The science of typing

Hello and thank you for making few clicks to reach this particular site.

But how many times did you click today? How many buttons have you pressed?

You might be thinking “Well, it depends!”, and you are right. One way to know how much you type is using some counting software.

You could download “WhatPulse”, a useful little program that will count your mouse clicks, key pressings and even meters crossed with your mouse!

As  you guessed, I can’t say you typed a lot today or in total, but some studies have shown that people who spend a good amount of time on computers (like office workers) tend to type from 5000 to 10000 keystrokes every day, while clicking from 1500 to 3000 times every day. Studies have also shown that people in the UK type the most.

But there are other button-using gadgets, not just keyboards for computers! What about texting, on phones? Well texting is a big part of our topic here, since we humans all together send 6 000 000 000 messages every day, there are only 7 000 000 000 people on earth!

We type the equivalent 0f The Complete Works of William Shakespeare everyday…18 000 times.

And that is just texting!

Now, let’s get back to typing. Not every key is pressed the same amounts of time, stats have shown that we use the letter E the most.

Well, most of the languages that have letter E within them uses that letter the most.

Here is a sculpture of a keyboard. Every buttons’ height corresponds to it’s popularity compared to the other letters.

9 % of all the letters ever typed is the letter E, but what about characters, not letters? Well it seems that the spacebar is used almost as twice as much as the letter E.

With some info that we have available, we are able to do some rough math and say that at any given second, the space bar is pressed (on keyboards, phones or anywhere) 6 000 000 times. Just try counting to 5 and think about how many times the space bar was pressed while you were counting, by the time you do the rough math, you have yourself another 30 000 000 space bars pressed in our world.

It takes around 1/10 of a second to type the spacebar, so, statisticaly speaking, whenever you press the spacebar, 600 000 people in this world pressed the spacebar at the exact same time.

So if you ever feel alone, try getting Space (pun intended) and know that 600 000 other people are doing the exact same thing.

If this is somewhat depressing, remember that typing takes off 20 calories every hour! Well that’s not much but it’s at least something.

Thanks for reading.

Source: Vsauce

Comments are always welcome, please tell if you want more random suprising topics or do you want some more specific areas covered. Let me know!

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