I’ve been aware of the Dvorak Simplified Keyboard for a long time, but only in the past few days have I decided to try the layout for myself. Like any cognitive realignment pushing against the momentum of a lifelong habit, the initial adjustment process has been slow and occasionally punishing. When you are acccustomed to the fluidity of the keyboard as an invisible extension of the mind, it’s terrifying to find it amputated and clumsily reattached. I expect this overwhelming self-consciousness to be the norm someday when future generations willingly trade in their limbs for more dynamic cyborg substitutes.

Up to now, the closest I’ve come to this awkward stumbling was when I attempted to train my left-hand dexterity on Charlie Parker melodies I would normally play with my right. A kind of impotence, really: I was willing myself to do things that I was used to executing at dizzying velocities with ease, but my body just wouldn’t respond. The trick, I discovered, is to force yourself to slow down, clean up the suddenly naked particulars, and not rely so much on your established ‘chunks’ of muscle memory. My left hand is still a shambles, mind you, but as the lesser automaton it invents the more colourful passages.

That’s why I’m still plugging away in Dvorak. It may be slow-going at first—this post you are reading now is taking an eternity to punch in—but within minutes of playing with it, you begin to perceive all sorts of qualitative pleasures that simply don’t exist in QWERTY-land. It’s like switching to an Apple Macintosh, complete with the moment of epiphany where the cultishness of the already indoctrinated looks reasonable all of a sudden. (Or so I’ve heard. Having been a Mac user on and off since the age of five, I can’t really say.)

Patented in 1936, the Dvorak keyboard was designed around a handful of basic principles. High-frequency characters reside on the home row (middle row) to minimize squashing and stretching. Vowels and common punctuation marks sit together on the left, encouraging the alternation of hands from one character to the next; one hand presses keys while the other hand repositions. Finally, synergistic pairs like the digraphs ch and th are packed in close proximity. (In the original design, the arrangement of the number row fell on the axis of an outward spiral, reading 7531902468 from left to right. Even Dvorak’s adherents conceded that was silly, and it has largely been dropped.)

Dvorak users will often tell you two things. The first is that the layout’s ergonomics are a vast improvement on QWERTY, allowing you to push your typing to record speeds without incurring nearly the same risk of repetitive strain injuries. I can’t verify this myself; as someone who pulls a respectable 120 wpm in QWERTY, it’s unlikely that I’ll see efficiency gains in my typing habits anytime soon, and RSI has never been a problem for me thanks to my exclusive preference for lightweight, shallow keyboards.

Intuitively, the claims about Dvorak’s top-speed advantage sound plausible. Although the credibility of the original pro-Dvorak study has been questioned, notably in the 1990 paper “The Fable of the Keys” by SJ Liebowitz and Stephen E Margolis, the fact remains that the QWERTY layout was specifically “anti-engineered” by its inventor, Christopher Sholes, to split digraphs and spread common letters apart and thus avert key-jamming. In other words, it was designed to slow you down.

The second thing you’ll hear is that the Dvorak keyboard has nothing to do with the most notable figure to bear that name, the great romantic composer Antonín Dvořák. The keyboard’s designer, the Seattle-based educational psychologist August Dvorak, was a distant cousin at most—and that, we’re told, is all there is to the story.

This is where I disagree.

Key Largo

Most of the conversation you will find about the Dvorak layout portrays it as a case study in economics. If mass commercial standardization precludes the adoption of a considerable improvement in design, the argument goes, do free markets really foster innovation? Jared Diamond’s 1997 essay in Discover, “The Curse of QWERTY”, is a classic of the genre. Liebowitz and Margolis, in contrast, stay on the tack that QWERTY has remained triumphant simply because the alternatives aren’t discernibly better.

In either case, the way people tend to talk about Dvorak is invariably utilitarian, balancing the costs and benefits of adoption in the quantifiable parlance of character frequencies, finger mileages, relative activity by row, and above all, words per minute. Rarely will you hear specifics about the intangibles of the overall Dvorak experience, even among the few who swear by it. My impression is that many who praise Dvorak on principle don’t actively use it themselves—”I wish I knew how to qwert you!” rings the cri de cœur on Backspace Mountain—and testimonials among those who do typically say a few words about speed and comfort and leave it at that.

The closest thing I’ve seen to a lucid experiential observation is this article by Nicholas Thompson, in which he says:

Using a Dvorak after a lifetime of banging on a Qwerty is like removing a tiny pebble from your shoe. Writing a word such as “the” gives me a buzz as I roll my fingers to the left in a fluid, natural motion. The the the the.

The the the the. Thompson couldn’t have picked a better example; ‘the’ is the word that sold me on Dvorak. It rolls off your fingers like the spoken word rolls off your tongue as you flick it against the back of your teeth. Teeth teeth teeth teeth. But then he blunders:

For musicians, think about trying to play “Blowing in the Wind” starting with a B-flat ninth. That’s a Qwerty board. Now think about starting on a G chord. That’s a Dvorak board.

This makes no sense to me whatsoever. Were you to play “Blowing in the Wind” with a ninth on the initial tonic, the chord would reduce to a F6 or Dm7 over a B-flat root. Easy, comfortable, and far better than G on many instruments. I suspect Mr Thompson was a guitarist.

However poorly he may have worded it, Thompson had the right idea. Dvorak’s layout is more than a mere ergonomic reconfiguration. It proposes an entirely different way of thinking about typing. It makes the activity of typing musical. Dvorak, in a word, is like Dvořák.

Major Major Major Major

Experienced pianists have a way of detecting whether a composer is catering to their needs. In this respect, Frédéric Chopin comes up most often as the model composer for the instrument. Playing Chopin is like revenge: it isn’t easy by any means, but everybody covets the satisfaction of pulling it off. It’s easy to see why once you practice his works—his chords and patterns have an uncanny knack for fitting in the curve of your hand like a volley of fastballs perfectly aimed at the palm of a catcher’s mitt. The fingerings by and large suggest themselves. In the jazz world, Duke Ellington is the same way: construct the chords under a tune like “Mood Indigo” or “Prelude to a Kiss” and you find yourself pulled towards brilliant, open structures with voice-leading that magically clicks.

One neat little morsel of trivia about Chopin is that he liked to start new piano students on B major, which has the most idiosyncratic fingerings of any major scale if you learn the instrument according to the common pattern of starting with C major (no sharps or flats, and therefore no black keys) and adding accidentals as you get better, spreading out along the circle of fifths. In the usual progression, B major with its five sharps is introduced relatively late, and thus it has developed a reputation for being difficult.

Chopin, who frankly knew better than everyone, taught C major last. It’s the easiest key to read, he reasoned, but the hardest key to play. C-oriented thinking creates obstacles in the long run in real-world performance scenarios; better instead to begin with B, which develops the proper contour of the hand. This won’t seem like a big deal if you are anything like Eva van Crommelynck from David Mitchell’s novels and “couldn’t tell C major from a sergeant major,” but believe me, it is.

For Chopin, training for the eventual practicalities of expressing real ideas took priority over taking advantage of conventions that happened to be convenient now. You can probably see where I’m going with this. The Dvorak keyboard, you may notice, was conceived along similar pedagogic lines. It is a system where to work on fundamentals is to prepare yourself to tackle practical scenarios efficiently. Learn a few neighbouring characters at a time, starting with your hands in the rest position, and within minutes you already have the building blocks of words and phrases.

But it’s the clever arrangement of digraphs where Dvorak truly shines. This is something you pick up right away: drum the right hand on its natural resting place and you instantly glimpse the potential of legato typing. The t in nth is a passing tone; the s in sh, a colourful appoggiatura.

Even as a Dvorak novice, you don’t hunt and peck a character at a time. Instead, as you practice the layout you rapidly come to visualize phonemes and syllables, hammering them out in clumps. Strings like ‘Schubert’ feel like five keystrokes, not eight, but acronyms like QWERTY remain a nasty pickle. Pronounceables skip like stones on a pond; abbreviations are minefields daring you to tiptoe across. In essence, the rhythm of Dvorak imitates the rhythm of speech. Rhythm rhythm rhythm rhythm.

QWERTY has a rhythm of its own once you’re fluent, but as you accelerate you converge on the uniform staccato of a Gilbert and Sullivan patter song. There isn’t a way around this, either, as your pace is bounded by your fingers’ travel time. Typing in QWERTY is atomic at heart, decomposing into a succession of meaningless independent characters—quite unlike Dvorak, where vowels and consonants are demarcated by their very placement, and the phoneme reigns supreme.

We could almost think of the QWERTY map’s decentredness as twelve-tone serialism over a wider alphabet of possible notes, none of them privileged, no combination outwardly consonant or dissonant. By this analogy, switching to Dvorak is akin to witnessing music history play out in reverse, returning to a classical pianistic scheme of vowels in the left hand harmonizing a punctuated melody of consonants in the right.

And in tactile terms, that’s really how typing in Dvorak feels, only all the letter-chords are broken down sequentially. There are many obscure alternatives to QWERTY in the keyboard ecosystem, but perhaps why Dvorak has endured as the representative champion is its essential musicality. It’s the romantic keyboard, reminding us that beneath every typewritten palimpsest sleeps a sound.

It reveals an odd kind of poetry, too, when you first practice it in fridge-magnetic increments. “The idea that nineteen studious Dadaists assisted Einstein is asinine,” reads the cryptic aphorism of a home-row exercise. “This session is tedious on the tendons,” reads another.

Link-dumping has never been an adequate stand-in for commentary of my own, and if you want to read what I read you are better off checking Twitter (the only circumstance where that is ever the case). Nevertheless, here is a slice of the pileup.

• Let’s lead this off with one of my great loves and frustrations in the world: science journalism. Begin with Martin Robbins’ incisive parody of sensationalist science reporting. Then read Ed Yong’s remarks on objectivity, neutrality, and whether journalists should take sides.

• “Our daughter isn’t a selfish brat; your son just hasn’t read Atlas Shrugged.”

• Witnessing the Twelfth of July festivities in Northern Ireland this year led me to this must-read piece of ethnomusicology, where Stephen Howe scrutinizes the musical identity of the loyalist marching bands (the ones with the “kick-the-Pope” drums).

• Ron Rosenbaum explains agnosticism. I have a few problems with how readily Rosenbaum buys and sets up the all-too-common straw man of the so-called New Atheism, but the article’s spirited defence of uncertainty and rejection of tribalist debate makes it worth a thorough look.

• This has been a bumper year for exciting stories in espionage. By now everyone has read about the KGB’s suburban infiltrants and forgotten them too, but that doesn’t make revisiting the coverage any less fun. So neighbourly were they, yet so incompetent! Just look at those complaints.

• When I was a wee lad I co-moderated a Tolkien-themed discussion board that was, in later years, overrun by home-schooled creationist kids. Someday they will grow up to be Republican senatorial candidate Christine O’Donnell, whose views about Arwen and Éowyn are oddly more informed than her views about anything and everything else.

• Popular Science gives us a look at the Pentagon’s $58-billion killer robots.

• Lisa Poisso interviews a Lutheran pastor who runs a World of Warcraft guild and who has a host of insightful things to say on faith and fantasy.
• Finally, I must share Patrick Barkham’s remembrance of class and culture at Cambridge University—more reflective of the undergraduate life than the relatively new postgraduate one, I think, but still relevant today.

Somewhere along the way, I penned a dissertation of sorts, but let’s not talk about that. Here is the crust of readings that has built up in the meantime. There are more, but the list below was becoming rather overgrown and at some point I had to stop.

• Two of the great figures in things I care about passed away in May, both of them at ripe old ages after leading fulfilling lives: jazz pianist Hank Jones at 91; mathematical popularizer and Lewis Carroll expert Martin Gardner at 95. I came to both Jones’ and Gardner’s works late in life but quickly—very quickly—came to understand their immeasurable impacts on music and mathematics, respectively, which I had previously felt secondhand without being aware of it. More on Jones here and here; more on Gardner here and here.

• It speaks volumes for how long I’ve been away from saturating this page with hyperlinks that sitting atop the pile in my draft box is an ominous article by Dominic Lawson on David Cameron and Nick Clegg’s public-school upbringings at Eton and Westminster, written the week of the first televised debate.

• IBM has developed a Jeopardy!-playing computer. Observe the promotional video. From an AI perspective, this is orders of magnitude more exciting than Deep Blue, and takes us deep into Turing Test territory. I hope to say more about this should I find the time.

• One of the disadvantages of being in the United Kingdom—indeed, the most serious one I have yet encountered apart from the absence of fine, extravagant steaks—is that for the first time since 1998, I was unable to see a new Pixar film on or before the date of its release. Two Pixar films of note, in fact: Toy Story 3 and the accompanying Teddy Newton short Day and Night. That hasn’t stopped me from following the resurgence of coverage of Pixar’s process of perfection in this Wired piece and this interview with Lee Unkrich.

• Typesetting matters, folks. Just ask the consummate professionals behind these two book-size online resources: Typography for Lawyers, and LaTeX for Logicians.

• Everyone with an interest in the romance of modern international affairs has read it already, but Raffi Khatchadourian’s profile of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is an outstanding piece of storytelling, if also one that tends towards the making of myth.

• And while on the subject of journalism and international intrigue, here is the Rolling Stone feature on Stanley McChrystal that led him to be sacked from command in Afghanistan.

• Civilization V is on its way, but there’s still plenty to say about Civilization IV. Troy Goodfellow shares a letter from Christopher Tin about composing music for the game. Kotaku asks lead designer Soren Johnson about the mathematization of religion.

• Jeremy Parish reflects on this year’s Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) and calls out much of the game industry for the creative bankruptcy of video game violence.

• Neil Swidey of The Boston Globe courageously explores the mind of the anonymous comment-box troll.

• As this year’s graduate session at Singularity University gets underway, The New York Times talks to Ray Kurzweil and gang about the posthuman lifestyle.

• John Naughton writes in The Guardian about what the Internet has really changed.

• England has been swept up in the pathos and misery of football fever, as usual, and one may as well get some World Cup readings out of the way before the Three Lions have truly met with yet another ignominious doom. (Or, preferably, they could win.) Tim de Lisle enquires into the origins of spectator sport’s global draw. And then there’s this article on the North Korean national team, published in timely fashion just before Portugal blanked them 7-0.

• Finally, the only thing that can stop this asteroid is your liberal arts degree.

And now for something completely different:

• Start with Michael Weingrad’s piece in The Jewish Review of Books about why there is no Jewish Narnia. Then proceed to Israeli sci-fi reviewer Abigail Nussbaum’s response and her survey of the conversation.

• My friend Stephen McCarthy, who is coaching Korean schoolchildren in the art of debate, writes about his cultural collision with corporal punishment.

• Anthony Gottlieb digests a survey of what philosophers believe. The data set covers English-speaking academia and skews heavily analytic, but I’m not one to complain.

• Not exactly “reading” per se, but it’s election time, and I can’t stop playing with The Guardian‘s lovely polling widget.

• Wikileaks is in the news again after releasing footage of American troops firing upon a Reuters photographer in Iraq. The BBC profiles who they are.

• John McWhorter parses Sarah Palin. Typically the way the print media scrubs audio quotations into coherent, well-formed sentences (or doesn’t) is a good indicator of media bias, but the thing about Palin is that it can’t be done.

• Julie Just asks where the parents have gone in fiction for young adults.

• What are marching bands playing these days? Shostakovich, that’s what.

• Dale Dougherty writes about the iPad and misses HyperCard. He’s not the only one.

• Cartoonist James Sturm leaves the Internet. I should do that too.

• In a review of Mass Effect II, Jonathan McCalmont calls out video games for their uncritical acceptance of racial essentialism.

• A 1969 letter from Buzz Aldrin to a radio enthusiast offers some insight into the Apollo 11 spacecraft’s low-budget insulation.

• Jonah Lehrer draws on studies about primates and social hierarchy to express some concerns about the compulsion to count one’s Twitter followers and Facebook friends. (People do that? I don’t, but I sure like to comb through my website stats.)

• Finally, courtesy of Daniel Mendelsohn, a review of Avatar that says most of what I wanted to say about Avatar—and for good measure, puts it all in the context of James Cameron’s entire career.

• Patricia Cohen takes a look at the preservation of writers’ rough notes and scrap paper in a digital age, in which we discover that even Salman Rushdie is none too magniloquent to scrawl, “I am doing this so that I can see how a whole page looks when it’s typed at this size and spacing.”

• Also in The New York Times: a special feature on politics and the modern science museum. I’m not convinced that the agendas underlying science exhibits were any less varied or complex a century ago, but as a look at where things stand today the article is well worth perusing.

• The National Arts Centre in Ottawa is commemorating the great Oscar Peterson with a statue to be unveiled 30 June. Please make a contribution.

• And while on the subject of jazz, Peter Hum criticizes the notion that musicians should contrive to make the genre culturally relevant—whatever that means. My preference, as always, is for art that strives for timeless resonance over fashionable gratification. That some things feel like one, and other things feel like the other, is not well understood and worthy of investigation.

• Turn up your speakers and read Jan Swafford’s article in Slate about performing classical piano repertoire on classical pianos, which is full of audio comparisons that will make you wonder if the homogenized ideal of the modern Steinway grand is really a good thing.

• The Guardian asks a wide selection of novelists for their writing tips, which have a way of telling us more about the authors than about writing. Some of my favourites: Geoff Dyer (“Don’t be one of those writers who sentence themselves to a lifetime of sucking up to Nabokov”), Anne Enright (“The first 12 years are the worst”), Philip Pullman (“My main rule is to say no to things like this, which tempt me away from my proper work”).

• Ben Goldacre shows us how regulating alternative folk medicine through requiring certification is no use at all when we don’t know what’s being certified.

• From The New York Times: Canadians shoot left, Americans shoot right. The article is about hockey players but I think there’s something bigger in this.

• Teresa Nielsen Hayden remarks on the imaginative poverty of failed authors who think suing J.K. Rowling for plagiarism is a good idea.

• Jonah Lehrer wonders if the direction of funding towards older scientists hinders us from tapping into the creativity of youth. Also read the followup on his Frontal Cortex blog.

• Civilization IV lead designer Soren Johnson talks about designing strategy games around our intuitions about probability (or lack thereof).

• Mark Chu-Carroll explains why computer simulations of biological phenomena will never replace animal testing.

• Joel Stickley’s explorations of bad writing by example finally catch on to my fatal flaw.

Last month I attended a performance of Steve Reich and Beryl Korot’s “documentary digital video opera” Three Tales at the ADC Theatre, the first production in Britain since the UK premiere in 2002. I’m still not sure what to make of it.

On the surface it looks straightforward enough. The 65-minute composition for voice, acoustic instruments, and video divides neatly into three segments on subjects from the public face of twentieth-century technology—the Hindenburg disaster, the atomic bomb test in the Bikini Atoll, and the cloning of Dolly the sheep. We hear the familiar Reich technique of displacing and superimposing copies of repeated motifs slightly out of phase, which catches the ear well enough in recordings but in live performance has the air of a magic trick. As in Reich’s seminal string quartet Different Trains, many of the melodic ideas are derived from the pitches and articulation of human speech—but not, in Three Tales, the rhythms; here, the speech recordings are subtended to click into the frame of a regular pulse. The video speed, too, is synchronized to musical time and not “mimetic” time or real-time, if you get my meaning.

We see some captivating archival images in the first two movements, chiefly the ones that draw attention to the logistics of large-scale technology, like the construction of the Hindenburg (set to variations on the Nibelung motif from Wagner’s Ring) or the dislocation of indigenous people and livestock in preparation for the Bikini tests (with thunderous sforzandi from Genesis to spice things up). What I can’t quite fit into the picture is the Dolly movement, a contrapuntal collage of video interviews with prominent scientists like Richard Dawkins, Marvin Minsky, and Rodney Brooks. Korot tells us the work, as it was conceived, is more accurately called “Two Tales and a Talk”. Here’s how Reich described it:

Each of the three acts not only looks and sounds like it’s historical period, each is formally organized quite differently to comment on that period. [...] [Dolly] is non-stop with certain kinds of material recurring in no clearly discernible pattern. Musically one might say Dolly was a kind of free rondo. The forms of each act reflect the historical period they describe.

But what does the piece say about technology? It sets up a debate instead of taking a firm position, adopting the ambivalence that is often so necessary for art to say anything at all. Commentators have remarked on the obvious irony of critiquing technology in a technologically enabled medium, but I think it would be facile to stop there: as in most of his earlier works, Reich’s crucial gesture is to forsake electronic synthesizers and recreate the effects of audio manipulation in acoustic human performance. It is an incursion of man on the domain of machine, not the other way round.

Yet the Dolly movement remains an uneasy fit. Consider a crude reading of the work:

1. Hindenburg—Look at the majestic way people talked about big science! That didn’t turn out very well.
2. Bikini—Look at the majestic way people talked about big science! That didn’t turn out very well.
3. Dolly—Look at the majestic way people talked about big science! I wonder if it will turn out well?

I believe what we have here is a case of arson, murder, and jaywalking. Dolly now feels like a quaint late-nineties relic as revolutionary as Deep Blue—that is to say, not at all, in the grand scheme of humanity’s future. Cloning isn’t dragging us to the Singularity anytime soon, and conjuring images of Ray Kurzweil musing about robots replacing us all is a bit of a logical stretch.

Perhaps, as someone too irreligious to get his pants in a twist about the classic Promethean fears of man indulging in acts of creation proper to God, the message of Three Tales is lost on me. Or maybe the point is that the message is lost on everyone else.

This week’s bag of links:

• In a rare sighting of the man behind Calvin and Hobbes, Cleveland newspaper The Plain Dealer interviews Bill Watterson fifteen years after the legendary comic strip ended its run.

• Peter Hum ruminates on the “ugly beauty” of avant-garde jazz.

• The big news coming out of Barack Obama’s 2011 budget was the abandonment of NASA’s plan for the resumption of manned spaceflight to the moon. SPACE.com has the analysis.

• Jonathan McCalmont, caught between the debate over high/low culture and his vehement dislike of the popular video game Bayonetta (“a game so dumb that it makes a weekend spent masturbating and sniffing glue seem like an animated discussion of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921)”), spun it all into a compelling essay on hypnotism and lowbrow art.

• This Charles Petersen piece in The New York Review of Books is one of the better histories you will find of where Facebook came from and how it has transformed, and offers a thorough look at the content-pushing pressures facing the social-network model of a nominally private Internet.

• Mark Sarvas identifies some common problems of debut novels from the perspective of a prize-committee veteran.

• In The Guardian, Darrel Ince implores scientists who rely on internally developed software to publish their source code.

Serious aficionados should take a look at this 1957 letter by Salinger explaining why he saw The Catcher in the Rye as unfilmable. Really dedicated junkies of all things Salinger may even go as far as perusing Joyce Maynard’s 1972 article, “An 18-Year-Old Looks Back On Life”, which led her to drop out of Yale and live with the author for a year. (I personally find it nigh on unreadable, but it’s evidence that the cliché anxiety about settling down with 2.2 kids has been around for nearly four decades at least.)

And now for something completely different:

• How to Write Badly Well is consistently superb, but Joel Stickley has really outdone himself with this legitimately amazing poem.

• Alex Abboud previewed the new Art Gallery of Alberta, which opened its doors this weekend.

• Juan Cole speculates that Osama bin Laden is probably dead and has ceased to be relevant even if he is alive.

• Ethan Iverson makes the case for extravagant public funding of Wagner’s Ring.

• This weekend’s New York Times Magazine featured a marvelous piece by David Hajdu on AIDS survivor and phenomenal jazz pianist Fred Hersch.

• Those interested in the history of computer games will appreciate this Wired article on how perfectionism killed Duke Nukem Forever, the most infamous piece of vapourware in software history.

Many are rightly wondering if Apple’s iPad really does fill a niche that isn’t already better served by a laptop and a phone (specifically, Apple laptops and Apple phones). I can’t speak for anyone else, but I’ve long desired a device that allows me to do two things:

• Read full-size PDFs and websites in bed;
• Prop up music books on the piano in digital form, complete with gestural page-turns and sheets that don’t blow this way and that.

The iPhone and iPod Touch can’t do this because the screen is too small.

Laptops can’t do this because they go practically anywhere but on your lap, you can’t set them on the bed because they’ll set your house on fire, and the keyboard juts out and gets in your way. The screen orientation is also unsuitable for most PDFs. If you use a laptop, you are practically tethered to a desk. (I have, incidentally, seen a few musicians who put their laptops on the piano as a substitute for lugging a bagful of Real Books around. The form factor leaves much to be desired.)

What about e-readers? I’m astonished at how poorly existing e-readers have handled PDF support. The Kindle, last I heard, allows you to convert PDFs into its proprietary format so you can interact with the text the way you do with any of the books available for the device, but this completely fails to handle the kind of documents I tend to read as PDFs in the first place: music, articles in academic journals (often with diagrams, footnotes, and figures all over the place), and other scans that are sensitive to their original layouts. While the iPad can’t hope to match the battery life and screen texture of dedicated e-book readers for, well, reading books, a bright full-colour screen is exactly what I need for the kind of documents that wind up on my drive as PDFs.

The iPad is perfect for both of these tasks. By the looks of it, I can hold it in any orientation in the laziest of postures without strain, and it will sit nicely on any music stand. It’s an absolute dream for musicians, and the ideal device for someone who needs to pack a lot of stray documents on the go. Who knows—it may even save The New York Times, and I wouldn’t be in the least surprised if this was a major reason why the Times had the gumption to announce it would move its online edition to a paid subscription model next year.

What’s odd, then, is that Apple is falling short of its usual marketing savvy in promoting the features of the iPad as if it were merely an iPod Touch with a bigger screen. The company is clearly expecting the revolution to come from third-party application developers, as was the case with the iPhone, and banking to a lesser extent on the massive content push of its iBooks store, but this seriously undersells the potential of the device.

Combined with a keyboard dock, the iPad is potentially a complete computer replacement for everything I do except a few heavy design/development applications, World of Warcraft, and Civilization—essentially, every reason I have a MacBook Pro instead of the lightweight standard line. And as comfortable as I have become with using LaTeX for all of my document preparation, I am even willing to go back to a word processor like Pages if someone develops a good implementation of speech-to-text, so I can try the Richard Powers method of prose composition. Most people don’t use their computers for any of these tasks, and so long as there is an adequate file management system—something we have yet to see—the iPad could be viable as a standalone device. Keyboards are around to stay, but it’s only a matter of time before the mouse paradigm is dead.