cognoshanty

the longest i've ever typed two alternating letters before making a mistake

fjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfj
fjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfj
fjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfj
fjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfj
fjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfj
fjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfj
fjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfjfj
fjfjfjfjj

That's 807 letters, 404 j and 403 f*, ending in "jj".

It went like this: I opened a document for writing in, started doing a frenetic fjfjfjfjfj... to limber up, to let go of some tension. I realized that I was enjoying it and that I had gotten beyond 35 or 40 without making a single mistake. Which made me feel funny: what was it about me that normally made me hit the wrong key after a few seconds of an exercise like this? Meanwhile, I kept it up. The width of the screen was now full. I was discovering the first of two types of cramp that I was going to experience. I shifted my fingers and hands to alleviate the pain, thinking ahead about how many other positions there could be before I had to go back to the first, wondering if the number would be enough for me to rest the other muscles for sufficient time so that cramps would be staved off at a rate preventing them from becoming so bad that they would be the exclusive cause of a mistake--a searing arm seizing up and hitting the c instead of the f, the brain's attention exhausted by the pain to the point where it doesn't know which letter comes next... Even now I still have some deeper muscle tissue in my forearm that is sore, and that I don't remember ever being sore before... However, crampzilla is not what got me in the end. Oh, but it hurt.

After a while I was resigned to some pain, and my mind began to wander. I wondered if I would stumble if I started thinking too much about me doing what I was doing, because it always seems that I am most timid and error-prone when I am most self-conscious. I experimented with little doses of self-consciousness, but I remained very cautious. And I kept going. Still no errors!

Quickly I noticed the shape that "fj" made in my on-screen font. It looks like a stogie or a cigarette-lighter. It's so cute. I watched the little cigars dance by for a while, so amusing! And I didn't see a single "jj" or "fk" float by. Amazing!

I wondered how much time I could let elapse between key presses and still consider that I haven't stopped typing. I ended up deciding that there was no limit. As long as I didn't type another letter or the wrong letter at the wrong time, the attempt was good.

This disheartened me a bit. I thought of how long I could last if I started economizing myself. Call in sick tomorrow, do a few hours in the morning, a few more in the afternoon, make sure that I don't have to type anything on my way to drop Olivia off at the airport, come back for a few more hours at night, and then decide whether I've had enough or if I'd take Friday off too (and then it's Labor Day weekend!). How depressing.

I started to speed up, and then speed up some more, tempting the stumble. On and on it went, a perfect alternation of f and j. By turns I was mesmerized by the movement of my hands or by the shortening horizontal scrollbar. I was at a point where pixel-wide slivers seemed to be falling off the left edge every keystroke, then every one and a half keystrokes. For a while, I watched the alternation of the 01010101 and 10101010 edges of the halftone scrollbar background play against the left drop-shadow of the 3D button widget.

My speed was good, but my cramps were catching up with me. I plotted a suicidal final burst, and slowed down for a little rest first. Since I was going to do crazy experiments that might rush the conclusion, I decided that I'd enjoy it more if I let myself catch my breath now and then. Mind you, during the whole exercise I never let anywhere near a second come between keystrokes.

I coasted along leisurely for a while, then got myself ready for the burst. I went down a thread of thought that made me more self-conscious again, and this time I had a hard time controlling it. I had to cut back my speed a couple times. I was imagining all the ways I could fail. My thumbs kept grazing the space bar. Surely one of them would depress it enough to insert a sequence-ending " ". My index fingers were also hitting close to the edges of their keys sometimes. One of them just had to come down in the valley at some point. "df", done. I was bound to lose coordination, to fall out of sync, without even noticing it hitting the f and the j closer and closer together until my j finger cut ahead of the f, ending the run.

Turns out I still had it in me to do a couple of hair-raising bursts!

What finally did me in was unexpected. Toward the end of my second deceleration, I suddenly became confused about where I was going next. What stable, inter-burst rate did I want to park at? In quick succession, my brain said "eh, this speed is good." and "nah, a bit slower" and what happened is that my left hand obeyed the slow-down order, but my right faltered, as if the signal it received had interference from the other path of intentionality. My f-finger dropped to a speed where the next f was more than a half second away. My right index finger wavered at its indeterminate speed but ended up coming down, haltingly, on the j. I watched it make the mistake, aware of what was coming. There was nothing I could do about it. I distinctly remember thinking "Oh no!" before the key was even hit.

Very interesting. Not what I had set out to write about, but there you have it.

--
* Newlines inserted for clarity.

What command-line options are there for counting individual letters on a line? My grep doesn't seem to do match counting. I resorted to some slightly twisted perl in order to get the parameter (the letter being counted) as far back as possible:

cat alternating-letter-record.txt | perl -n -e 'print $g unless &{sub{$g++ while/j/g}}'

Then I remembered the return value of s///:

cat alternating-letter-record.txt | perl -n -e 'print s/f//g'

A non-Perl way:

sed 's/[^j]//g' alternating-letter-record.txt | wc -c

Posted by Erik at August 31, 2007 12:12 PM