On Tuesday at work not only did I stab myself with my new medicine, but we had free pizza for lunch for secret reasons. And then on Thursday after work we had free happy hour for the same secret reasons. I am terrible at keeping secrets; we soft-launched a new product. At the Thursday event, I was formally introduced to a new colleague.

Upon hearing my name, he immediately recognized me as: “the other person who uses the Dvorak keyboard.”

Once upon a time, I was at That Conference in Atlanta, and I was sitting near That Math YouTuber as she was putting the finishing touches on the slides for her talk. She was going to talk about some sort of 3D printed monkeys, and she was going to name the Keynote file mon.key. However, she was in the early stages of learning the Dvorak key layout, so she flubbed the punchline by starting to type mrb (relying on QWERTY muscle memory).

On the flight home from that conference, I wrote a Python script that searches for words that when typed on a Dvorak keyboard by a QWERTY typist are still words. For example, if you were to use my computer and press the keys labeled NOAH, you would have really typed BRAD.

Since I do an exhaustive search, I pre-trimmed the system dictionary to remove letter keys that map to punctuation marks.

grep -v -i -e 'q' -e 'z' -e 'e' -e 'w' /usr/share/dict/words > wordlist.txt

From there, I applied the permutation to all the words and then checked to see if they were still words.

wordlist = []
dictfile = open('wordlist.txt', 'rb')
for word in dictfile:
    wordlist.append(word.rstrip('\n'))
    
# Setting up the permutation that maps alphabet to dvorak
alphabet = "".join("abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ")
dv_permutation = "axje.uidchtnmbrl'poygk,qf;AXJE.UIDCHTNMBRL'POYGK,QF;"
dv_trans = maketrans(alphabet, dv_permutation)

# For each word in the dictionary, is its image also in the dictionary?
for theword in wordlist:
    newword = theword.translate(dv_trans)
    if newword in wordlist and len(newword) > 1:
        print theword, newword

The longest words are flossy mapping to unroof. My favorite that does not involve proper nouns is hot mapping to dry.

Tangential Update: Guys, I’ve been talking to still more people about pharmacy stuff. It’s gotten to a point where even I am bored by it. I struggle to add each new interaction to my phone log. Also, eventually this medicine is going to cost me $307.15 a month, so I’m focusing my efforts on keeping good records of how well it works so that I can determine if it’s worth paying over $1000 a year for. (NB: this is actually a good price for a “specialty” medicine, as one of my colleagues is paying over $400 a month for Advair Diskus, which is a non-specialty medicine whose active ingredients have gone off-patent.) Based on my last self-imposed medication trial, I’m thinking that I’m going to go with a sixty day trial and evaluate with Barnard’s exact test.