The pleasures of Bellow and the unexpected moment in Herzog
One of the pleasures of reading and rereading Bellow comes from the unexpected moments that ceaseless arise. I’ve read most of Bellow’s novels two or three times, but this bit regarding Herzog’s mind stands out: “It was too full of his grant projects to think anything clearly.” The contradiction of a full mind, which we usually consider orderly, brilliant, professorial, and the failure to think “clearly,” which is normally a problem of the undereducated or the thoughtless, seems perfectly right for someone who is being put back together by falling apart (or vice-versa; with Bellow, you never know). Here’s the larger context for that passage:
But it would never happen to her daughter, not if she could help it. And Madeleine was just as determined that it should not. And this was where Moses came in, on the bench of Verdi Square. His face was shaven, his shirt was clean, his nails clean, his legs, somewhat heavy in the thighs, were crossed, and he listened to Tennie very thoughtfully—for a man whose mind had stopped working. It was too full of his grant projects to think anything clearly.
So who is Moses, the man whose mind isn’t working clearly but who is also presented as a good and thoughtful bourgeois provider, at least here, with his cleanliness and full/empty mind? That I don’t have a good answer, two or three or however many times through, reminds me of Bellow’s subtlety, his habit of slipping in that idea that’s endlessly forgotten and rediscovered, and which makes him unexpected even when I superficially know what’s going to happen.
Moses Herzog and Bellow also know what’s going to happen, of course, which is why images of death are so pervasive in Herzog and many of Bellow’s other novels. The question is how we deal with that fact and how it animates our social and intellectual lives. The (partial) answer to that question is the complete works of Saul Bellow; I say “partial” because I suspect the larger point is that there is no answer, only more questions. No wonder so many people exist in such a neurotic world.
Product Review: Das Keyboard Model “S” Professional
The main question regarding the Das Keyboard Professional Model “S” should not be whether it’s a very nice keyboard: it is. The keys are precise and smooth, and the amount of force necessary to generate a letter is far more appropriate than the standard keyboards shipped with most computers. Rather, the main question should be: is the Das Keyboard substantively better than the Unicomp Customizer and Space Saver, both of which use the time-tested IBM Model M design and manufacturing equipment? The answer is probably “no,” especially when one considers their relative cost: as of this writing, the Unicomp keyboards are $69 and made in the United States, while Das Keyboards are $129 and made in Taiwan.*
First impressions
The slim keyboard and its housing:
As shown, the Das Keyboard is black and unadorned by anything save a “daskeyboard” logo in the upper right. The keys themselves are matte black with white letters etched in by laser, while the borders are glossy and probably prone to fingerprints and smudging over time. The attractive minimalist design makes the keyboard look like part of a set when placed next an iMac and Aeron, as though it were designed to complement them.
The chief drawback aesthetically and practically is the split USB cord:
Not surprisingly, a picture like this doesn’t appear on the Das Keyboard website. It’s reminiscent of the Matias Tactile Pro 2, and not in a good way.
But the Das Keyboard does have two USB ports on the side, which is a useful feature the Customizer lacks. To me it doesn’t make much of a difference: I taped a four-port, powered USB hub to the bottom of my desk, and that’s where I plug in peripherals, my printer, and an iPhone cord. The hub cost $10, like the one at the link, although I bought mine elsewhere.
The keys
Each stroke brings a satisfying but muted clack, and I like typing on the Das Keyboard. Its keys don’t travel quite as far as the Customizer or Space Saver’s; it’s also easier to bottom out because one doesn’t have the curious resistance that a buckling spring provides, as described here:
The most widely produced buckling-spring keyswitch keyboard is the IBM model M keyboard. When pressing an individual key, the operator is physically applying increasing force (approximately 60-70 grams of force) against a coiled spring. The spring provides slight resistance, so that you can rest your fingers on the keyboard and not cause an accidental or inadvertent key press. Once the key travels a particular distance (approx. 2.5 – 3.5mm), the spring reaches the “catastrophic buckling” point and produces an audible click at the same exact instance that the computer records the keystroke.
With the Das Keyboard, you can still rest your fingers on the keys, but when typing you won’t have the catastrophic buckling that prevents bottoming out. Consequently, the Das Keyboard has a slightly harsher feel than the Customizer or Space Saver. It seems to take approximately the same amount of force to generate a keystroke, but that’s based solely on feel rather than on testing. There might be an objective difference between the two, but if so, it’s not great.
The key switches themselves appear to Cherry MX Blues, which are explained in greater detail at the link and in this Hot Hardware essay. You can see them in the Das Keyboard here:
These switches are louder, though not enormously so, than the Cherry MX “Brown” switches found in the Kinesis Advantage Ergonomic Keyboard, which I reviewed at the link, or the Majestouch Tenkeyless Keyboard. You could use the Kinesis Advantage or Majestouch Tenkeyless keyboard in a dorm or office without offending those in the same room, but the Das Keyboard is probably too loud for those environments. I assume the “silent” version uses Cherry MX “Brown” switches that are quieter and also appropriate for group settings. To get a sense of how loud each keyboard is, check out this video, which compares the Advantage, Customizer, and Das Keyboard:
What do all these models mean?
If you’ve visited the Das Keyboard website, you’re probably aware that you can buy four models: the “Original Das Keyboard Professional, “Das Keyboard Model “S” Professional,” which I am reviewing, the “Das Keyboard Model “S” Professional Silent,” and the “Das Keyboard Model “S” Ultimate.”
Here’s how the somewhat confusing nomenclature and model numbers work: A Das Keyboard “Professional” means there are letters on the keyboard, like mine; not having any letters doesn’t seem to confer any benefit aside from sheer geek street cred, about which I care less than practicality. A Das Keyboard “Ultimate” is identical to the “Professional” except that it’s blank. The Das Keyboard “Silent” is quieter, presumably due to using Cherry MX “Brown” switches like those mentioned above.
The Original Das Keyboard Professional lacks media function keys, has only a single USB connector, isn’t compatible with KVM switches, and doesn’t have “Full n-key rollover,” which means that if you mash, say, six keys at once, the keyboard might not register all of them. The last feature is apparently useful for gaming. The short version is that the differences between the “Original” and “Model S” are marginal and not very important. Given the choice, I’d probably take the original.
Mac support
The Das Keyboard supports OS X and Linux as well as Windows. You can buy a set of Mac- and Linux-friendly keycaps for $14.95, which is comparable to Unicomp’s cost for OS-specific keys. You’ll have to swap the Option and Command key in OS X’s system preferences, as described here.
A strange problem
Every couple hours, a key would stop working. The first time it was the “e:” I typed “swt” instead of “sweet” in TextMate. The same thing happened in Word and Mellel. But when I plugged the keyboard into my MacBook, the “e” was back, and switching back to my iMac also solved the problem. The same thing happened a few hours later with the “control” key. Unplugging the keyboard and plugging it back in did the trick. It happened again with the “p” key, and presumably with others that I hadn’t noticed because I didn’t use them.
In addition, the remapped “option” key doesn’t function properly. In OS X, option-shift-hyphen generates an em dash, like this: —. But I had to remap the caps lock key to option to generate that dash. I have no idea why. This hasn’t happened with any of the other keyboards I’ve used with this computer: the Matias Tactile Pro, the Customizer, the Advantage, or the Apple Aluminum Keyboards. I assume this is a problem unique to this particular Das Keyboard or to this Das Keyboard with my iMac; if this happened with a purchased computer, the company promises “For repair and exchange: no waiting, no hassle. We will ship you a replacement as soon as we receive your shipment.”
A second opinion
My girlfriend used the Das Keyboard for a day and didn’t like it as much as I did: she said she heard a high-pitched squeak from it. Of the keyboards I’ve tried recently, she likes the Kinesis Advantage best. In comparison to the Unicomp Customizer, she wrote, “WAY better than the daskeyboard. [...] It takes a little more effort, and maybe I’ll find at the end of the day my muscles aren’t a fan of it, but for now, it’s definitely better. Feels more solid.”
Conclusion
Even Das Keyboard’s website says that “Das Keyboard compares to the legendary IBM model M. Its best-in-class mechanical gold-plated key switches provide a tactile and audio click that makes typing a pure joy.” They’re right: it does compare to the Model M. Either keyboard is an good choice. If I had to make it, I’d take the Model M. Its durability is proven, the key travel is slightly better, and it sounds slightly more like a typewriter and slightly less “plasticky” to my ears. In addition, it’s about $50 cheaper after shipping. The only drawback is the lack of USB ports, which seems minor in comparison to how the keyboard feels.
* I don’t highlight where the keyboards are made out of a misplaced and ignorant jingoistic nativism, but rather because, all else being equal, I’d generally choose the item made in a western country (Canada, the United States, most of Europe) over one not made there under the assumption that the workers are probably treated better and make living wages. Taiwan is an industrialized country, so this probably doesn’t apply, but I notice the difference anyway. In addition, products made elsewhere usually cost less; I find it suggestive that, in this case, the opposite is true.
* Note: The review unit was provided by Das Keyboard and returned to the manufacturer after this review was written.
Halloween links: Superfreakonomics, Evolutionary Psychology/Biology, The Books of Brin, and more
* SuperFreakonomics has already generated tremendous and noisy controversy in the blogosphere, and Stephen Dubner responds on his blog: Global Warming in SuperFreakonomics: The Anatomy of a Smear.
I read the book, like approximately half the U.S. population, and thought it intriguing mostly in the first chapter, which is really about the changing social mores around women.
* A Brief History of Sex Ed in America.
* Kahlo, Trotsky and Kingsolver: The writer [Kingsolver] on dust, dirt, rain and her new novel set in 1930s Mexico. I’ve never gotten into Kingsolver’s fiction, but I like this interview.
* Dismantling the Calculus pyramid.
* The Cosmopolitan Tongue: The Universality of English.
* Why do we rape, kill, and sleep around? Whatever the cause, don’t blame evolution for it:
Evo psych took its first big hit in 2005, when NIU’s Buller exposed flaw after fatal flaw in key studies underlying its claims, as he laid out in his book Adapting Minds. Anthropological studies such as Hill’s on the Ache, shooting down the programmed-to-rape idea, have been accumulating. And brain scientists have pointed out that there is no evidence our gray matter is organized the way evo psych claims, with hundreds of specialized, preprogrammed modules. [...]
Like other critics, he has no doubt that evolution shaped the human brain. How could it be otherwise, when evolution has shaped every other human organ? But evo psych’s claims that human behavior is constrained by mental modules that calcified in the Stone Age make sense “only if the environmental challenges remain static enough to sculpt an instinct over evolutionary time,” Pigliucci points out. If the environment, including the social environment, is instead dynamic rather than static—which all evidence suggests—then the only kind of mind that makes humans evolutionarily fit is one that is flexible and responsive, able to figure out a way to make trade-offs, survive, thrive and reproduce in whatever social and physical environment it finds itself in. In some environments it might indeed be adaptive for women to seek sugar daddies. In some, it might be adaptive for stepfathers to kill their stepchildren. In some, it might be adaptive for men to be promiscuous. But not in all. And if that’s the case, then there is no universal human nature as evo psych defines it.
That is what a new wave of studies has been discovering, slaying assertions about universals right and left.
This should be mandatory reading in conjunction with Geoffrey Miller’s Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior and The Mating Mind.
* In His Own Literary World, a Native Son Without Borders concerns Sherman Alexie . The money shot:
[Alexie] characterized the high-six-figure advance he is being paid for a subsequent novel, a thriller that is still at least a year away, as lucrative enough that it constituted “a pornographic deal.” He was quick to note that he meant nothing bad by that.
“No, I like porn,” he said.
* The Books of Brin—that’s Sergey Brin of Google fame.
* Eventually the U.S. will hit the wall on deficit spending. The result is not going to be happy.
* Apple releases new 27-inch LED Cinema Display, and it comes with a new Mac.
* Free Mac mini—you save the cost of the computer in the form of electric bills.
* Bob Higgs on understanding the government, which is really about understanding economics:
Until more people come to a more realistic, fact-based understanding of the government and the economy, little hope exists of tearing them away from their quasi-religious attachment to a government they view with misplaced reverence and unrealistic hopes. Lacking a true religious faith yet craving one, many Americans have turned to the state as a substitute god, endowed with the divine omnipotence required to shower the public with something for nothing in every department – free health care, free retirement security, free protection from hazardous consumer products and workplace accidents, free protection from the Islamic maniacs the U.S. government stirs up with its misadventures in the Muslim world, and so forth. If you take the government to be Santa Claus, you naturally want every day to be Christmas; and the bigger the Santa, the bigger his sack of goodies.
(Hat tip Marginal Revolution.)
* An interview with New York Review of Books Classics editorial director Edwin Frank. I love this quote: “Finding something lost gives us a sense of new possibility, don’t you think?”
* Slate has a fascinating take on Why gay marriage, getting high, and going to Cuba will soon be legal. The best parts come near the bottom:
For similar reasons, there is not likely to be any retreat on the basic legal status—as opposed to tinkering around the margins—of the right to have an abortion or own a gun. Conservatives would be wise to give up on the one, liberals on the other. In each of these cases, popular demand for an individual right is simply too powerful to overcome. The Internet has been a crucial amplifier of all such claims. With pornography, and gambling, the Web itself became an irrepressible distribution tool for indulgences that were once perforce local. When it comes to gay marriage, the Web has accelerated the recognition of a new civil right by serving as an organizing tool and information clearinghouse. More broadly, the freest communications medium the world has ever known has raised expectations of personal liberty. In a world where everyone has his own printing press, restrictions on private behavior become increasingly untenable.
Republicans face a risk in resisting these new realities. Freedom is part of their brand; if the GOP remains the party of prohibition, it will increasingly alienate libertarian-leaners and the young. But the party as presently constituted has very little capacity to accept social change.
* Nation’s morons march on Washington State.
* Seattle doctors try flat-rate no-limit primary care. If I lived there, I’d be tempted to sign up for $39 a month and no hassles.
* Student Loans and Payback Time: Student debt as the new form of indentured servitude.
* Want 50Mbps Internet in your town? Threaten to roll out your own. This is from Ars Technica:
ISPs may not act for years on local complaints about slow Internet—but when a town rolls out its own solution, it’s amazing how fast the incumbents can deploy fiber, cut prices, and run to the legislature.
* Obama’s right. It’s time to stop taking the network’s skewed news seriously. And I love the lede:
Last week, when White House communications director Anita Dunn charged the Fox News Channel with right-wing bias, Fox responded the way it always does. It denied the accusation with a straight face while proceeding to confirm it with its coverage.
* Attention retail establishments: noise costs you millions:
Based on personal experience and interviews with many shoppers I believe that many people turn around and leave before they even get inside a shop because of its noise. The eyes are being told: “Come in, hang out, spend your money”, but the ears are being told: “Leave at once, hostile environment, not safe”.
I agree: it’s unusual and refreshing to find stores/coffee shops that feel like entering an acoustical oasis instead of a hurricane. The most fascinating part of the post comes at the end: “Most shop soundscapes are arbitrary. Nobody designed them: they are the accidental results of design by people with no ears…”
* Beware the reverse brain drain to India and China. U.S. immigration policies aren’t discussed extensively in the piece but probably should be.
Product Review: Evoluent Ergonomic Vertical Mouse
The Evoluent Vertical Mouse takes the shape of a traditional mouse and essentially rotates it 90 degrees. This probably means nothing without a picture:
You then grip it like this:
That contrasts with a traditional mouse because your forearm doesn’t rotate:
The Evoluent posture is supposed to be more ergonomically sound. Judging the ergonomic claims is difficult, and I haven’t found any strong research to support them, as described in greater detail below. But the mouse, though it takes a little bit of time to acclimate, does feel better. The difference between a standard mouse and an Evoluent Vertical Mouse isn’t as great as the difference between a standard keyboard and a Kinesis Advantage, for example. That being said, it still seems like an improvement over a mouse design that seems to have come about chiefly by accident rather than planning.
The mouse retails for at places like Newegg, but you can find it for $53 from Google shopping as of this writing.
Research
With any exotic, expensive device that promises dramatic improvement, it’s worth considering what, if any, research backs it up. The answer, so far as I can tell using a combination of Google Scholar and the University of Arizona’s online databases, is “not much.”
The best I found came from two sources: The prevalence of neck and upper extremity musculoskeletal symptoms in computer mouse users (2000) and Can a more neutral position of the forearm when operating a computer mouse reduce the pain level for VDU operators? (2002; VDU is researcher speak for “visual display users,” or, as we might call them today, “computer users.”) Both articles are behind pay walls. The first finds that some pain in the upper extremities of mouse users tends to exist, and the latter essentially answers “yes” to the question of whether a neutral forearm position and reduce pain, although the study doesn’t really get around placebo effect problems—that is, merely showing users that one is interested in their problems can sometimes make users work faster or alleviate their ills.
You can see this in a slightly different context in Matthew Stewart’s “The Management Myth,” which appeared in the June 2006 Atlantic:
While a group of female workers assembled telephone relays and receiver coils, Homer turned the lights up. Productivity went up. Then he turned the lights down. Productivity still went up! Puzzled, Homer tried a new series of interventions. First, he told the “girls” that they would be entitled to two five-minute breaks every day. Productivity went up. Next it was six breaks a day. Productivity went up again. Then he let them leave an hour early every day. Up again. Free lunches and refreshments. Up! Then Homer cut the breaks, reinstated the old workday, and scrapped the free food. But productivity barely dipped at all.
The second study also looked at mice that were more like joysticks than like the Evoluent mouse. But it also demonstrates that keeping one’s arm in a more vertical position is probably superior to keeping it in a horizontal position, all other things being equal.
But the study doesn’t measure whether and how moving one’s hand from a horizontal keyboard to a vertical mouse might change the experience: since most of us probably type more than we use the mouse, we regularly switch from one input device to the other. The Evoluent mouse requires you raise your hand slightly as you go from the keyboard to the mouse because of the mouse’s instead of letting your hand fall onto the mouse. This might obviate some of the ergonomic benefits in real-world use.
Finally, a 1995 study called “Design Criteria of an Ergonomic Mouse Computer Input Device” by Richard Pekelney and Robin Chu mostly calls for more research and discusses some of the research performed up to that time. It doesn’t even consider the possibility of a vertical mouse. If anyone knows of better researcher on mouse design, send me an e-mail or leave a link in the comments section.
Sensors and Tracking
The mouse has three buttons on the right side (a lefty version is also available), with a scroll wheel between the top two buttons. In OS X, those buttons correspond to a traditional left click, a traditional right click (bringing up context menus) and expose, which shrinks all currently open windows. The layout is easy to use; the mouse is slightly too small for my hand, but scoop on the mouse’s left side offers a comfortable spot for my thumb. There’s also a button that will offer a rapid scroll in some programs, like Firefox, but which otherwise isn’t active. Textmate, for example, appears not to do anything with the other button.
The sensors are apparently a selling point for gamers. As Evoluent’s website says:
An Avago 3080 gaming grade infrared sensor tracks more accurately on many surfaces than most laser sensors. The Rev 2 has a button and indicator light on the bottom for cycling the true optical hardware resolution among 4 settings: 2600, 1800, 1300, and 800 dpi. This makes adjusting pointer speed easier and further improves tracking.
I have no idea what “An Avago 3080 gaming grade infrared sensor” is, or whether that description is merely speaking speak or a genuine feature, but I do know that the on OS X the mouse scrolled way too fast out of the box: I’d barely move my wrist, and the mouse would fly across the screen. Consequently, hit a button on the bottom of the mouse to lower its sensitivity, and I also had to adjust the mouse tracking and clicking speeds in OS X so that I could actually use the mouse for precision work. The out-of-the-box settings might not be very good for reasons discussed in the next section.
Lousy Mac Support Might Not Matter
One annoying part of Evoluent’s website: they have a section devoted to why they don’t provide good Mac support. Maybe the number of mice they sell to Mac users is small, but this seems unlikely since 12% of U.S. households now own Macs. In addition, given how many hackers are now starting to use Macs in earnest again, Mac users are probably important out of proportion to their raw numbers for the reasons Paul Graham describes. If you’re offering esoteric computer products that require a certain amount of openness and willingness to try new things, it would seem rather foolish to exclude a market that presumably overlaps substantially with yours.
Conclusions
I’m sticking with the Evoluent mouse rather than moving back to my old mouse. As I said above, there’s not a great deal of difference, but I spent a lot of yesterday scrolling as I edited a novel. I think the mouse made doing so at least somewhat easier. Considering the amount of time one spends using a computer, even marginal enhancements are probably worth the small cost of retraining and the somewhat higher costs of the mouse itself.
Commencement — J. Courtney Sullivan
J. Courtney Sullivan’s Commencement is a less accomplished version of Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children, and it has all the narrative tension of an overcooked noodle. It shoots for modern-day Jane Austen and hits something closer to the chick-lit bulls-eye. I noted this to my girlfriend, who said that she could’ve told me it was chick-lit based on its teal dust jacket. I try not to judge a book by its cover, but in this case apparently my principles apparently wouldn’t have mattered.
The writing in Commencement isn’t bad, but it also isn’t good; I’m searching through pages, looking for a representative quote, or something that’s at least stylistically unusual enough to merit consideration and am finding… nothing. The prose conveys information effectively but without any pizzaz; it is what James Wood might call an efficient literary/commercial novel, having absorbed a few conventions of modernism while retaining a passionate eye and penchant for understatement. Wood says that “There is a familiar American simplicity, for instance, which is Puritan and colloquial in origin, ‘a sort of ecstatic fire that takes things down to the essentials,’ as Marilynne Robinson has it in her novel Gilead.” Sullivan doesn’t have that. She works for the New York Times, which might explain why Commencement reads like a long piece for the Sunday Styles or one of the other less rigorous sections.
I read Commencement based on a mostly positive review in the same paper. It says, for example, that “Sullivan’s characters are often motivated by urges that are taboo to admit in certain quarters: getting love and nurture from men, or staying protected in a cocoon of female friendship rather than confronting the larger world.” Outside of the Mormon church and some university Women’s Studies departments, I can’t imagine what those “certain quarters” might be. In an age of Sex and the City and Katy Perry’s “I Kissed a Girl (And I Liked It),” taboos aren’t very strong. One notable thing about the review is that while it comments extensively on the novel’s social content, it says virtually nothing about its style or prose. Perhaps that’s because the reviewer drew a blank, just as I did, and therefore fell back on sociology when aesthetics failed to rouse any feeling whatsoever.
New iMacs, Macbooks, and Mac minis
Apple announced new iMacs, MacBooks, and Mac minis earlier today; you can read more about the announcement via Ars Technica’s writeup. If you’ve been looking for a desktop Mac, today’s the optimal time to buy.
Although I’m still happy with my setup—you can see an old picture here—I do admit to feeling a bit of tech lust at the announcement of new gear.
The death of literature part 11,274, from Saul Bellow
“From the first, too, I had been warned that the novel was at the point of death, that like the walled city or the crossbow, it was a thing of the past. And no one likes to be at odds with history. Oswald Spengler, one of the most widely read authors of the early ’30s, taught that our old tired civilization was very nearly finished. His advice to the young was to avoid literature and the arts and to embrace mechanization and become engineers.”
That’s from Saul Bellow’s “Hidden Within Technology’s Empire, a Republic of Letters” for the New York Times’ Writers on Writing collection. Fortunately he didn’t listen to the various Spenglers of his day. I often find it amusing to read the various predictions of literature’s demise, which have so frequently been trumpeted in the 20th Century and now the 21st; Orwell does a good job with the same theme in his collected essays.
Although being wrong in the past doesn’t necessarily equate to being wrong in the present, the poor track records of both religious apocalypse and the demise of reading tend to make me skeptical of new claims about either.
(Legitimately) free music: The Orange Mountain Music Philip Glass Sampler Vol.I
Amazon is currently giving away The Orange Mountain Music Philip Glass Sampler Vol.I, which caught my attention because I’ve liked Glass since really hearing him for the first time last year during a University of Arizona dance showcase when some of the students used “Metamorphosis.”
I’m listening to the “sampler” now, which has more variation in style than a complete album for obvious reasons. While some transitions between songs verge on jarring, but the album still seems worth downloading.
