Jay Leno ran a contest between two kids with cell phones (one of whom is the fastest SMS messager around—who runs these contests?), and a couple of grizzled old guys with Morse Code tappers. Naturally, Morse Code won.

Equally naturally, the show says nothing about why SMS is better technology. The guy receiving the SMS message just has to read English, or at least, the hily cmprsed Eng f SMS msgs. The guy getting the Morse needed the same forty years of training to get the message that the guy needed to send it.

I had my own experience with this years ago when Plenarcast was in the business of transcribing conference talks, in the pre-audio streaming days. My solution was to hand out a stack of laptops and give my temps a training on how to get a good transcript by freetyping without any editing; the result was a good but not verbatim transcript. One day, a fiftyish temp shows up and declines my laptop, showing me her shorthand steno pad.

Need I mention that she had the highest accuracy and fastest turnaround of anyone I ever hired?