carriage shift

Though no touch-typist am I and would be tripped up whatever the case, it’s a little bit of an adjustment for me just switching between a QWERTY keyboard at work and the only slightly different German QWERTZ layout at home.
I could not imagine, however, taking to something so radically different—for an industry standard—as what the French are contemplating as a replacement for the maligned AZERTY with the Dvorak-style BÉPO model. I’ve always thought it’s a little ironic that typewriters were given their respective layouts to keep mechanical units from jamming by pacing typists and making them work a little more deliberatively. What do you think? Should keyboards focus on ease and intuition, concede to the times (the chief complaint about the unmodified AZERTY keyboard is hunting for the @-sign) or stick with tradition? I never quite got over the fact that a telephone keypad assigned letter values to the 1 key and started admitting Q and Z.

dress right dress

The US government squandered millions, as Super Punch informs, outfitting the Afghani army.
Standard- isation in uniform and gear is of course important to signal allegiance on the battlefield and it stands to reason that the army would want something distinctive to discourage impostures. While far cheaper alternatives were available, over a quarter of the hundred million dollar expenditure went towards a proprietary camouflage pattern. The branded camo, Spec4ce it’s called (not pictured), is produced by Canadian firm called HyperStealth whose previous contracts include costuming a rogue paramilitary force for an Iron Man movie. Al Qaeda and company will surely lay down their arms and surrender to international anti-piracy laws. While the costs constitute barely a drop in the bucket in the scheme of that unending war and the American army seems pretty obsessed with window-dressing itself, it is even more regrettable that the choice in pattern was committed with no regard for landscape of Afghanistan and rather than camouflage troops, it makes them more visible.

tyto alba

Via Nag on the Lake, we learn of a very clever way to up-cycle wine packaging from the Portuguese vintners of Companhia das Lezírias . Having committed to protecting local barn owls, they are raising awareness with a collection named Tyto Alba (the Latin nomenclature for the bird) whose wooden boxes can be hung from a tree branch after enjoying. Though the accommodations might be too cramped for an owl, these bird houses, nest-boxes are a pretty nifty idea. Most populations of barn owls are not under grave threat in Europe, but the creatures have suffered at superstitious hands for ages, believed to be bad omens due to their rather liminal natures. While owls—or birds in general for that matter, are not famed for their ears, but uniquely among birds barn owls ears (if they were visible) would appear lop-sided and it’s this offsetting that allows them to use their preternatural hearing to triangulate prey in complete darkness.

don’t talk about our son, martha

Our faithful chronicler, Dr Caligari, informs that on this day, among many other events like the trial of Galileo Galilei for the heresy of positing that the Earth travels around the Sun, the concluding moves of the Machtergreifung of 1933 that banned all other political parties in Germany and the 1941 invasion that ended the country’s “Peace and Friendship” treaty with Russia—director Mike Nichol’s released his first film in 1966 with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton starring in the screen-adaptation of Edward Albee’s absurdist work Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? to critical acclaim.