On 03/19/13 10:34, Jacob Keller wrote:
Never one to shrink from philosophizing, I wonder generally why the
codon conventions are the way they are? Is it like the QWERTY
keyboard--basically an historical accident-
QWERTY didn't "just happen." It was designed. Don't kids today know how
to use Wikipedia or Google?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QWERTY
"Still used to this day, the QWERTY layout was devised and created in
the early 1870s by Christopher Latham Sholes
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Latham_Sholes>, a newspaper
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspaper> editor and printer who lived in
Milwaukee <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milwaukee>...
The solution was to place commonly used letter-pairs (like "th" or "st")
so that their typebars were not neighboring, avoiding jams. Contrary to
popular belief, the QWERTY layout was not designed to slow the typist
down,^[5] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QWERTY#cite_note-5> , but rather
to speed up typing by preventing
jams.^<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QWERTY#cite_note-why-4> "
--
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All Things Serve the Beam
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David J. Schuller
modern man in a post-modern world
MacCHESS, Cornell University
schul...@cornell.edu
