Hey, Vsauce. Michael here. And thank you for clicking on this video. But how many times
a day do you click? And how many times a day do you type keys on a keyboard? You might
be surprised by the answer. And one of the best ways to know exactly how many actions
you're taking per day is to use software like WhatPulse.
WhatPulse measures how often you do things. Keystrokes, mouse clicks. It even measures
the total distance you've moved your cursor. It's really fun stuff to track and,
of course, depending on who you are, or what day it is, or what you do, your totals per
day will change. But it's been found that, on average, people who use computers a lot,
like office workers, type around 5,000 to 10,000 keystrokes every day. And they click a mouse
about 1,500 to 3,000 times a day. Interestingly, computer users in the UK typed the most.
Sitting down and using a computer - typing, scrolling, moving the mouse - burns about 20
more calories an hour than just doing nothing. I mean, if you do nothing, you're still
using calories. It takes energy for you to exist. You have to keep your body temperature
where it should be, you have to breath, pump blood. To figure out how many calories it
takes, per day, for you to just exist, simply take your weight in pounds and multiply
it by 11. If you want to be more specific, take your weight in kilograms and multiply
it by .02. What you wind up with is the number of calories it takes, per minute, to keep
you existing. That's the number of calories that you burn every minute doing nothing.
It's not very much. And using a computer doesn't raise it that much higher, but don't be discouraged,
because typing and texting can bind us together.
We text and type on keyboards a lot. And rapidly. In fact, every day, 6 billion text messages
are sent. And there are only 7 billion people on Earth.
And that's just texting. We'll add keyboard typing in a little bit later. But I want
to take a quick detour and talk about the letters, and the characters, and the keys themselves.
They're not all pressed the same number of times. Some are more common than others. Let's
begin visually. This is a sculpture of a keyboard, where every letter has been raised to a height
that corresponds to its popularity compared to the other letters. The letter "E" is the
most common letter typed in almost every language that has a letter "E."
But to figure out letter frequencies in texts that you type yourself, use Patrick Wied's
heat map. On this site you can type a sentence in and see how frequently the characters are
used. For instance, this sentence contains every letter in the alphabet at least once,
but it uses "E" and "O" the most.
Roughly speaking, and considering different languages, of all the characters typed, or
tapped on a phone everyday, about 9% of them are the letter "E," which is a lot, but the
letter "E" is not the most common key. The space bar is the most commonly pressed key -
nearly twice as popular as the letter "E."
Now that we know about the space bar's popularity, let's return to texting and add in keyboard
typing. If we assume that about 350 million people are typing 5-10,000 characters a day
on keyboards, and add that to the number of characters being texted everyday, we can do
a little bit of math and determine that at any given second, here, on Earth, the space
bar is being pressed 6 million times.
6 million spaces bar a second! What a great world, right? Well, let's think of it this
way. Because it only takes 1/10th of a second to tap, or type, a space bar, when you push
the space bar, statistically speaking, as many as 600,000 other people on Earth did
that at the exact same time that you did.
So, if you ever feel alone, just give yourself some space and know that more than half a
million people are doing that exact same thing.
And as always,
thanks for watching.