After much education, research and deliberation among me, myself and I......
I have determined that we don't know shit.

We might think we know quite a lot of shit but really we don't. I guess it comes down to how do you know you know what you think you know?

For instance; if in 5000 years from now, or however long it takes for the small details of our lifestyle to become lost, assuming the earth and human life still exists at that point in time, and artifacts from our current day and time were dug up and among the artifacts was a keyboard. Not a typewriter, not a computer nor a monitor, but a keyboard. Wouldn't it stand to reason that the first letter in our alphabet was "Q"? And if Q was the first letter of our alphabet, then what am I saying to you now? Probably not what you or I think I am saying, that's for sure.

If our alphabet went the way of a keyboard layout, then the word "cat" would actually be "eqz."

Why is a keyboard laid out that way? I have been told it was because in the making of the typewriter, if the keys were in alphabetical order, based on the probability of certain letters typically following other certain letters, the striking keys would get stuck together constantly. I would think a helluva a lot of thinking had to go into this non stick design which would amount to nothing short of Typewriter Science. Typewriter Science, I would think, would be such an enormous undertaking and knowledge of all words in a particular language and the probability of what letters most often come before and after others, etc that in our present time it would be the work of a computer to figure out. But since there were no computers - not like there are these days - it was the work of a human brain.

It would be too inconvenient, now that we use keyboards that do not have striking keys, to put the keyboard in the more logical alphabetical order, because then everyone who already knows how to type would be reduced to the hunt and peck method of typing...... welcome to my world.

The above explanation sounds pretty reasonable, but what about all those "other" languages? The ones that use letters that look like ours, but they are of a different language? What if our keyboard is laid out according to their alphabet and it was just a practical joke by someone who is too smart for their own good. Someone whose jokes are almost never funny to anyone except themselves. Then when people and companies started paying big bucks for this practical joke of a communication/information machine, they just fabricated a story that seemed logical enough but they figured there was likely no one with so much time, or monkeys, on their hands to test out the theory of probability of the typewriter. So in some probability, at least in my mind, there is a chance that we are typing in ancient Runes.

Which brings up another subject.

What if I want to type in Egyptian hieroglyphics? Can I get a keyboard for that? Would it be laid out is some equivalent translation to QWERTYUIOPASDFGHJKLZXCVBNM? Or would it have it's own archaic layout? Maybe it would be logically designed in first to last order.

Why do we not have keyboards of ancient characters that would allow people to type in ancient languages and keep what knowledge we do have, or think we have, of the past alive?

One cool thing would be a setting on our computers where we select what language we want all input to be, and using our regular (in my case, English) keyboard, I just type what I want to say and it is automatically and accurately translated - then once the final punctuation on a sentence has been typed it would then be reformatted and proper word substitutions inserted to make it read like I knew, or at least thought I knew, what I was talking about.

 See this is what happens when I am left to twiddle my thumbs for 3 hours (Noah had to retake the CRCT test today at a not nearby school so I had to wait it out). I had a latte, read the first chapter of a book on the coffee shop counter, read some more of Scar Tissue, hung out in my car, cranked the radio with my hand in the rock sign & raised high with a mock thrash - while I sat in the elementary school parking lot. Sat in the car with the windows up to see how long I could take it and to test if even the slightest movement in the car's hotness would make me sweat. It did. Stared into space. Thought and thought and thought. Finally I opened the car door and read a little more of Scar Tissue when a teacher approached and asked me what the hell I was doing there - only nicer. He was finished! On the way home I jumped on a train (of thought) and ended up in an unplanned destination (wondering about keyboards, ancient civilizations and why we think we're so damed smart when we really don't know jack squat - in the whole how much there is to know vs. what we actually know (or think we know) realm of possibilities. I had some thoughts about Dinosaurs, bicycles and wal-mart, too, but enough's enough, right?