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Look, no hands

looknohands.me

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Re: Look, no hands

#11

Post by michael_nielsen »

bbarn wrote: post #5

Only one mention of a doctor, once in the whole page, and he says to give it a rest and she'll be ok. Then she says she spends 50% of the time using her hands normally? No mention of further deterioration, or further attempts to figure out the problem? It seems like it's more important to her to say "look I am clever" than actually solve the problem here.

The article is about the amazing things she's doing, how she's doing them, and, more broadly, all the fun she's having with design. It will benefit many people. She's under no obligation to report the details of her medical investigations.

Re: Look, no hands

#12

Post by [deleted] »

bbarn wrote: post #5

Only one mention of a doctor, once in the whole page, and he says to give it a rest and she'll be ok. Then she says she spends 50% of the time using her hands normally? No mention of further deterioration, or further attempts to figure out the problem? It seems like it's more important to her to say "look I am clever" than actually solve the problem here.

[deleted]

Re: Look, no hands

#13

Post by auvi »

I remember CMU (or a site that was linked from a links page in CMU vision site) had a project called Nouse where you can operate the computer with a video camera using your nose. The nose doesn't touch anything.

Re: Look, no hands

#15

Post by mcescalante »

nchelluri wrote: post #9
bbarn wrote: post #5

Only one mention of a doctor, once in the whole page, and he says to give it a rest and she'll be ok. Then she says she spends 50% of the time using her hands normally? No mention of further deterioration, or further attempts to figure out the problem? It seems like it's more important to her to say "look I am clever" than actually solve the problem here.

I have a hard time believing someone would just stop using their hands if they had the ability to do otherwise. I do agree it would have been nice to know more of the details of what went wrong, though, and why she seemed to experience severe RSI when some other people don't. (Like me - I probably don't use the mouse/trackpad as much as a designer, but I've been clacking away at the keyboard for 25+ years with no sig…

I would have loved to hear a bit more about the RSI and the issues that it caused her. The writing left it very unclear to me what the extent of her injury was, and made it seem like her hands were virtually useless.

Re: Look, no hands

#17

Post by arjie »

The elasticity of the brain is incredibly impressive. Very neat solution. My parents are surgeons, and I know they worry at least a little bit about the safety of their hands. While my hands are definitely very important to my being able to work I know I don't worry as much as they do. That's funny, because for the most part I think about Carpal Tunnel Syndrome as a career-ending condition.

I recently suffered some amount of tendonitis in my wrist and it prompted me to make quite a few changes:

* Better posture

* Better seat adjustment

* A nicer (mechanical) keyboard

* Practising touch typing more (i.e. correcting myself any time I use the wrong finger)

* Resting my wrists evenly

I made all these changes simultaneously so I don't know what changed it or if it was a one-time thing and resting fixed it. An interesting thing is that I found that I overuse my right hand.

`vim` binds simple movements to hjkl and that's fine because they're on the home row, but it also means that a lot of the time I'm holding down one key while reading code. I've switched to moving around code better now, using larger jumps, and when scrolling a lot I use my left hand. I've also rebound some other things so that they're easier with home row keys. Anyway, learning to be faster at all this took very little time. I am very impressed with how fast we learn new acts if they keep repeating them.

Re: Look, no hands

#18

Post by owenwil »

This is awesome. Fun to see someone trying something new and pushing the boundaries of how computer interaction is done, considering how stressful on the body it can be to use a mouse.

Re: Look, no hands

#19

Post by ChuckMcM »

bbarn wrote: post #5

Only one mention of a doctor, once in the whole page, and he says to give it a rest and she'll be ok. Then she says she spends 50% of the time using her hands normally? No mention of further deterioration, or further attempts to figure out the problem? It seems like it's more important to her to say "look I am clever" than actually solve the problem here.

I'll admit that bothered me too. RSI is real and it is crippling, although it is also almost completely curable with surgery and some physical therapy [1]. However, I found her story of working on tasks that typically need arms and hands, without them, pretty awesome. So on balance the story worked for me.

[1] http://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/carpal-tunnel-... -- If you feel tingling in your fingers when you type STOP TYPING seriously.

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