@futurebird Math formula application is less likely to involve muscle memory, though

@muellerwhh

Everyone will just love Calculus but in roman numerals. Is that what you're suggesting?

@Anke

You'd think. But I do think there is something like a spatial memory involved in solving algebra. A sense of what can and cannot be done, like it's a board game.

@futurebird I never think about the letters at all as a blind touch-typist.
My brain wants to make a word. Interestingly, if I make an error, it's far quicker for me to trash the entire word and start over than it is to count my backspaces.

@jannem

Ah yes. The vaunted "reasons" ...

@futurebird I don't know if I could draw a keyboard from memory, but there have been a few times when I took all the keycaps off a keyboard and then had to put them all back in place from memory. It turns out the tricky part is the bottom row of a laptop keyboard; on many laptop keyboars there will be somehting like [ctrl] [fn] [win] [alt] [space] and sometimes these are all the same shape keycap. And on some laptops [fn] and [ctrl] are swaped. And it's worse on the right side of the spacebar.

@cachondo

Same! I always delete the whole word and just "make it again" like doing a bat swing or something. It's hard to break the action of typing a word into parts.

@futurebird I hesitate to call them liars, because they might be honestly reporting a different experience from mine. But it *is* a different experience from mine; I find that I get *less* efficient with anything under a 60%. More importantly - for me, it's less *comfortable*.

(I made some firmware tricks in my current 66% that makes LaTeX a bit more pleasant to work with: I have layers for Greek letters and for some commonly-used mathematical symbols; both can output either my own custom Compose sequences, ibus-compatible sequences or LaTeX commands. )

@futurebird nope, my hands know how to type. My brain doesn't. I could draw you a keyboard but I'd have to type out each letter in the air and then write down its location. This is so bad that often my fingers know a password but I don't know the combination of capitalized and uncapped letters, numbers and symbols. I'm sort of like an octopus (my tentacles have a brain of their own).

@futurebird When I touch type, I don't think in letters. Nor words, really. I just think what I want to write, and my fingers go "yeah, sure, ok, we'll get that done, boss!". I spent quite a bit of time to train my muscle memory, and once my fingers knew how to type, I promptly forgot where keys are.

Thus, I couldn't draw my layout, 'cos I've got no clue. I remember parts of it, but... it's muscle memory that's typing. If I need to recall it, that's going to be hard.

This can lead to funny scenarios when I misalign my hands, and end up typing a lot of text a row or column off, or if I need to use someone else's keyboard (in which case I usually just give up, and ask them to type, because hunt and pecking with two fingers and looking at the keyboard all the time is slow).

@futurebird Great idea :-D, I am sure we are on the same page ;-).

I was suggesting vim as an editor, but I just realized that there are no commas, colons etc. on the keyboard. So vim would let you suffer even more. If you are into cool keyboards, I think the Daskeyboard with blank black keycaps may be made for you. Also, switching the keycaps is less impactful.

@Anke

I used to teach at a Steiner school. They have a lot of strange ideas (some are very questionable) but one of their notions is that "mathematics lives in the limbs and fingers" (they were always saying this kind of new-age sounding stuff which I found fascinating and troubling.)

But, I think there may be a drop of truth in this notion. A part of math is a lot like muscle memory, not language based, but kinetic. Beyond words. Or maybe before words.

@datarama

I will not hesitate. Those of us with these tiny keyboards just like how cute they look. There is nothing wrong with that.

It's also amusing to watch other people be horrified and flummoxed when they try to use it. It's a simple life pleasure and the small keyboard crowd just needs to come clean about it IMO.

@muellerwhh

"Daskeyboard"

*hipster sniff*

I couldn't possibly consider something I didn't solider myself. I suppose something like that might be OK for a keyboard casual.

(Daskeyboards are fine. I am working on being less of a snob about these kinds of things. Not doing the best job.)

@futurebird @Anke
A friend’s mother decided to become a Steiner teacher and went to the teacher’s school in Sacramento. We visited her there and got to attend a lecture on color theory. Goethe was involved and seeing beyond the visible spectrum. It was beautiful and very confusing and somewhere between brilliant and total malarkey.

@futurebird I must distract you with my FAVORITE RESEARCH PAPER! It's about drawing bicycles from memory to test how well humans understand the technology around them:

The Science of Cycology

(www.liverpool.ac.uk)

I pull out my eink tablet at parties and get people to draw bicycles, everyone enjoys it.

@shapr @futurebird Shae this concept is represented fairly prominently in my "Tools of Math Construction" study guide/lit review thingy.

Specifically it does recommend "The Knowledge Illusion" by Sloman and Fernbach, which specifically mentions the issue of asking people to draw bicycles.

@leon_p_smith @shapr

I may well ask my geometry students to draw a bicycle! It is an excellent example of how it is possible to look at something all the time but never really see the geometry. And how, if you have had to think about the design of a bike, if you have taken one apart, you develop a more refined model— I should check out this source you suggested— but the connection between the amusement one can have asking people to draw bikes and math is exciting.

@leon_p_smith @shapr

“looking” and “seeing” aren’t the same things. And, in light of a recent discussion about writing #alttext it is more clear than ever that having sight is just one possible path to seeing. Sighted people can easily fail to see the things we look at and we’d do well to remember this.

@leon_p_smith @shapr

The photons may go in your eye holes, oh they may tickle your brain a little but, more often than we’d like to admit there the process terminates. Nothing much is really “seen” at all.

And there is something adaptive about this. To not disregard most of what we see would be paralyzing— but I like to be aware, at least, that this is happening. And I want to make other people aware as well.