The problems with the English language stem from the way it came into existence. English is more a melting-pot of languages. It is part Anglo, part Saxon, part Roman, part Hunn, etc. etc.
I am grateful that I learned it growing up. I would really hate to have had to learn it after I grew up with a sensible language (just about any other).

Anyone who argues for using Celsius because it is ‘scientific’ should be using Kelvin instead.

He’s captured the essence of the idea of accelerating technology. Amazing, especially for a politician.

Most “Qwerty” techs survive not based solely on their supremacy in a single area, but in the ability to meet a wider subset of needs that may not be at all obvious. Take the example of Tires. Foam filled ones are indeed safer, less prone to blowouts etc, but if you have ever been to a autoshop and watched the methods of changing a tire on a rim, the simplicity of the procedure reveals levels of secondary conditions that foam tires fail to fulfill. If they were as simple and easy to replace they would likely have already replaced the current pneumatic versions.

Before simply dismissing a “Qwerty” technology, it is worth considering the secondary needs it fulfills beyond just it’s obvious uses.

Nanotech will make it much more easy for us to tap that energy in numerous forms. Just think how many times better and more efficient nanotech photovoltaics will be than those awful little flimsies in use now.

It’s true that as our time sense speeds up, we will expect more and more. But (I believe) our accelerating technology will outrace even our most extravagant wants and desires.

Imagine nanotech tires always forming and re-forming as they meet and deal with differing road conditions. Cool, eh?

Telecommuting is an obvious adaptation in the information society in which we now live. Information workers manipulate data. If they can do so away from a centralized workspace, they will begin doing so. Physically commuting to a job arose during the Industrial Revolution when factories needed lots of warm bodies working there, manipulating matter.

“Our future of post-scarcity promises to turn our entire view of “employment” — at least insofar as we have defined it as a prerequisite to earning a living — into a QWERTY.”

Which is one of the points I tried to make during our show on abundance. Why do we (and futurists and SF writers) assume economics will go on as usual as the productivity of our machines accelerates?

I still think this is lazy thinking on the part of a lot of usually forward looking people.

I’ve been going through my old Analogs, collected during the Eighties. They’re embarrassing. Interstellar societies depicted centuries from now with exactly the same political and economic problems we have now.

Writers kept doing this even after Drexler’s Engines of Creation exploded idea grenades all over the science fiction world. I know Drexler had an immediate impact because Editor Stan Schmidt practically screamed (in print) to his readers to GO OUT AND BUY ENGINES OF CREATION.

I guess it took a genius like Kurzweil to point out what to us now is obvious. The QWERTY of linear technological advancement is nonsense. Accelerating technology has ruined more old SF stories for me than the breakup of the Soviet Union did.

Economics since the stone age has developed in order to enable people to deal with scarcities in reasonably effective ways. When scarcities vanish, won’t economics vanish also?

“It seems likely to me that there are a number of QWERTies lurking in our current educational and health care infrastructure.”

QWERTY as a metaphor for path dependency is an excellent way for us to think about concepts we take for granted, that we depend on, to order our thinking about the ways of the world.

I’d love to listen to a show in which our hosts and panelists pop a number of QWERTY balloons, QWERTYs that get in the way of us thinking clearly about accelerating technology and the Singularity.

These contests provided ample opportunity to demonstrate the superiority of alternative keyboard arrangements. That Qwerty survived significant challenges early in the history of typewriting demonstrates that it is at least among the reasonably fit, even if not the fittest that can be imagined.

Yes, QWERTY keys were placed in part to solve a problem of key-clash that no longer exists. The argument that this placement is actually a significant slowdown for average typists is not one for which I can find good support, and it does seem to have been selected for pretty good competitive reasons at the time. Now, it may still be one of the QWERTies you want to replace if there’s something sufficiently better out there, but I wouldn’t say that’s been established already. Similarly with other candidate QWERTies; I’m personally happy with Centigrade, having grown up in Latin America, and this very morning I was telling a contractor that he didn’t need to return the Canadian (made in China, I believe) geothermal-system thermostats that work in Centigrade but not when switched over to Fahrenheit. C is okay…but F is okay too, if you’re not doing physics, and I don’t think that learning F is one of the many major problems of our educational system. I suspect that the switching costs you’re concerned with are usually fairly small, and that (as with VHS/Beta, where I personally had both for a while) the claim that “X is just overwhelmingly better, and doesn’t get used because of lock-in” is one that needs careful justification each time. Sometimes that justification will work; I don’t know how often.
Well, maybe someday I’ll be able to get past editing in vi, which my fingers learned when I was a new asst prof in 1980. But I dunno. These newfangled systems like emacs…do I really have the time?

The articles you link to raise questions about whether Dvorak is faster, but I don’t see any refutation of the fact that Sholes deliberately spaced the keys farther apart as a means of avoiding the sticking problem.

Both authors seem to be primarily concerned with defending the free market from a charge of sticking the public with sub-optimal technology. My view is that superior solutions win out in the long term; however, technological superiority isn’t the only criterion people look at when making a purchasing decision. Having worked in the software business for more than 20 years, I can tell you that — irrespective of what economists might argue — market dominance is at best an occasional indicator of technological elegance or capability.

Considering how much we’ve learned about ergonomics over the past few decades, it seems highly unlikely to me that QWERTY, Dvorak, or any keyboard layout from the 19th or first half of the 20th century is truly the optimal design.