cat > /dev/kb

I'd like to bring up a very important topic for all my inky-fingered friends (and I am not
referring to my experiments with spilling Quink on the ebony fretboard to see if I can play faster).

The cats. come and sit. on the keyboard. in front of the screen. while you're trying to work.

How can we fix this? 

Well, here's my patented invention that I think is going to work.

You know how the keyboard layout was invented by Benjamin Franklin for President Theodore Roosevelt when he was digging the Panama Canal? It is an oft told tale - the problem was that all the typists producing  reports to send back to Washington DC had to type an inordinate number of lower case 'a's every time just to get the headed paper to look right. For this reason, they moved the keys for 'l', 'n', 'm' and 'p' as far away from the 'a' as they could get them. Back in those days, most people were one or two fingered typists so this slowed them down, so that the 'a' key stopped breaking, leading to incredible misunderstandings between the  rmy, nvy and rfrce ('o' was a lesser,but not insignificnt prblm).

So the new keyboards worked a treat until they started working with a French company who still used the old Aztec name Pznzmz Cxnxl, which led to the second new keyboard, which nous aimions tres biens ces jours. and so on and so forth.

As code breakers amongst you will remember, (or possible Sherlock Holmes stick insect fans) the problem is to do with the popularity of different letters f the alphabet in different tongues. Why the alphabet is in alphabetical order is an interesting question which I'll leave for later  (just noting for now that it isn't, for example, in Arabic, Hebrew, Greek and Cyril Smith's languages, the third letter is 'g', not 'c' - go figure how the Romans got that wrong along with really poor ways of counting). And of course, Scrabble scores - which are in the opposite order to the popularity of letters ( a bit like Nathaniel Hawthorne's novels).

So "how does this solve a problem like a cat?", I hear you ask, Maria.

Easy peasy. we place bigger springs under the unpopular letters and so when the cat sits on the nice warm laptop keyboard, instead of getting a gentle purr like vive from the fan, it gets prodded uncomfortable in random places.

This will also let us revert the keyboard layout to being alphabetic, since it will just be harder to depress the unpopular letters which will slow us down between popular ones.

Of course we could confuse the cat further (as if such a thing were possible or even desirable) by choosing springs from a French or dare I  even suggest, a Chinese (Mandarin, not Catonese (sic), of course) layout of spring constants. By Hooke or by Crooke, we will have to solve the problem that the Chinese layout would require at least 5 springs of different strengths to operate really successfully, but we believe that yhe market for this in china will be as big as that for Dragon Nets.

I will be inviting investors to my alpha-beta-gamma product launches shortly, meanwhile I leave you with the experimental result that  you may wish to try as well, in these distracted days. You can teach your cat a foreign language easily. I have ours completely versed in French - when I say va't en or viens ici, she behaves in exacfly the same way as when I say "get the 'f off that keyboard" or "where are you didums". This does not work with dogs. In fact I know several dogs in the Dordogne that response to "Get off my leg fido" in exactly the same way as if you offer them a biscuit.

Science is a marvellous thing when used carefully.Electromagnets more so - in the new version (delta-key) of the boards above, we replace the springs by electromagnets and now can use this to train humans to type faster, and untrain cats to sit on the keys. Gnu Emacs key bindings will be available shortly.

References

Keyboards:
qwerty or azerty

Frequentists:
code breakers and scrabble

Dvorak:
chording

Medication:
While waiting for the coffee to brew,