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Uphill! Both ways!

How many fewer calories do I burn when typing on a low-travel keyboard rather than an old mainframe keyboard?




I 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.


Probably 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/


Using 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)




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