficient programmer is getting harder and harder.

Clearly, this indicates that the old methodology should be worked through first. And then students should, in a discussion section of some kind, discuss that methodology as a ‘code smell’ working out (with some guidance) a better solution for themselves. By following this path you motivate the understand through a previously worked example (which can be referred to during the discussion) and can clearly identify the leaks as you work toward the abstraction. Any bad coding habits picked up during the initial slog can be eradicated by revisiting the assignment and applying the new abstraction. There shouldn’t be resentment, because it’s framed as a way of applying some cool new pattern just learned.

I wonder… I haven’t seen anybody teach virtual dispatch and dynamic polymorphism from first principles in this manner. Usually that abstraction is granted as a built-in of the language being learned. Would it be useful to hand-hold the students through designing a virtual method table? could you find a motivating enough example? First doing it some crufty way, then identifying the VMT as a pattern, and finish by refactoring the initial assignment.