5 ms·
He would have had to expend quite some calories to type that out every time on an ancient keyboard with chunky keys and massive travel.
by frou_dh 7y ago
He would have had to expend quite some calories to type that out every time on an ancient keyboard with chunky keys and massive travel.
- floatingatoll 7y agoUphill! Both ways! How many fewer calories do I burn when typing on a low-travel keyboard rather than an old mainframe keyboard?
- CDSlice 7y agoProbably not very many. According to XKCD What If? [1] a modern keyboard takes around 2 millijoules to press a key. Typing a full novel would take a few kilojoules. Even if an old mainframe keyboard took 10x more power to press the keys you would save less than a AA battery worth of energy over writing a full novel. [1] https://what-if.xkcd.com/102/ https://what-if.xkcd.com/102/
- floatingatoll 7y agoUsing some conversions from an internet site, one AA battery is 1.3e4 Joules and a human requires 8.4e6 Joules per day, so about 133 seconds of energy saved per 6 months of novel, or two lost seconds of calorie burning exercise every three days. (Lots of sketchy napkin math here)
- aasasd 7y agoI can just say that attempting to even begin learning to play bass guitar had me exercising the fingers for two–three hours before they stopped feeling like wooden sticks on the strings. Almost every day. I.e. mashing the keyboard is no workout at all. This means, however, that a typewriter would likely noticeably exhaust a modern keyboard jockey, though not in eight characters (hopefully). But dunno about teletypes.