On QWERTY keyboards

If you're given to thinking about stuff(ie; not a Leftist), you might be wondering about why your computer keyboard is designed the way it is.  After all, the letters most used in the English language bear no relation to where your hands are placed.  It's almost like it was designed to make typing less efficient!

Well, it was.  The most efficient keyboard for typing English is the Dvorak keyboard, but it hasn't really caught on, for reasons of simple inertia.  Everyone learned to type on a QWERTY board, and they're not really interested in relearning an entrenched skill.



So, why on God's green Earth would anyone design a keyboard to make typing less efficient?  The answer requires us to travel back into the dim and distant past.  A time when we had to hop from one foot to another as the crust of the planet cooled, and our greatest fear was being caught unawares and scooped up by a pterodactyl.  A time not only before the internet, but before personal computers.  Yes, there was such a time.  And, believe it or not, I lived through it.

Back in those simple days, men were real men and sheep were real nervous when we needed to broadcast our thoughts to the world but our handwriting sucked, we turned to a device called a type-writer.  It was a keyboard attached to a steampunk-style array of levers which would slam a small plate embedded with a reversed alphabetical character against a sheet of paper, with an ink-embedded cloth ribbon sandwiched between the two.  This would embed the ink into the paper in the shape of the selected letter.  Pretty innovative for a bunch of geezers who'd never even heard of an mp3 or a cell phone, huh?

So, what does that have to do with the design of the board?  Well, some folks back then would get to typing so fast that they would overwhelm the 'return spring' of the type-writer, which would result in 'stuck keys' like this:

This is why the QWERTY board was, in fact, designed to slow down faster typists so they wouldn't spend half the day unsticking the keys.  And this configuration simply migrated over to the computers of today, even though no one can type faster than an electron.  (Though many people do seem to be able to type faster than their own thought processes.)  So, why am I rambling on about these type-writer things, anyway?

Well, the graphic analysis of the alleged Obummer Birth Certificate is being picked apart by the usual O-pologists, who are making all sorts of excuses as to why none of the observed discrepancies actually exist.  But you don't need to be a graphics geek (I'm sure as hell not) to ascertain that this BC is BS.

Examine the above picture of the type-writer.  These devices were supposed to type all the characters in a straight line, but rarely did.  Certain letters would be slightly misaligned, like the 'n' would be a little low, the 'o' might be a little high.  This was commonplace.  In fact, the police of those days could tell whether or not a letter was written from a certain type-writer fairly easily, simply by analyzing the alignment of the letters.  One thing, though...when a letter was misaligned, it remained that way.  A low 'n' would always be a low 'n' until the machine was serviced by a qualified repairman.  The entire document would show the same lows and highs consistently.

And this one doesn't.  Back to the drawing board, Obamanoids.