Category Archives: Health

A Bicycle Can Get You From Here to There

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That’s Good For You, Good For Everyone Else.

Wednesday, May 26, 1999
BY ALEX MARSHALL

I’m going to talk about bikes today. So I’m going to speak very slowly, so my colleague Dave, “I’ll get out of my car when they pry my cold dead hands from the steering wheel” Addis, will perhaps understand me.

It’s funny about bicycles. When I suggested a while back accommodating them more on local roads, Addis, who has become the leading supporter of the traffic-jammed, suburban status quo, could only think of Bejing or Bombay. Yellow and brown hordes on rusty bicycles jostling for space on dusty roads with chickens and stray dogs yapping at their heels. Who wants that?

A different image comes to my mind. I think of two of the wealthiest and most civilized cities on earth — Amsterdam and Copenhagen. In my travels there, I remember beautiful women in elegant skirts, and men wearing fine linen suits, bicycling along to work or shopping.

All that biking was good for the natives. In Copenhagen, I remember a grandmotherly women blithely pedaling by me as I, on my rented bicycle and anemic calves, struggled to keep up with her.

I think of Seattle — another wealthy, liveable city — where the buses have bike racks and people put up with the steady drizzle to ride bikes everywhere.

Bikes have about them the aura of the childish, the silly and the inconsequential. They needn’t. For trips of a few miles or less, bikes can be the perfect vehicle. They are easy, casual and convenient. Add a rack and you can carry a bag of groceries or a shopping bag.

We have the perfect terrain for bicycling. We are as flat as Holland, with better weather than Seattle or Copenhagen. But we build everything so reflexively for the car, we rule out other ways of getting around.

In Amsterdam and Copenhagen, something like a third of all trips are by bicycles. Last time I checked, Copenhagen planners were hoping to see this rise to 50 percent.

A lot of people using bicycles transforms cities. To state the obvious, it’s a lot easier to accommodate a rack of 10 bicycles in front of a store than a parking lot for 10 cars.

New Norfolk City Manager Regina Williams got this right away when I spoke to her about it. Every person that rides a bike is one not driving a car, she said. It frees up space on streets, and represents another parking space that does not have to be built. There is no reason downtown Norfolk could not have thousands of commuters, shoppers, students coming into downtown every day by bicycle. Older cities, with their densities and finer grained network of streets, are ideal for bicycles.

In Hampton Roads, Virginia Beach should be the worst place to bike and in a lot of ways is. A city built around high-speed corridors like Virginia Beach Boulevard will always have difficulty accommodating a guy on a bike. Still, the city has done a good job of including separate bike paths on some of its newer streets, like South Independence Boulevard around Green Run. It also has a wonderful route from Fort Story all the way out General Booth Boulevard in the newer suburbs.

Norfolk and Portsmouth are lousy places to bicycle. This is a tragedy because it should be the opposite. Their older, straighter and narrower streets with clear, right-angle intersections are safer and better for bicycles. A cyclist can mix with traffic on a Colley Avenue in Ghent, or around Olde Towne, without dread.

But the same cyclist will eventually come to one of the giant, high-speed highways, like Brambleton Avenue or London Boulevard, that have been ploughed through these cities without much thought. Even crossing one of these roads is difficult, much less biking in them.

A perfect example of this is at the corner of Brambleton Avenue and Botetourt Street on the edge of Freemason in Norfolk. You come across the Hague on the lovely footbridge from Ghent, originally built for streetcars, and are then faced with a raging river of highspeed traffic on Brambleton Avenue. No crosswalk. No stoplight. I have seen a dad with two little children, all on bikes, trying to dart their way across this rushing stream without getting killed. I fear someone will be eventually.

In the short term, Norfolk and other planners need to add cross walks, stop lights and other devises to accommodate bikes. In the longer run, planners need to narrow traffic lanes on major highways like Brambleton or Waterside Drive. Narrower traffic lanes slow down cars, and frees up space for bike lanes and on-street parking. Planners need to think about bikes as naturally as they now think about cars.

This isn’t just being nice. The middle-class rides bikes, and if Norfolk and Portsmouth wants more of them, or to keep the ones they have, they need to make it easier for them to pedal places.

Right now, Norfolk thinks about bikes last, if at all.

Why doesn’t the MacArthur Center Mall have any bike racks in front of it? This is such a natural and obvious thing to do, when parking is both tight and charged for, you have to wonder what was on their minds.

One hopeful sign. The redesigned Church Street in Norfolk includes bike lanes, one planner told me. That’s a great start. If we start including bikes in our thinking, there’s no reason we can’t be the Copenhagen of the East Coast. Automobile Addis might never leave his well-cushioned front-seat, but the rest of us would like to now and then.


Typing For Non-Conformists

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The Dvorak alternative keyboard is a boon for the aching hand.

BY ALEX MARSHALL

I’m writing this essay in a different language. It’s called Dvorak.

The words in my mindnd on the screen are coming out the same as always. But my fingers on the keyboard, the tool I use to translate mental words to written ones, are moving differently than they have over the last 20 years. My fingers are speaking Dvorak.

Perhaps it was an impending middle-age crisis, but at age 39, after a decade as a journalist and two decades typing everything from college papers to months-long newspaper projects, I wanted to see if I could do something as fundamental as shift my system of typing.

So I switched. “Dvorak” (pronounced duh-VOR-ak), to the uninitiated, is the more efficient keyboard layout designed by efficiency expert August Dvorak in the 1930s. With Dvorak, the letters are laid out to correspond, roughly, with their frequency of use: All five vowels, for example, repose under the left hand. Five common consonants rest under the right hand. Your fingers stay put more and cover less ground.

As I write this, my fingers are staying mostly on the middle row of the keyboard — the home row. In Dvorak, 70 percent of one’s typing usually happens there. This compares to just 30 percent on Qwerty, as the standard keyboard layout is dubbed.

It wasn’t just a whim that prompted my switch. Although I liked the idea of typing more quickly and easily, I also thought it might ease my RSI (repetitive stress injury). Like roughly half the adult population, it seems, I am bothered by wrist and hand pain brought on by too much typing. I thought Dvorak might help.

Dvorak is also one of those visionary systems I have a weakness for — one of those big “if onlys,” like Esperanto, the invented language that its proponents hoped the world would adopt as a universal tongue. Or the Wankel rotary engine. Or the Macintosh computer. Or the flat tax. All these systems hold out the appeal that “if only” the world switched over, everything would work better. They’re frankly utopian visions: Someday, we will all use Dvorak on Macintosh computers as we write in Esperanto to our congressmen about the new flat tax.

But this particular revolution may indeed be coming. In the typewriter era, switching to Dvorak was virtually impossible: No one made typewriters with Dvorak keyboards — and even if they had done so, you would have had to lug around your own machine to every job or place you wanted to type.

But with computers, all you have to do is change a file in the operating system and presto — you have a new keyboard. Boosted by these possibilities, thousands of people around the country are switching to Dvorak. Dvorak has also inspired a dozen or so Web sites that promulgate its virtues.

The biggest boost for Dvorak came when Microsoft began pre-installing it in Windows. In most versions, you simply open the Keyboard file inside the Control Panel and then switch to Dvorak using the Properties file inside the Language selection category. (Depending on the computer, you may then be prompted to insert the installation disk to complete the switch.)

For this milestone on the road to universal Dvorak typing, we can thank two Dvorak fanatics, Linda Lewis and Randy Cassingham. Lewis is the founder and president of Keytime, a typing school and products seller in Seattle; Cassingham is author of “The Dvorak Book” and the online column This Is True.

A few years ago, Lewis and Cassingham journeyed across the water from Seattle to Redmond to meet with Microsoft executives and argue the case for Dvorak. It worked — the 800-pound gorilla of operating systems began including Dvorak in Windows soon afterward. It was a huge victory for the Dvorak contingent. Before that, Cassingham said, to use Dvorak, you had to type in MS-DOS, because Windows would not recognize a software conversion to Dvorak.

My own dear Macintosh, I’m sorry to say, does not pre-install a Dvorak file. But switching is still pretty simple. You can buy a Dvorak file from Keytime or download one free from several sites, like this. Then, you just drop it in your system folder, and Dvorak becomes one of the languages you can switch the keyboard to, like Dutch or Finnish.

Just how many people use Dvorak? Hard to say, but far more people than ever have in the past. Cassingham said offices are studded with people who have switched to Dvorak on their own. Among the high-profile converts to Dvorak use is Nathan Myhrvold, chief technology officer for Microsoft.

Cassingham has been typing in Dvorak for about 15 years. At first, he relied on software conversion programs he wrote himself. “I’m a writer, and as a writer, output is money,” Cassingham says. “I used to type on Qwerty, and my hands would be aching after a long article. My hands never ache now, even though I write a lot more. I used to type 55 words a minute. Now I type over 100.”

But the Dvorak revolution has implications beyond helping freelancers make more money. Along with the standard Dvorak layout, August Dvorak also invented a one-handed layout for both the right and left hands. Microsoft now also includes these in Windows as a benefit for disabled users.

Switching to Dvorak is more an effort of will than of skill. When I switched a year ago, I gave myself one week for the task, during a break I had in researching a book. For those seven days, I dedicated one hour each morning to practicing Dvorak. I used a book and software package called “Skillbuilder” that’s available from Keytime.

It was a scary time. There was that moment midweek when I found myself between shores, unable to type Qwerty, but still not having mastered Dvorak. My fingers felt awkward and clumsy. But at the end of seven days, I had learned Dvorak enough to do my work — to walk, if not run, where I wanted to go.

And a year later? I count the switch a success, if a mixed one. My typing speed is only slightly faster than it was before. (I was shocked to learn, when I tested myself before I switched, that I was typing 90 words per minute in Qwerty — I guess daily journalism is good for something.) I now type about 100 words a minute in Dvorak. Cassingham says I will gradually increase in speed and flexibility over the years to come.

Dvorak is integrated into most of my environment. It’s installed on my Macintosh desktop and laptop. It even comes pre-installed on my AlphaSmart, the $250 word processor I use on the road. If I desired, I could buy premade Dvorak keyboards from several vendors. As it is, I’ve attached clear plastic letters, which I bought from Keytime, to show the Dvorak layout without hiding Qwerty.

My RSI is still there, but it has diminished. Under Qwerty, my hands resembled deranged spiders as they flew over the keyboard, making awkward stretches to this or that letter. Now, they are more like workers in a good union, as they hoe away at the main row.

First printed in www.SALON.com | Oct. 12, 1998

Alex Marshall is a freelance writer. His first book, “How Cities Work,” has now been published by University of Texas Press. It was written in Dvorak.

Guns Don’t Kill People; Cars Do. Or At Least Not As Many

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On Foot Or On Wheels, Facing The Threat

Whether you walk, drive or bicycle on your daily rounds, are you more in danger of getting killed from a bumper of a car or a bullet from a gun? It depends on where you live, although the stats suggest that overall, the mean metal of a car is more dangerous than that from a gun, simply because speeding cars are so much more prevalent than speeding bullets.

The New York Daily News started out this somewhat morbid train of thought of mine with its news series this month examining pedestrians killed by vehicles. The series noted that from 2000 to 2002, 580 pedestrians were killed. The news campaign, entitled Save a Life, Change the Law, is an excellent example of advocacy journalism. It informs the reader of a fact — a lot of people on foot are killed by cars — and then forcefully presents a possible remedy, in this case, making it easier to charge drivers with criminal penalties if they kill a pedestrian. If more drivers were charged with criminal penalties for reckless behavior, drivers might think twice before speeding through an intersection.

The good news is that both the murder rate and the killing of pedestrians by vehicles have been steadily dropping over the last decade. In 1990, 365 pedestrians were killed and an amazing 2,606 people were murdered. In 2002, only 195 pedestrians were killed and only 575 people were murdered. If the murder rate keeps up its swift descent, walking across a dangerous intersection will be riskier than walking through a bad neighborhood.

Eric Monkkonen, an urban historian at the University of California at Los Angeles, studies both crime and urban planning. He is the author of Murder in New York City (UCLA press 2001), and America Becomes Urban, (UCLA 1988). Both are excellent. He said New York City’s murder rate has always gone up and down over the centuries, but was unusually high in the last generation.

“New York has always been safer than other American cities, so the crime rate could go even lower.” Monkkonen said from his office in California. “The question is how to get it there. I wouldn’t trust anyone who has a simple answer.” Moving back to pedestrian deaths, Transportation Alternatives, in several excellent recent reports available at its web site www.transalt.org, reported that the number of pedestrians has continued to drop in 2003, with only 102 pedestrians killed in the first nine months of the year. It appears we are heading for a record breaking year in safety. T.A. credits the transportation department with a series of traffic calming measures that have significantly made things safer for pedestrians.

But only if you are satisfied with not dying.

Transportation Alternatives also reports that in 2002, 15,000 pedestrians and 4000 cyclists were injured, about the same as in past years. Also in 2002, 16 cyclists were killed, a rate that has been pretty consistent for the past decade.

How do we fare if we move from the urban streets of New York City to the more suburban ones of New Jersey? Not so well, at least if we are walking or driving.

Drivers in the Garden State killed 184 pedestrians last year, an alarming 37 percent increase, it was reported recently. Pedestrian deaths in New Jersey had been dropping, and the increase is so large that it begs some specific explanation. New York has 8 million people; New Jersey has about 8.4 million.

Given the similar populations and the similar pedestrian death rates — 184 in New Jersey versus 198 in New York City — seems evidence that it’s more dangerous to walk in New Jersey, simply because so many more people walk regularly in New York City.

It’s not only more dangerous to walk, it’s more dangerous to drive. In 2001, New Jersey had 747 traffic fatalities, at least double the number of those in New York City.

This statistic matches with the work of William Lucy, a professor of urban planning at the University of Virginia, who made headlines consistently in the 1990s with his studies showing one was more at risk living in a traffic ridden suburb than a crime ridden inner city. Several of his studies showed that a prosperous Northern Virginian or Richmond suburb was less safe to live in than Washington DC or Richmond, which then vied for the highest murder rates in the land. The reason was surprising but obvious from the data.

Speeding cars killed a lot more people in the suburbs than they did in the inner city, where the cars tended to travel more slowly and accidents tended not to be fatal.

Here in the Tri State Region, it would be nice to have the best of all worlds. If we make it safe and most of all pleasant to walk and bicycle in the city or suburb, we will have safer and more pleasant communities all around.

–Alex Marshall, an Independent Journalist, is a Senior Fellow at RPA

When the big guns fail, here’s a secret weapon in the battle against warts

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Published: Monday, August 9, 1993
Section: DAILY BREAK , page B1
Source: By Alex Marshall, Staff writer

THE STORY OF HOW I conquered and vanquished the strange, alien-like creatures that marched and multiplied across the soles of my feet for a decade may not be nice, it may not be pretty, but it needs telling, for those who face similar struggles need hope, examples that glory and victory comes to those who persist.

They – the warts that is – first appeared in the late 1970s. There were just two at first, right under the ball of each foot, so I felt them when I put my weight down.

I went to a dermatologist, the one who treated my teenage zits. He carefully froze them with liquid nitrogen and sent me on my way.

But the warts came back. Nitrogen worked on one or two warts on my thumb and hand, but foot warts were like Japanese guerrilla fighters, refusing to give up their positions even under the most withering fire.

So I did what I often do with long-term problems. I ignored them.

But they did not ignore me. While I finished college, lived in Europe for two years, taught high school, traipsed through Central America, became a writer, went to graduate school, got hired as a reporter and got married, my warts continued their slow march across my feet.

They were more persistent than Kempsville suburbs.

As the 1990s began, I found myself with, it’s hard to admit, more than 30 warts on the bottoms of my feet. Pea- to nickle-sized. I know, it’s disgusting. I fill with self-loathing just talking about it.

Still, I might have kept on ignoring them, but my wife was beginning to look at me funny. And they hurt when I walked.

So I declared total war. It was the only way I would get rid of them, I told myself. No pity. No quarter given. Lasers were the thing, I told myself. Move in the big artillery.

But the laser doctor, a dermatologist in a brick medical bunker on First Colonial Road, had bad news. I had so many warts that a laser would take off about half my foot along with the warts. I would be in bed several weeks afterward, maybe more. And it would be very painful.

So he recommended a different strategy. Weaken the bastards with liquid nitrogen and acid for a few months, then club them over the head with a laser.

Trouble was, my super-hardy warts didn’t weaken. They seemed to thrive under the acid and nitrogen as if I had been sending them to a health club. Eventually we moved up to acid so strong that the dermatologist handed it to me with shaking hands and elaborate instructions on how to avoid burning holes in my head or car.

But the warts didn’t flinch.

I was getting worried. What if these things crawled up my ankles to my throat? I was really having problems walking at this point. The treatments had made them larger and more painful.

My dermatologist, who was an open-minded kind of guy, had an idea. Let’s attack the beasts from the other end of your body, your head, he said. Biofeedback and hypnosis had been used with some success to train people’s bodies to reject warts and other skin problems.

But a guy at Eastern Virginia Medical School told me, after testing me with various gizmos, that biofeedback would probably take six months of daily sessions and cost thousands of dollars, most of which my insurance would not cover.

I didn’t like it but decided to try it. And curing warts through biofeedback and hypnosis would be a pretty good story. But that’s not what happened.

My wife visited a local chiropractor, Dr. Carl Nelson, bless his name and soul forever. She mentioned my wart problem, and he recalled a treatment he had heard about developed at the Mayo Clinic.

Here it is.

Soak your feet in hot water, he said, for 15 minutes a night for two weeks. Take 100,000 units of Vitamin A a day, only start this a few days before the hot water treatment and continue for just one week. During the treatment itself, take at least 1,000 units of Vitamin C a day. After each treatment, rub liquid vitamin E on the warts.

The theory was that warts were viruses. And as viruses, heat should kill them. The vitamins somehow boosted the process along. This was a ridiculous notion, and I had no faith in it. But I tried it.

Every night I soaked my feet in a plastic tub. I couldn’t stand the 118-120 degrees Nelson recommended, only about 112 degrees. I used the vitamins he recommended.

My crusty foot crustaceans didn’t change during the treatments, but a week or so afterward, I noticed all the warts had turned black. And then they slowly shrank, leaving my feet wart-free in a few weeks.

As they are right now, more than a year later.

All this leaves only one question.

Who put together the massive conspiracy of laser doctors and dermatologists to keep this simple, cheap treatment a secret?

My laser guy, who I called with the news, was actually pretty interested in my treatments and not that surprised. He said the Vitamin A might have as much to do with it as the hot water. This vitamin had had some success in spurring the body to gather its defenses together and beat skin problems. Because my body essentially rejected the warts, I was now probably immune to them, something that doesn’t happen with lasers. So why hadn’t he mention it?

Well, he said, most people, believe it or not, get angry if they come for a simple laser cure and you tell them to take a hot bath. And Vitamin A, taken in large doses for too long, could be harmful.

The lesson of all this, besides the inefficacy of Western medicine, is that if you work at something long enough, you may win in the end. Even against warts.