Double thanks! Private Internet Access privateinternetaccess.com/standupmaths (For 2.08 $/month we can be VPN buddies.) and of course my Patreons. If you cannot find your name in the spreadsheet credits, ask me for your keyboard distance over here: privateinternetaccess.com/standupmaths And thanks to the folks at pi-ratebay.com/ they are the real heroes.
@@DayInDaLife Nah, the problem with going away from qwertz (or in my case qwertz since I'm german) is that you would have to rebind a lot of keys in games and Programms + as far as I know, no alternative layout has the öäüß Keys I need for my school work...
"If you accept the definition that a word as some letters, surrounded by a gap, then xnopyt, aaaaaaajjjjjjjjj, hrrkrkrkrwpfrbrbrbrlablblblblblblwhitoo'ap, are all words" ~Tom Scott
@@PhilHibbs in the video he was talking about moving around on a keyboard and on a keyboard the keys are misaligned which means that going up and down on a keyboard will automatically mean you're also going side to side.
In fact, if I were to ever found a settlement, I might call it Hypotenuse Town (Town being part of the name, so it keeps this no matter how big it grows. I grew up in a town that had City in it's name.), and all of the city blocks would be triangles, making all of the intersections 3-way. (Or roundabouts, of course.) *fires up Cities: Skylines*
I'm pretty sure Matt is as close as we have to a modern day Greek "philosopher"... an extremely bright person who just sits around and thinks about stuff all day.
you know there are people alive today who have the actual job 'philosopher'???? and a degree for it?? do you think no one else has a job involving thinking about things?!?!
That "Mathematics, he wrote" intro was both the funniest look I could have ever imagined Matt having and the most sublime version of the Stand-up Maths theme I've heard so far.
This has an important application in spell checking, as most typing errors comes from missing a key and press one adjacent to it. So if you misspell a word, your spell checker should suggest the word with the closest “distance” to it.
Google and Shazam searches also work like this, just with many dimensions. The closer a result is to the input in the multidimensional space, the more relevant it is.
"But Mr. Parker, what is the point of learning this stuff about vectors? It's totally useless in the real world!" "You could calculate the pointiest words on a keyboard." "Thanks, Mr. Parker! Now suddenly math is total fun for me."
This, made me find my inner British schoolboy voice, who speaks in perfect Received Pronunciation. Surely the second paragraph come in Matt's voice. Got those a while ago.
You don't study higher maths at school because it's "useful". You study maths and languages at school because they are the best ways to rigorously train your mind.
Fun fact: The word spa originated from the Belgian village Spa, renowned for its mineral springs. Unfortunately the inhabitants in Spa can't enjoy how pointy the word is because the AZERTY key layout is used there.
in our local language, we use "namumunumunuan", which means "pretend ruler" or "a ruler that power trips", and "namumuhumuhunan" which means "pretending to invest" or something (it's hard to express the essence of the word in english). they are written in alphabet, yes.
@@snsnni The inclusion of multiple m, n, u, and h letters in the word would certainly make the word appropriate for calligraphic practice. What language is that?
@@bw0n6 it's tagalog, a filipino language. they do have long trains of m's, u's, n's, and h's bc of its repetition of syllables wc is a grammatic rule to change the words' meaning. so we have quite a handful of long calligraphy friendly words. it's a really strange and beautiful language.
As a chemistry major I appreciate the longest word (in letters) in your dataset, but my biology professor has it beat with perhydrocyclopentanophenanthrene - which he was quite surprised I remembered 1 semester after teaching it, and I still remember more than a decade later. It's the name of the base molecule for various cholesterols.
"See, everyday use of Pythagorus!" "Hmm, interesting, and what is this everyday use?" "Putting together a logic to measure distance travelled between keyboard keys..." "I see. Could happen to anyone, any day."
Huh this is actually really interesting as someone who types on their phone with the 'swipe' method, the intended audience for those distance calculations haha
@@HelgeMoulding It has been a major issue for me over the years making accidental typos, especially with had/has and if/is but on the other hand I also know where all the letters are on the keyboard really well so I don't know if a different layout would help.
Been using gesture typing for almost a decade. The many issue that comes up are straight line disambiguation, like "cores" and "chores" that I encountered today.
I'd like to add a few words for everyone's consideration: DREAD, alternatively READ. Has a wonderful little circle motion. Hours of fun. WARD is another good one with an easy but satisfying one-hand motion. MINIMUM is still really very good, though; definitely hard to beat that one.
14:37 “Deess” is an obsolete word meaning goddess. Deo/Deus being masculine for god, Deess being feminine for goddess, Deity being neutral. The pronunciation would have been more like DAY-ESS, rather than DEE-S.
When we were making Swype, I explored a lot of similar things. Our dictionary for English was smaller, but the words we used were first categorized by usage frequency. Some of the words you chose in this video weren't ones we had in our dictionary, but it was still interesting to explore. We also came up with word art. By changing the trace fade timeout so that it wouldn't disappear until you start the next word, you could draw pictures which were words. Because Swype was looking in its dictionary of words, the precision could be off with respect to what key you actually went to, so the art could be a little more expressive and you'd still get the word you intended. "BANANA" was a word which could be traced and you would have a nice picture of a banana with the ridges on the fruit visible in the sketch. My favorite was "COSMIC" because with the tolerances I described you could create an elongated star -- very swooshy and stylistic.
What a small world! I was just thinking how his distance and angle calculations are actually quite relevant for swipe-style keyboards and was disappointed that he didn’t make that point in the video. But here you are actually having developed them! That’s super cool, thanks for sharing that story :)
I love how any mathematics involving spelling just devolves into "This string has this property. Yes, apparently it is a word. No, I've never heard of it either.".
As a german Maths student i really enjoy listen to ur vids when going to sleep. Yesterday I got really upset as I understood lettuce every time u said letters O.o I never had any difficulties with english accents till today :D Just thought it would be fun to share .) Have a great day everyone!
I have never experienced a more "this is for my audience, and we get each-other" video in my life. I love this video so much, but can't think of anyone who I can share it with, who isn't already a subscriber.
Nice. “Mathematics He Wrote” deserves a prime time series. I look forward to reading your paper on this subject at the next Annals of Recreational Lexicography, Graphology and Typing.
I'm sure someone must already have asked this - is it possible, using these measurements and this database of words, to redefine the keyboard layout for minimum expected finger travel? I know that's kind of the concept of the Dvorak layout, but that was designed in 1936, without these kinds of tools.
Pretty sure Dvorak was also supposedly optimized for home-row touch-typing, not one-finger hunt-and-peck. The layout of something optimized for hunt-and-peck would be _much_ different I'd imagine.
Yes! There are lots of alternative layouts that are far superior to qwerty. Colemak is a popular one. Dvorak is another alternative. Workman, Halmak, RSTHD. Halmak was designed using a genetic algorithm. RSTHD was designed using simulated annealing. Lots of different designs to cater for different styles of typing.
There's a ton of layouts, there's some even designed as a balanced measure for people who know qwerty but want to improve ergonomics with as few alterations as possible.
I think it would be interesting to expand this for touchtyping and other keyboard layouts. A truly “optimal” layout matters less than your familiarity with it, but it is still interesting
As both a recreational mathematician *and* a recreational linguist, I can't express quite how much I love this video. Absolutely amazing, Matt, so good!
Crazy idea, run a novel through your typing distance program. I want to know how far an author had to move their fingers to type a book, next level would be a book series (go all in with wheel of time haha)
alternatively, there's the Foreigner sequence by C.J. Cherryh, that's a long haul at 22 books so far, and is going to go to 27, because 27 is just... such a good number. The Atevi -love- are very pleased by the number three.
At 5:40, Matt officially found the most useful application of the Pythagoras theorem, (I learnt it to be Pythagoras by the way, and not Pythagorus). Trinity Music College, London awarded him for this discovery and now it is used to produce papers for printing.
But Matt, what's the longest word you can type without crossing over a previous vector? What's the longest word with the most cross-overs? We need to know!
The longest words I can find without crossing over are CLAPPER and POLARITY. NUMBERY is also a great one, simply because it has "number" in it, but alas, it is a much shorter distance than CLARITY and POLARITY. I shall now anxiously await Matt's answer! As for the most cross-overs? I'll throw RELINQUISHMENT into the hat, because the final M-E-N-T does a ton of damage by crossing lots of previous vectors at the same time. It's pretty cool that there isn't much crossing up till that point, and then there's a whole slew of it! Although I assume Matt's algorithm will find something better.
@@joeloftus6148 CLAPPER passes over P-E with E-R (as they're on the same plane) as does POLARITY (IT passes over RI, as does TY). The longest I can think of off the top of my head is "LINGER" or "ANGLER" My guess for most is "STEWARDESSES".
@@murphy54000 Oh yeah, I knew there was a slight issue with "same plane" movement, but I was just following what Matt does in the video, ignoring all angles of 0 or 180 degrees. If you want to count "doesn't cross over" as "also doesn't repeat on itself", then it does indeed get much more limited. ANKLET improves ANGLER by 19.05mm!
I love how as soon as you said type and minimum, before even saying how satisfying it was to type, the FIRST think my mind went to was that fluid up and down motion of typing. minimum. minimum. minimum, it's great
"A use of pythagoras in everyday life". AH yes, everyday life. I certainly often feel it necessary to find the distance between keys. Such a relatable moment
As a joiner, 'The fence post problem' is enough to explain the letters/gaps disparity. It appears all the time in joinery. Calculating the space between spindles in a balustrade is made more complicated by the fact that there is one more spindle than gap (Counting newels as spindles). When calculating the width of doors for a wardrobe you have to keep in mind that there will be one more divider than the number of doors. And of course, you always need one more fencepost than fence panels.
Same in metal works whenever you want a row of holes at a certain distance along a certain length. Gets real nice if each end needs another distance from the workpiece's edges xD Hint: just remember the formula for the last one as it is more versatile and the "standard" fence case is applicable aswell
Well, in russian culture ZOG is well-known as a name of an organization in a particular conspiracy theory. So I wonder if Matt avoided the word because it is quite racist, because it is an abbreviation (are those "words"?), or because it is not that recognizable in English?
@@ssdd28561 I'm not English, but I speak it quite fluently. That said I've never heard or read any reference to the Russian word ZOG, actually in the west we are generally pretty ignorant about the russian and estern european cultures. It's no surprise given the cold war and all the propaganda associated with it up to the 90s
The fact that Matt provides all the files and stuff he uses, not only 1: has made my University career so much easier, but 2. also makes this my favorite favorite channel because I can mess with and experiment more with what Matt already did
This could be a fun way of comparing the alternative layouts, like Dvorak and colemak, no? Disregarding the fact that they are explicitly made for touch typing, maybe this could test if they would be better for the "double hunt and peck approach" as well.
Then optimized layouts would be a circle keyboard. Bunch the keys as close together as possible. Put most popular letters in middle (vowels) and bridge out.
@@simcowgames981 Very interesting applications in hyper-realistic sci-fi media, personal communications devices with a wildly different keyboard layout.
Matt thank you for your hard work, you are like a unicorn, completely non replace able Thank goodness. Now I cannot use the type writer keyboard without being highly self conscious about how far I travel in hunting and pecking along. (like a lot of comp sci folk from the 70's and 80's we WERE NOT touch typists) now they teach touch typing in elementary school. I am thinking about taking all keyboards that are used, and melding them together into a hyper hybrid, having multiple vowels (like five e's, etc according to etoain schrdlu). Anyway I am in basement slamming multiple KB's together thanks to you, my friend. Have a Happy New Year!
@@thoop6795 Disagree. I've used several in my life and while they were newer than this they never required hunt and peck. You just adjust your press down
@@angelodc1652 I'm a german. It is our hobby to construct single long words out of smaller words such as "Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz". Therefore I vote for counting "seven-digit" as one word.
For those who are wondering about "Deess": Deessing (pronounced "De-Essing") is the process of reducing sibilance in a voice recording. Great video as always Matt!
There's actually another meaning to this one that I found online: it's an archaic word that's basically the feminine version of "deity", i.e. a goddess.
from latin "deus" (god) and "dea" (goddess). Since the English language often uses the -ess ending to give a word a feminine connotation we can se how the word "deess" can stem from the latin radix "de-"
The first word that came to my mind have a Z, O and G in it is "zigzagoon" which is the name of a pokemon so not really an English word but it is very pointy and makes a neat shape on your keyboard that touches the extreme left, extreme right and exact middle of your keyboard!
I would love to see a part 2 of this video exploring alternative layouts like Dvorak and Colemak, or even an attempt at creating a keyboard optimised for one finger use!
I have to say, I'm surprised that a man who types with two independently moving fingers didn't compute the word with the largest distance traveled when using two independently moving fingers. Sounds like an everyday practical application for ~*dynamic programming*~. Papal would score low because the "a"s are handled by one finger and the "pl"s by the other.
My favorite words would be those where you type with the minimal distance for two fingers and and end up with the left hand on the right side and vice versa.
That would, of course, still be a bit of a Parker effort. Proper typing technique should naturally be considered, with fingers starting from natural position on the home row.
@@PaulPaulPaulson It probably gets even worse than that. There might be words which require the typist to physically turn their entire body around underneath their arms, or else have arm bones made of rubber, to type with the true minimum double finger distance.
It should be possible to compute the "two finger typing arm winding number" for entire books. How many times did Matt have to spin in a circle as part of typing humple pi, because of his steadfast dedication to optimal unoptimal typing? Only a series of ridiculous approximations resulting an ultimately meaningless number can say for sure.
"Here is some meaningless text for me to type on the typewriter in the opening tiles of the Mathematics, He Wrote video. It may be one of the more silly things I have ever done for my TH-cam channels. While I'm here I should thank my Patreon supporters who mean I can spend my days doing this. And hello to [obscured] pause the video to work out exactly what I was typing the [obscured] I hope it was worth it. I know that is exactly what I w[obscured]." You're welcome.
"[...] And hello to everyone who will pause the video to work out exactly what I was typing in those shots. [...] I know that is exactly what I would do. I should make it clear that this is my own typewriter which I already had. I did not waste Patreon money on this. It was [obscured]"
You're a life saver, normally I'd spend 20 minutes trying to read it all but this time I was smarted and knew someone already did it. May the gods of maths smile upon you and all your calculators.
This is some meaningless text for me to type on the typewriter during the opening tiles of the Mathematics, He Wrote vidoe which may be one of the more silly things I have ever done for my TH-cam channel. While I'm here I should thank my Patreon supporters who m### mean I can spend my days doing this. And hello to everyone who will pause the video to work out exactly what I was typing in these shots. I hope it was worth it. I know that is exactly what I would do. And I should make it clear that this is my own typewriter which I already had. I did not waste Patreonn money on this. It was the minimum amount of effort to get it out of storage. Hmmm. "Minimum." That is as much fun to type on a traditional typewriter as is on a modern keyboard. Minimum. Takes a bit more effort. But is to#tally worht it. I also love using the physical SHIFT key on an old typewriter. The shift lock actually &&&& locks the typewriter in the shiftedposition. And would you believe that this isn't even the only typewriter I own? The other one is from the &0's though and far too modern, &&& MATHEMATICS# MATHEMATICS, HE WROTE
Notes: #s are overtyped characters; &s are characters I couldn't read. The text was written using a monospaced font, but the alignment of the two bottom chunks isn't perfect for the typewritten layout. Also, due to inconsistency in the mechanical carriage return, the alignment of characters in the body of the text won't perfectly match the typewritten page.
Disappointed Matt didn't research which word has the largest total enclosed area, from all the enclosed sub-areas that the connecting lines sometimes produce. Surely there will be a Part 2!
Probably something like covariance. A more easily computable version could be done by using the Shoelace theorem which includes negative areas by calculating the determinant of a matrix with all the coordinates in order.
I’ve always enjoyed “dereference”… you have that satisfying cluster with the left finger, then swoop down for that renegade N, and head back to close it down with the C/E.
I was looking for this comment. I type the word "references" a lot at work. I actually have a list of "fun words to type", including references, minimum, column, and restricted.
Now do the sums again for Dvorak and Colemak layouts? Seriously though, I would recommend putting the time in to touch type! I did it 30 years ago, and it is really worth the effort! I remember the epiphany of realising that I was typing, but that I was thinking about what I wanted to type, not how to type it... Then we could get another of your excellent books more quickly!
Touch typing and keyboard layout have nothing to do with each other, other than that someone who has learned to touch type in one layout won't naturally be able to touch type in another. Layouts are meant to improve efficiency or ergonomics, not memorizability.
The Dvorak thing is just an internet cult, the Wikipedia says: "The Dvorak layout is designed to improve touch-typing, in which the user rests their fingers on the home row. It would have less effect on other methods of typing such as hunt-and-peck. Some studies show favorable results for the Dvorak layout in terms of speed, while others do not show any advantage, with many accusations of bias or lack of scientific rigour among researchers. The first studies were performed by Dvorak and his associates. These showed favorable results and generated accusations of bias.[36] However, research published in 2013 by economist Ricard Torres suggests that the Dvorak layout has definite advantages.[37] In 1956, a study with a sample of 10 people in each group conducted by Earle Strong of the U.S. General Services Administration found Dvorak no more efficient than QWERTY[38] and claimed it would be too costly to retrain the employees.[34] The failure of the study to show any benefit to switching, along with its illustration of the considerable cost of switching, discouraged businesses and governments from making the switch.[39] This study was similarly criticised as being biased in favor of the QWERTY control group.[8] In the 1990s, economists Stan Liebowitz and Stephen E. Margolis wrote articles in the Journal of Law and Economics[36] and Reason magazine[15] where they rejected Dvorak proponents' claims that the dominance of the QWERTY is due to market failure brought on by QWERTY's early adoption, writing, "[T]he evidence in the standard history of Qwerty versus Dvorak is flawed and incomplete. [..] The most dramatic claims are traceable to Dvorak himself; and the best-documented experiments, as well as recent ergonomic studies, suggest little or no advantage for the Dvorak keyboard."[36][40]"
There is a also a "distance function" based on the typing pattern that can be defined for words: this is relevant for example useful for spelling correction, and security (detecting domains that are accidentally typed), and maybe other uses.
"Minimum" remind me of key patterns: I have worked where keypad door entry was used, and the number was changed on a regular basis. Once learned, all the chosen numbers seems to have an intrinsic, meaningful pattern that made the pattern easier to remember than the number sequence. I permitted a temporary speculation that software was being used to generate meaningful patterns, but it was just an arbitrary choice by an individual. It appears that the mind overlays the pattern on the sequence, and my experience suggests how powerful is its instinct to do so.
I've recently forced myself to learn Dvorak layout and now prefer it (or at least it's what I've now got muscle memory for). I wonder how much mathematical difference there is between it and the Qwerty layout since Dvorak is supposedly more efficient, placing more commonly used letters in easier to reach places.
I wanted to learn halmak. It's a really interesting project. Check it out. Almost perfect layout. But I couldn't install it at the time and lost interest. Will try it again soon hopefully
Dvorak IS more efficient. Your fingers travel about 38% less distance than with QWERTY because the more common letters are closer to the home row and easy-to-reach locations. The speed increase doesn’t really matter for everyday typers, it’s more about comfort. My hands used to cramp really bad when typing, but I’ve been typing in Dvorak for almost exactly a decade now and never experienced a cramp since (I had a career where I was typing all day as well). So I would recommend Dvorak for people who don’t necessarily want to get faster but would like more comfort and less cramping.
Hey Matt, audio guy here! To "de-ess" something is to take out the high pitched sibilance, eg. dampening the S-sounds of a vocal performance. I think that's the "deess" in question!
Yep. That's what the OED reckons too, which is just about as definitive as you can get in a descriptive (as opposed to prescriptive) language like English.
OMG, I just imagined this as a graph theory problem. I'm so broken. Every word is a weighted graph. Even on non-standard keyboard you can measure the distance between keys by a common unit: key. Treat the keys as in-phase array and use Pythagoras to find distance of keys in different ranks or files. Now I've watched the video - very impressed by "everyday usage of dot product" - lol
About words that are fun to spell out: Even though it's again a more scientific term, and the English version is actually split in three words rather than the single word in German, "aluminium minimum immunity" (or "Aluminiumminimumimmunität" for that matter) looks satisfying, especially if written in cursive.
The best way I can describe the feeling typing Aluminiumminimumimmunität with one finger: beeb beb bebbep brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr bebbeb beb beeeeb ...
Aluminiumminimumimmunität Oh yes, if fingers could swoon. It's especially fun on a mobile, that last A when you hold and give it the old electric slide across the keyboard to the umlaut. So fun!
I think that Angela would really like that little parody sequence. I know that my grandfather would. He used to watch the show every time it was on the air (this was back before cable was available in my area and right around when VCRs were becoming a thing).
07:30 - I'm german, i've had my share of compound nouns. Non-technical, technical, you name it. The longest german words aren't even that uncommon in everyday speech. And btw, "minimum" is also very satisfying to write by hand imo.
@@rich1051414 It's like Russian (or most other Cyrillic script alphabets), where most of the letters have vertical lines, one to three, and few to no rounded elements that make them stand out. Add to that that Russian print typically is unusually small and very tightly kerned, and it just looks like MHIMN INHNM NMNMMIN MNHMHMNN for most of it...
Regarding how we kept the misalignment of keys despite not having any mechanical reason to do so; The Razer Tartarus keypad uses straight columns, and let me tell you, it took a LONG time for me to get used to that, and it ruined my ability to type on a normal keyboard for quite a while after I did get used to it. I actually experienced physical pain as I adjusted to the straight key columns. And while I can type just fine again on a normal keyboard, I to this day cannot play games on a normal keyboard because of the offset. It's truly odd.
The greatest force for keeping the exact layout is that millions of us have been seriously trained to do 10 finger typing without looking at the keys. Which means all positions must match the learned positions closely enough to not hit a different key when having normal human tendency to be off within each key surface.
@@johndododoe1411 You can swap keys around and pick it up surprisingly fast. If you literally randomized the letters, in 24h of typing you'd be at least 80% your original speed, and if the randomness wasn't randomly bad, you might even get as good or even better, if it just happens to fit your typing style somehow.
@@kindlin As someone using multiple keyboards every day, inconsistency ruins everything. And 24 hour retraining seems like a myth based on fast learners or people without thorough training and experience with the standard layout. But switching keyboards multiple times a day makes 24 hours way too long. I need to switch in seconds to get things done.
Nice video! I'm in a community that generates a lot of optimized alternative keyboard layouts, and we do similar calculations involving key distances for bigrams, skipgrams, trigrams, etc. as well as looking at the amount of alternation, rolling, redirection, etc. there is for the actual movements. Ex: You could use your function that calculates right turns instead to generate an arrangement of keys (a new keyboard layout) which has the most right turns possible (on average). It can sound like a pain to learn, but we have a few people that can generate a brand new layout and get back up to 100+ wpm on it in a couple weeks, and they have the pleasure of typing on something that was optimized for exactly what they enjoy. PS. If you're curious how to make these, it's actually pretty quick to find global optimum in the ~30! search space of a 3x10 keyboard layout. You can start with lots of random ones and make swaps that improve the score of the layout for your objective function. There are cleaner ways of guaranteeing you find global optimum using things like constraint programming, but that isn't needed for just 30 keys.
@@engelsteinberg593 Only a tiny fraction of the search space needs to be explored. The search method I mentioned is similar to methods like Local Search which explore the "neighborhood" of random states by looking at states that can be reached in a couple of swaps. Local Search can find Local Optimum pretty quickly this way, but has no guarantees for finding Global Optimum, so starting with many initial states which you greedily improve can improve your odds of finding a Global Optimum.
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"Typewriter" being the longest word from the top row of a typewriter is so satisfying.
Now the one burning question left is coming up with the optimal keyboard distribution that on average lets you travel the least distance for the words of the english vocabulary (or if we wanna get spicy with it, the most 'brexit-y' keyboard that somewhat minimizes the distance traveled for english but vastly increases it for, say, french or german)
Can't post links on yt but there's an article called "Optimizing 19th Century Typewriters" by Nathan Brixius that does this for an interesting real world one dimensional typewriter design. IIRC he found proving the optimal solution was optimal would take a quadrillion years because there's so many possibilities.
@@7452Michael mathematically optimal would require knowing how common the words are and that depends on the context. Most people will never write some words even though they are rather common (scientific terms for example)
I feel like you missed two strong hypothesis of why minimum is so fun to type: repeating (similar length) paths and consistently similar angles (ignoring 0/360° ones)
If your hypothesis is correct, bananas should be very fun to type. and indeed it is. To me, switching between hands also helps with the fun, so bananas is more fun than minimum :)
Hi Matt. Question: What is the most circular word (360°) with the most angles but the lowest standard deviation or however you measure the roundness? (4x90° excluded) And as a contestant of "minimum", I would propose "wert". It's the German word for "value" and very satisfying to write as you just roll all of your fingers over the keyboard
I think a lot of what he likes about 'minimum' is because he only types with 1 finger per hand. for me, the best words to type are ones that start and end on the left hand with any right-handed letters in the middle. that way it's, click with right hand, start typing immediately because left is already there, and right hand is back on the mouse before I've finished typing
Thanks for the shout-out during the Mathematics, He Wrote intro sequence. Hello to you too, and yes, it was worth pausing it to see what you were typing.
20:00 So what I’m hearing is that King Zog of Albania has the pointiest possible name for anyone to type Also yes I promise King Zog of Albania is a real person. My favorite fact about him is that he may have been the heaviest smoker in human history, consuming over 100 cigarettes everyday.
sMILEs.... slightly more alliterative, if you push the meaning of alliterative or if you can use an s for a bracket/parenthesis....plus it is plural. I win.
Fun fact for anyone who hasn't read any of the discworld books: In "Sourcery" there's a wizard (hopeful archchancellor-to-be) Called "Virrid Wayzygoose", which given Pratchett's love for language, most certainly is a spin on "wayzgoose" (which may be pronounced way-se-goose). Also his first name is a misspelling of "Virid" (which means 'green').
@@AntonioBarba_TheKaneB 1) Is a misspractice the existentce of the cross product. 2) The Wedge product outputs a sensical rotation plane meanwhile the Cross product outputs a nonsencical vector.
Congratulations, you've made me actually laugh out loud. Tea came out of my nose at the part where you conclude how the video got at the point of words with turns in the same direction...
As we all know, calculating the exact distance between each and every pair of letters on the keyboard for a mathemathical youtube video is a thing i do in everyday life, thus pythagoras is a very important and obviously useful thing you use in your day to day life.
The maximum amount of fun writing is definitely given for the name of my hometown Dresden. The n is a little off from the rest, but writing the first six letters is just pure joy because you can write it in a nice and smooth rolling move.
This is a video that answers a lot of questions no one really asks, but I find extremely entertaining as my mind already goes off on long tangents trying to figure out singularly trivial matters. (Yes, I know someone asked these questions, but not in relevant, day to day activities, im just making a silly comment that also shows that I liked this video and I found it entertaining as my mind also follows a similar thought path on silly things)
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PAPALS?
In your “EVERYDAY USE OF PYTHAGORAS” slide, you misspell it “PYTHAGORUS”, with a “U” near the end instead of an “A”.
And I think “Schizogony” should be pronounced “sk-it-z-AW-guh-nee”. Approximately.
And know do it for qwertz Keyboard so I know what I need to do ;D
@@DayInDaLife Nah, the problem with going away from qwertz (or in my case qwertz since I'm german) is that you would have to rebind a lot of keys in games and Programms + as far as I know, no alternative layout has the öäüß Keys I need for my school work...
"If you accept the definition that a word as some letters, surrounded by a gap, then xnopyt, aaaaaaajjjjjjjjj, hrrkrkrkrwpfrbrbrbrlablblblblblblwhitoo'ap, are all words" ~Tom Scott
Qmqmqmqmqmqmqm them
"xnopyt, AA-"
which video sir
@@londonreturns th-cam.com/video/m8niIHChc1Y/w-d-xo.html
"What Counts as a Word?"
@@alkalinekats8300 thanks haven't seen this one in a while
"If you're goin' up and down, you're in hypotenuse town." Is probably the nerdiest phrase I've ever heard.
He's a poet and he knows it.
Don't you also need to be going side to side to have a hypotenuse?
@@PhilHibbs in the video he was talking about moving around on a keyboard and on a keyboard the keys are misaligned which means that going up and down on a keyboard will automatically mean you're also going side to side.
I am definitely going to start using "hypotenuse town" anytime I need to move diagonally.
In fact, if I were to ever found a settlement, I might call it Hypotenuse Town (Town being part of the name, so it keeps this no matter how big it grows. I grew up in a town that had City in it's name.), and all of the city blocks would be triangles, making all of the intersections 3-way. (Or roundabouts, of course.)
*fires up Cities: Skylines*
This is a lot of research into something that ultimately doesn't really matter all that much. And I appreciate every second of it!
It matters to speed typists lol
Isnt that first sentence what Brian David Gilberts mom told Brian once?
@@ichJONGleur It might be loosely based on that, yes :)
that's what standupmaths is all about
Thats math in a nutshell.
Linguist by training + recreational math hobbyist + circular fingerpoke typing enthusiast = delighted fan. Keep up the good (?) work!
I'm pretty sure Matt is as close as we have to a modern day Greek "philosopher"... an extremely bright person who just sits around and thinks about stuff all day.
pretty much
Unlike Greek philosophers, Matt is often right.
I didn't expect the smart-home contingent to show up here! You were the first to get me into Shellys, hi! :)
@@DonReba How would you say something so controversial yet so brave
you know there are people alive today who have the actual job 'philosopher'???? and a degree for it??
do you think no one else has a job involving thinking about things?!?!
That "Mathematics, he wrote" intro was both the funniest look I could have ever imagined Matt having and the most sublime version of the Stand-up Maths theme I've heard so far.
Exactly!! I love Matt's joke!! Let's crank up the thumbs up for the comment above!!
Me watching the intro…
Wait a minute…
Waaaait a minute….
1:20 Looks at his wrist but he's not even wearing a watch.
Every time Matt's team makes an intro they always outdo themselves.
I think he should make the opening permanent
This has an important application in spell checking, as most typing errors comes from missing a key and press one adjacent to it. So if you misspell a word, your spell checker should suggest the word with the closest “distance” to it.
You're right! Quick, someone code the software and sell it to bill gates, the world needs smart spellcheck!
Who knew this video might have a direct application lol
Isn't this how spell check works? I've always thought that's how it's done
Google and Shazam searches also work like this, just with many dimensions. The closer a result is to the input in the multidimensional space, the more relevant it is.
@@darrelstinkmeaner4673 last semester I had to do this for one of my CS classes. I created a (suboptimal) distance function between strings.
It’s just great that such a large number of the shortest words are so silly
"But Mr. Parker, what is the point of learning this stuff about vectors? It's totally useless in the real world!"
"You could calculate the pointiest words on a keyboard."
"Thanks, Mr. Parker! Now suddenly math is total fun for me."
Dr. Parker*
@@starpetalarts6668 He has a PhD? I didn't know that
This, made me find my inner British schoolboy voice, who speaks in perfect Received Pronunciation. Surely the second paragraph come in Matt's voice. Got those a while ago.
@@jurian0101 My inner voice was also a schoolboy, but with a transatlantic accent.
You don't study higher maths at school because it's "useful". You study maths and languages at school because they are the best ways to rigorously train your mind.
Fun fact: The word spa originated from the Belgian village Spa, renowned for its mineral springs. Unfortunately the inhabitants in Spa can't enjoy how pointy the word is because the AZERTY key layout is used there.
would matts code work for these keyboards as well
@@mikeburston9427 It would but the key coordinates would be different
on azerty it's still pretty sharp since it's just the a and q that swap places, the p stays where it is
so on azerty keyboards you dont play youre videogames with WASD but with WQSD ?
@@doofkopf2579 We play them using ZQSD actually !
You may find it interesting that the word "minimum" is also one of the most favoured practice words in calligraphy for lowercase characters.
Oh yes it’s so fun to write
So many similar strokes but still not gibberish or drills
@@rosepinkskyblue Indeed, it works well to practice consistent spacing and slope.
in our local language, we use "namumunumunuan", which means "pretend ruler" or "a ruler that power trips", and "namumuhumuhunan" which means "pretending to invest" or something (it's hard to express the essence of the word in english). they are written in alphabet, yes.
@@snsnni The inclusion of multiple m, n, u, and h letters in the word would certainly make the word appropriate for calligraphic practice. What language is that?
@@bw0n6 it's tagalog, a filipino language. they do have long trains of m's, u's, n's, and h's bc of its repetition of syllables wc is a grammatic rule to change the words' meaning. so we have quite a handful of long calligraphy friendly words. it's a really strange and beautiful language.
As a chemistry major I appreciate the longest word (in letters) in your dataset, but my biology professor has it beat with perhydrocyclopentanophenanthrene - which he was quite surprised I remembered 1 semester after teaching it, and I still remember more than a decade later.
It's the name of the base molecule for various cholesterols.
But pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis is longer no?
@@09DinoDinothat word has incorrect roots
It's invalid
@@Xnoob545 it’s still in the Oxford Dictionary so…..
"See, everyday use of Pythagorus!"
"Hmm, interesting, and what is this everyday use?"
"Putting together a logic to measure distance travelled between keyboard keys..."
"I see. Could happen to anyone, any day."
Or Pythagoras, even :)
@@germansnowman The card at 5:45 celebrates lesser-known philosophizer Pythagorus.
@@ComradeTiki he actually is a really known mathematician.
@@lightdropp It’s misspelled
@@goldenwarrior1186 are you talking about me or the other guy?
Should have got Tom Scott in for this classy linguistics fun
Not gonna lie almost thought that was him in the intro
Tom is unbearably leftleaning.
@@tafazzi-on-discord lol you ok bru? You can't bear it really?
xnopit
@@tafazzi-on-discord this is a video about linguistics and math, let's not make it a partisan issue
Huh this is actually really interesting as someone who types on their phone with the 'swipe' method, the intended audience for those distance calculations haha
I want to see him swipe these.
Also as far as swipe texting goes I enjoy "dearest" you should try it out. It's like a double loop de loop! ➰➰
There are many "swipe" words that aren't unique, so they cause problems. I wonder if there's a way to optimize the key layout for swiping...
@@HelgeMoulding It has been a major issue for me over the years making accidental typos, especially with had/has and if/is but on the other hand I also know where all the letters are on the keyboard really well so I don't know if a different layout would help.
It's possible to Latin this power?
Been using gesture typing for almost a decade. The many issue that comes up are straight line disambiguation, like "cores" and "chores" that I encountered today.
I'd like to add a few words for everyone's consideration: DREAD, alternatively READ. Has a wonderful little circle motion. Hours of fun. WARD is another good one with an easy but satisfying one-hand motion. MINIMUM is still really very good, though; definitely hard to beat that one.
DREADS and READS -- filling in the middle of the circle is quite satisfying to me :)
I remember seeing a post that said that typing the word "skepticism" feels like playing ping pong with your keyboard. And... they're not wrong.
Here's one: SEA
Use one hand and two fingers, simple but fun, especially if you keep going.
“SOMEONE” is pretty fun to type when swiping to text
Treads is also nice
14:37 “Deess” is an obsolete word meaning goddess.
Deo/Deus being masculine for god, Deess being feminine for goddess, Deity being neutral.
The pronunciation would have been more like DAY-ESS, rather than DEE-S.
That makes so much more sense as a word now. Thank you!
@@alicesmith5361 welcome :)
Deess nuts
@@Redddragon that's the point, deess have no nuts :P
@@Redddragon Red Dragon more like…
RED DRAG'IN DEEZ NUT
When we were making Swype, I explored a lot of similar things. Our dictionary for English was smaller, but the words we used were first categorized by usage frequency. Some of the words you chose in this video weren't ones we had in our dictionary, but it was still interesting to explore.
We also came up with word art. By changing the trace fade timeout so that it wouldn't disappear until you start the next word, you could draw pictures which were words. Because Swype was looking in its dictionary of words, the precision could be off with respect to what key you actually went to, so the art could be a little more expressive and you'd still get the word you intended. "BANANA" was a word which could be traced and you would have a nice picture of a banana with the ridges on the fruit visible in the sketch. My favorite was "COSMIC" because with the tolerances I described you could create an elongated star -- very swooshy and stylistic.
What a small world! I was just thinking how his distance and angle calculations are actually quite relevant for swipe-style keyboards and was disappointed that he didn’t make that point in the video. But here you are actually having developed them! That’s super cool, thanks for sharing that story :)
Swype rocks. Swype on a QWERTY phone keyboard is very satisfying in my opinion.
I love how any mathematics involving spelling just devolves into "This string has this property. Yes, apparently it is a word. No, I've never heard of it either.".
As a german Maths student i really enjoy listen to ur vids when going to sleep.
Yesterday I got really upset as I understood lettuce every time u said letters O.o
I never had any difficulties with english accents till today :D
Just thought it would be fun to share .) Have a great day everyone!
I have never experienced a more "this is for my audience, and we get each-other" video in my life. I love this video so much, but can't think of anyone who I can share it with, who isn't already a subscriber.
Nice. “Mathematics He Wrote” deserves a prime time series.
I look forward to reading your paper on this subject at the next Annals of Recreational Lexicography, Graphology and Typing.
I'm sure someone must already have asked this - is it possible, using these measurements and this database of words, to redefine the keyboard layout for minimum expected finger travel? I know that's kind of the concept of the Dvorak layout, but that was designed in 1936, without these kinds of tools.
Pretty sure Dvorak was also supposedly optimized for home-row touch-typing, not one-finger hunt-and-peck. The layout of something optimized for hunt-and-peck would be _much_ different I'd imagine.
We'd also need to know word popularity in regular usage.
Yes! There are lots of alternative layouts that are far superior to qwerty. Colemak is a popular one. Dvorak is another alternative. Workman, Halmak, RSTHD. Halmak was designed using a genetic algorithm. RSTHD was designed using simulated annealing. Lots of different designs to cater for different styles of typing.
@@cyanophage4351 I don't really care what goes on with the rest of my keyboard, but I want x, k, c, and d in that order on the bottom row of mine.
There's a ton of layouts, there's some even designed as a balanced measure for people who know qwerty but want to improve ergonomics with as few alterations as possible.
I think it would be interesting to expand this for touchtyping and other keyboard layouts. A truly “optimal” layout matters less than your familiarity with it, but it is still interesting
This should work great with swipe typing(what's the real term?) on touch keyboards
@horusreloaded6387 that is the real term
As both a recreational mathematician *and* a recreational linguist, I can't express quite how much I love this video. Absolutely amazing, Matt, so good!
“Terrorproof” is also obviously disqualified from being all on the top row due to that “f” at the end, Matt. 😬
Oof
thats why he said "if you disqualify it."
It's a Parker top row
He must have been writing on a Parker Typewriter.
Once again, Lucifer is absolutely right.
Crazy idea, run a novel through your typing distance program. I want to know how far an author had to move their fingers to type a book, next level would be a book series (go all in with wheel of time haha)
I love this idea
Bump
you need to assume that they use a hunt-and-peck method instead of something with multiple fingers involved
But wheel of time was written by two authors!
alternatively, there's the Foreigner sequence by C.J. Cherryh, that's a long haul at 22 books so far, and is going to go to 27, because 27 is just... such a good number. The Atevi -love- are very pleased by the number three.
At 5:40, Matt officially found the most useful application of the Pythagoras theorem, (I learnt it to be Pythagoras by the way, and not Pythagorus). Trinity Music College, London awarded him for this discovery and now it is used to produce papers for printing.
But Matt, what's the longest word you can type without crossing over a previous vector? What's the longest word with the most cross-overs? We need to know!
The longest words I can find without crossing over are CLAPPER and POLARITY. NUMBERY is also a great one, simply because it has "number" in it, but alas, it is a much shorter distance than CLARITY and POLARITY. I shall now anxiously await Matt's answer!
As for the most cross-overs? I'll throw RELINQUISHMENT into the hat, because the final M-E-N-T does a ton of damage by crossing lots of previous vectors at the same time. It's pretty cool that there isn't much crossing up till that point, and then there's a whole slew of it! Although I assume Matt's algorithm will find something better.
Some guesses of polygonal, zigzag and spiral words
3 letters pen, was, saw, car, ice, are, gut, hug, tug, mad
4 letters lock, rome, move, play, seed, bell, loop
5 letters point, poise, acari, adore
6 letters igloo, chores, closer, reload, remold
7 letters shallop
10 letters temporally
A fun words to type:
lollipop, polio
Reply if you find better ones
@@joeloftus6148 CLAPPER passes over P-E with E-R (as they're on the same plane) as does POLARITY (IT passes over RI, as does TY). The longest I can think of off the top of my head is "LINGER" or "ANGLER"
My guess for most is "STEWARDESSES".
@@murphy54000 Oh yeah, I knew there was a slight issue with "same plane" movement, but I was just following what Matt does in the video, ignoring all angles of 0 or 180 degrees. If you want to count "doesn't cross over" as "also doesn't repeat on itself", then it does indeed get much more limited. ANKLET improves ANGLER by 19.05mm!
wandered? also waster is a really tightly packed word that doesn’t cross any previous vectors
I love that calculating keyboard geometry for fun is "everyday life" to this guy. Never change.
I love the gradual decline from “incredibly excited about these findings” to “depressed this is how I’m spending my life” present in this video.
Isn't that Matt Parker energy in a nutshell.
I love how as soon as you said type and minimum, before even saying how satisfying it was to type, the FIRST think my mind went to was that fluid up and down motion of typing. minimum. minimum. minimum, it's great
"A use of pythagoras in everyday life". AH yes, everyday life. I certainly often feel it necessary to find the distance between keys. Such a relatable moment
I need to enter those relatable moments in my rela-table *spreadsheet.*
As a joiner, 'The fence post problem' is enough to explain the letters/gaps disparity. It appears all the time in joinery. Calculating the space between spindles in a balustrade is made more complicated by the fact that there is one more spindle than gap (Counting newels as spindles). When calculating the width of doors for a wardrobe you have to keep in mind that there will be one more divider than the number of doors. And of course, you always need one more fencepost than fence panels.
Why yes... of course. Newels. And Spindles. I know all about those.
Same in metal works whenever you want a row of holes at a certain distance along a certain length.
Gets real nice if each end needs another distance from the workpiece's edges xD
Hint: just remember the formula for the last one as it is more versatile and the "standard" fence case is applicable aswell
...unless the fence is a closed loop.
Chaparajos*
In German, „zog“ is actually a real word (the past tense of „ziehen“) but we cannot enjoy its pointiness because we commonly use the QWERTZ layout.
on QWERTZ keybosrd zog is actually really pointy
Well, in russian culture ZOG is well-known as a name of an organization in a particular conspiracy theory. So I wonder if Matt avoided the word because it is quite racist, because it is an abbreviation (are those "words"?), or because it is not that recognizable in English?
@@ssdd28561 I'm not English, but I speak it quite fluently. That said I've never heard or read any reference to the Russian word ZOG, actually in the west we are generally pretty ignorant about the russian and estern european cultures. It's no surprise given the cold war and all the propaganda associated with it up to the 90s
Incredible that you can make a 30 min long video with this content. Love it!
The fact that Matt provides all the files and stuff he uses, not only 1: has made my University career so much easier, but 2. also makes this my favorite favorite channel because I can mess with and experiment more with what Matt already did
This could be a fun way of comparing the alternative layouts, like Dvorak and colemak, no? Disregarding the fact that they are explicitly made for touch typing, maybe this could test if they would be better for the "double hunt and peck approach" as well.
Then optimized layouts would be a circle keyboard. Bunch the keys as close together as possible. Put most popular letters in middle (vowels) and bridge out.
@@simcowgames981 Very interesting applications in hyper-realistic sci-fi media, personal communications devices with a wildly different keyboard layout.
the main reason I learned Dvorak was to get away from the double hunt and peck cause none of your muscle memory translates
@@he1d1_ yeah same, I started with colemak because I had really nothing to lose haha
wait what are dvorak and volemak???
*types "minimum"*
*mutes video, activates miniplayer, deactivates miniplayer, unmutes video, mutes video again*
ì think at least 50% of the viewers did so too haha
Underrated comment
Minimum
Minimum
@@Northtarctica you'll have to shout, he can't hear you.
Matt thank you for your hard work, you are like a unicorn, completely non replace able Thank goodness. Now I cannot use the type writer keyboard without being highly self conscious about how far I travel in hunting and pecking along. (like a lot of comp sci folk from the 70's and 80's we WERE NOT touch typists) now they teach touch typing in elementary school. I am thinking about taking all keyboards that are used, and melding them together into a hyper hybrid, having multiple vowels (like five e's, etc according to etoain schrdlu). Anyway I am in basement slamming multiple KB's together thanks to you, my friend. Have a Happy New Year!
I never took you for a "hunt and peck" style of typist, Matt.
Scandalous
And he's legally represented by Hunt & Pecker.
No hunting on the Parker Square.
Typewriters often make you do that bc you have to punch the keys so hard lol.
@@thoop6795 Disagree. I've used several in my life and while they were newer than this they never required hunt and peck. You just adjust your press down
Writing English sentences exclusively utilizing minimally seven-digit dictionary entries produces difficult challenges. Aforesaid sentences inherently introduce cumbersome wordings, because restricting letters usually prohibits preposition utilization. Impeding further similarly helpful language constructs complicates phrasing likewise.
Bruh
Does seven-digit count as one word or two?
@@angelodc1652 I'm a german. It is our hobby to construct single long words out of smaller words such as "Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz". Therefore I vote for counting "seven-digit" as one word.
@@angelodc1652 if it’s hyphenated it’s one word
@@pypeapple Not-always-it-isn't.
For those who are wondering about "Deess": Deessing (pronounced "De-Essing") is the process of reducing sibilance in a voice recording.
Great video as always Matt!
And it doesn't have anything to do with nutz ... Who would have known.
There's actually another meaning to this one that I found online: it's an archaic word that's basically the feminine version of "deity", i.e. a goddess.
@@xnossisx5950 yes this is what I found too
@@xnossisx5950 Borrowed from French déesse, feminine of dieu (“god”).
from latin "deus" (god) and "dea" (goddess). Since the English language often uses the -ess ending to give a word a feminine connotation we can se how the word "deess" can stem from the latin radix "de-"
The first word that came to my mind have a Z, O and G in it is "zigzagoon" which is the name of a pokemon so not really an English word but it is very pointy and makes a neat shape on your keyboard that touches the extreme left, extreme right and exact middle of your keyboard!
I would love to see a part 2 of this video exploring alternative layouts like Dvorak and Colemak, or even an attempt at creating a keyboard optimised for one finger use!
Steam Controller profile pick checks out :D
@@ToxNano I love my steam controller! I modded the soft keyboard to imitate Dvorak. Its high hand alternation makes it a perfect fit for the SC.
@@edmund-osborne As a fellow input aficionado I concur, It's pretty great :D
Point
I want two finger keyboard...
I have to say, I'm surprised that a man who types with two independently moving fingers didn't compute the word with the largest distance traveled when using two independently moving fingers. Sounds like an everyday practical application for ~*dynamic programming*~.
Papal would score low because the "a"s are handled by one finger and the "pl"s by the other.
My favorite words would be those where you type with the minimal distance for two fingers and and end up with the left hand on the right side and vice versa.
That would, of course, still be a bit of a Parker effort. Proper typing technique should naturally be considered, with fingers starting from natural position on the home row.
@@PaulPaulPaulson It probably gets even worse than that. There might be words which require the typist to physically turn their entire body around underneath their arms, or else have arm bones made of rubber, to type with the true minimum double finger distance.
Independent finger typists have no consistency and therefore it is not guerenteed that the p's or a's will be hit with the same finger.
It should be possible to compute the "two finger typing arm winding number" for entire books. How many times did Matt have to spin in a circle as part of typing humple pi, because of his steadfast dedication to optimal unoptimal typing? Only a series of ridiculous approximations resulting an ultimately meaningless number can say for sure.
"When you go up and down, you're in hypotenuse town"
Another classic catch phrase right there
still sounds like a square phrase to me.
there's a hebrew phrase kids learn in regards to crossing the roads - "אלכסון זה אסון" (hypotenuse is a disaster). in hebrew it even rhymes!
28:43 "And my internet service provider has no idea I'm doing this." [posts public video with 600K+ views]
"Here is some meaningless text for me to type on the typewriter in the opening tiles of the Mathematics, He Wrote video. It may be one of the more silly things I have ever done for my TH-cam channels. While I'm here I should thank my Patreon supporters who mean I can spend my days doing this. And hello to [obscured] pause the video to work out exactly what I was typing the [obscured] I hope it was worth it. I know that is exactly what I w[obscured]."
You're welcome.
"[...] And hello to everyone who will pause the video to work out exactly what I was typing in those shots. [...] I know that is exactly what I would do.
I should make it clear that this is my own typewriter which I already had. I did not waste Patreon money on this. It was [obscured]"
You're a life saver, normally I'd spend 20 minutes trying to read it all but this time I was smarted and knew someone already did it. May the gods of maths smile upon you and all your calculators.
This is some meaningless text for me to type on the typewriter
during the opening tiles of the Mathematics, He Wrote vidoe
which may be one of the more silly things I have ever done for my
TH-cam channel. While I'm here I should thank my Patreon supporters
who m### mean I can spend my days doing this. And hello to everyone who will
pause the video to work out exactly what I was typing in these shots.
I hope it was worth it. I know that is exactly what I would do.
And I should make it clear that this is my own typewriter which
I already had. I did not waste Patreonn money on this. It was
the minimum amount of effort to get it out of storage. Hmmm.
"Minimum." That is as much fun to type on a traditional typewriter
as is on a modern keyboard. Minimum. Takes a bit more effort. But
is to#tally worht it. I also love using the physical SHIFT key
on an old typewriter. The shift lock actually &&&& locks the typewriter
in the shiftedposition. And would you believe that this isn't even
the only typewriter I own? The other one is from the &0's though and
far too modern, &&&
MATHEMATICS# MATHEMATICS,
HE WROTE
Notes: #s are overtyped characters; &s are characters I couldn't read. The text was written using a monospaced font, but the alignment of the two bottom chunks isn't perfect for the typewritten layout. Also, due to inconsistency in the mechanical carriage return, the alignment of characters in the body of the text won't perfectly match the typewritten page.
Thank you
Spoiler: this video features the debut of the "Parker spelling" of Pythagoras at 5:45!
*twitch*
I saw that too. If only I commented. A Parker Thought.
Yeah. I thought a PYTHaGORus was a kind of dinosaur (emphasizing the syllables PYTH and GOR).
Just spotted it myself, and checked the comments to see if someone else already noticed prior. Good job 👏
@@Markovisch ditto!
“Terrorproof” doesn’t just fit on the top row, though, does it lol
Terrorpoo does, though.
Don't worry, it's a parker square away from all being on the top row
I came here to say this
Also came here to say this
It's a Parker word
Laughing at myself nerding out and thoroughly enjoying this stuff. I love it!
Disappointed Matt didn't research which word has the largest total enclosed area, from all the enclosed sub-areas that the connecting lines sometimes produce. Surely there will be a Part 2!
Probably something like covariance.
A more easily computable version could be done by using the Shoelace theorem which includes negative areas by calculating the determinant of a matrix with all the coordinates in order.
Yes please
I’ve always enjoyed “dereference”… you have that satisfying cluster with the left finger, then swoop down for that renegade N, and head back to close it down with the C/E.
Thank you.
I prefer "dereferred", for the funky dance without having to collect the loose ends
I was looking for this comment. I type the word "references" a lot at work. I actually have a list of "fun words to type", including references, minimum, column, and restricted.
or just shift-8
Deference
Now do the sums again for Dvorak and Colemak layouts? Seriously though, I would recommend putting the time in to touch type! I did it 30 years ago, and it is really worth the effort! I remember the epiphany of realising that I was typing, but that I was thinking about what I wanted to type, not how to type it... Then we could get another of your excellent books more quickly!
He just needs a direct brain to computer interface for maximum efficiency and minimum latency.
Touch typing and keyboard layout have nothing to do with each other, other than that someone who has learned to touch type in one layout won't naturally be able to touch type in another. Layouts are meant to improve efficiency or ergonomics, not memorizability.
@@cebo494 I can't figure out what you're responding to. Nothing was said relating touch typing to either keyboard layout or memorizability.
cgp grey approves
The Dvorak thing is just an internet cult, the Wikipedia says:
"The Dvorak layout is designed to improve touch-typing, in which the user rests their fingers on the home row. It would have less effect on other methods of typing such as hunt-and-peck. Some studies show favorable results for the Dvorak layout in terms of speed, while others do not show any advantage, with many accusations of bias or lack of scientific rigour among researchers. The first studies were performed by Dvorak and his associates. These showed favorable results and generated accusations of bias.[36] However, research published in 2013 by economist Ricard Torres suggests that the Dvorak layout has definite advantages.[37]
In 1956, a study with a sample of 10 people in each group conducted by Earle Strong of the U.S. General Services Administration found Dvorak no more efficient than QWERTY[38] and claimed it would be too costly to retrain the employees.[34] The failure of the study to show any benefit to switching, along with its illustration of the considerable cost of switching, discouraged businesses and governments from making the switch.[39] This study was similarly criticised as being biased in favor of the QWERTY control group.[8]
In the 1990s, economists Stan Liebowitz and Stephen E. Margolis wrote articles in the Journal of Law and Economics[36] and Reason magazine[15] where they rejected Dvorak proponents' claims that the dominance of the QWERTY is due to market failure brought on by QWERTY's early adoption, writing, "[T]he evidence in the standard history of Qwerty versus Dvorak is flawed and incomplete. [..] The most dramatic claims are traceable to Dvorak himself; and the best-documented experiments, as well as recent ergonomic studies, suggest little or no advantage for the Dvorak keyboard."[36][40]"
13:40 I don't know why but this quote genuienly made me laugh
Also "water" is by far the most satisfying word to type
There is a also a "distance function" based on the typing pattern that can be defined for words: this is relevant for example useful for spelling correction, and security (detecting domains that are accidentally typed), and maybe other uses.
"Minimum" remind me of key patterns:
I have worked where keypad door entry was used, and the number was changed on a regular basis. Once learned, all the chosen numbers seems to have an intrinsic, meaningful pattern that made the pattern easier to remember than the number sequence. I permitted a temporary speculation that software was being used to generate meaningful patterns, but it was just an arbitrary choice by an individual.
It appears that the mind overlays the pattern on the sequence, and my experience suggests how powerful is its instinct to do so.
I've recently forced myself to learn Dvorak layout and now prefer it (or at least it's what I've now got muscle memory for). I wonder how much mathematical difference there is between it and the Qwerty layout since Dvorak is supposedly more efficient, placing more commonly used letters in easier to reach places.
I'm glad to see I'm not the only weirdo here 😅
I'm not only using Dvorak but also a Kinesis Advantage, which has non-staggered rows and is concave!
'supposedly'? Way to sit on the fence there, dude. Scared of upsetting the QWERTY crowd?
I wanted to learn halmak. It's a really interesting project. Check it out. Almost perfect layout. But I couldn't install it at the time and lost interest. Will try it again soon hopefully
Dvorak IS more efficient. Your fingers travel about 38% less distance than with QWERTY because the more common letters are closer to the home row and easy-to-reach locations. The speed increase doesn’t really matter for everyday typers, it’s more about comfort. My hands used to cramp really bad when typing, but I’ve been typing in Dvorak for almost exactly a decade now and never experienced a cramp since (I had a career where I was typing all day as well). So I would recommend Dvorak for people who don’t necessarily want to get faster but would like more comfort and less cramping.
"Tomato" makes a satisfying clockwise circle
"Reaches" is a nice counterclockwise circle
“Someone” makes two clockwise circles
Hey Matt, audio guy here! To "de-ess" something is to take out the high pitched sibilance, eg. dampening the S-sounds of a vocal performance. I think that's the "deess" in question!
Since Matt said he found it used it old books, I suspect it’s actually obsolete word for “goddess”
Yep. That's what the OED reckons too, which is just about as definitive as you can get in a descriptive (as opposed to prescriptive) language like English.
de-ess these nutssssssssss
@@joemcalister7105 cmon loser you could have gotten it better than that
de-ess deess nuts
deess nuts
Loved the Mathematics He Wrote segment. You've really been putting in a lot of work into fun extras and I like it!
yes POOP has 2 movements, but also requires a push in the middle without any movement
i love how that matt putted grayish hair in the typewriter section and just started doing random things(jokingly)
OMG, I just imagined this as a graph theory problem. I'm so broken. Every word is a weighted graph.
Even on non-standard keyboard you can measure the distance between keys by a common unit: key. Treat the keys as in-phase array and use Pythagoras to find distance of keys in different ranks or files.
Now I've watched the video - very impressed by "everyday usage of dot product" - lol
Haven't gotten very far into the video, is it not graph theory?
About words that are fun to spell out: Even though it's again a more scientific term, and the English version is actually split in three words rather than the single word in German, "aluminium minimum immunity" (or "Aluminiumminimumimmunität" for that matter) looks satisfying, especially if written in cursive.
It’s like a waltz with your fingers on the keyboard
this is good.
The best way I can describe the feeling typing Aluminiumminimumimmunität with one finger:
beeb beb bebbep brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr bebbeb beb beeeeb ...
Aluminiumminimumimmunität
Oh yes, if fingers could swoon.
It's especially fun on a mobile, that last A when you hold and give it the old electric slide across the keyboard to the umlaut. So fun!
It's a pretty good tongue-twister, too.
"When you go up and down, you're in hypotenuse town" This is the kind of high brow math humor I signed up for. :D
I think that Angela would really like that little parody sequence. I know that my grandfather would. He used to watch the show every time it was on the air (this was back before cable was available in my area and right around when VCRs were becoming a thing).
07:30 - I'm german, i've had my share of compound nouns. Non-technical, technical, you name it. The longest german words aren't even that uncommon in everyday speech.
And btw, "minimum" is also very satisfying to write by hand imo.
Write it in cursive and show someone under the age of 24. Minimum was used as an example of how ridiculous cursive can be to read sometimes.
@@rich1051414 minimum in cursive is just a sad worm
@@rich1051414 It's like Russian (or most other Cyrillic script alphabets), where most of the letters have vertical lines, one to three, and few to no rounded elements that make them stand out. Add to that that Russian print typically is unusually small and very tightly kerned, and it just looks like MHIMN INHNM NMNMMIN MNHMHMNN for most of it...
Regarding how we kept the misalignment of keys despite not having any mechanical reason to do so; The Razer Tartarus keypad uses straight columns, and let me tell you, it took a LONG time for me to get used to that, and it ruined my ability to type on a normal keyboard for quite a while after I did get used to it. I actually experienced physical pain as I adjusted to the straight key columns. And while I can type just fine again on a normal keyboard, I to this day cannot play games on a normal keyboard because of the offset. It's truly odd.
The greatest force for keeping the exact layout is that millions of us have been seriously trained to do 10 finger typing without looking at the keys. Which means all positions must match the learned positions closely enough to not hit a different key when having normal human tendency to be off within each key surface.
@@johndododoe1411 I use 6 fingers though. Really 10?
@@johndododoe1411
You can swap keys around and pick it up surprisingly fast. If you literally randomized the letters, in 24h of typing you'd be at least 80% your original speed, and if the randomness wasn't randomly bad, you might even get as good or even better, if it just happens to fit your typing style somehow.
@@kindlin That doesn't change the positions of keys, only the char associated with each position. It might be more difficult if the positions changed.
@@kindlin As someone using multiple keyboards every day, inconsistency ruins everything. And 24 hour retraining seems like a myth based on fast learners or people without thorough training and experience with the standard layout. But switching keyboards multiple times a day makes 24 hours way too long. I need to switch in seconds to get things done.
Nice video! I'm in a community that generates a lot of optimized alternative keyboard layouts, and we do similar calculations involving key distances for bigrams, skipgrams, trigrams, etc. as well as looking at the amount of alternation, rolling, redirection, etc. there is for the actual movements.
Ex: You could use your function that calculates right turns instead to generate an arrangement of keys (a new keyboard layout) which has the most right turns possible (on average).
It can sound like a pain to learn, but we have a few people that can generate a brand new layout and get back up to 100+ wpm on it in a couple weeks, and they have the pleasure of typing on something that was optimized for exactly what they enjoy.
PS. If you're curious how to make these, it's actually pretty quick to find global optimum in the ~30! search space of a 3x10 keyboard layout. You can start with lots of random ones and make swaps that improve the score of the layout for your objective function. There are cleaner ways of guaranteeing you find global optimum using things like constraint programming, but that isn't needed for just 30 keys.
Ok, because of this comment I’m now going to delve into the Stand up maths comment section looking for more tantalizing insights like this.
r/keyboardlayout
30! Is more than the unmber of atoms in universe, how it can be trivial?
@@engelsteinberg593 Only a tiny fraction of the search space needs to be explored. The search method I mentioned is similar to methods like Local Search which explore the "neighborhood" of random states by looking at states that can be reached in a couple of swaps. Local Search can find Local Optimum pretty quickly this way, but has no guarantees for finding Global Optimum, so starting with many initial states which you greedily improve can improve your odds of finding a Global Optimum.
"Typewriter" being the longest word from the top row of a typewriter is so satisfying.
17:28 Matt's dog makes a brief cameo in the bottom right of the screen.
You can also see similar thing @ 16:12 but this time at bottom left just behind the keyboard
Dog product
Puppy
Now the one burning question left is coming up with the optimal keyboard distribution that on average lets you travel the least distance for the words of the english vocabulary (or if we wanna get spicy with it, the most 'brexit-y' keyboard that somewhat minimizes the distance traveled for english but vastly increases it for, say, french or german)
Can't post links on yt but there's an article called "Optimizing 19th Century Typewriters" by Nathan Brixius that does this for an interesting real world one dimensional typewriter design. IIRC he found proving the optimal solution was optimal would take a quadrillion years because there's so many possibilities.
The DVORAK layout is sort of that. I mean, I don’t think it’s mathematically optimal, but it is better than QWERTY
@@7452Michael mathematically optimal would require knowing how common the words are and that depends on the context. Most people will never write some words even though they are rather common (scientific terms for example)
@@Houshalter You totally can post links on TH-cam.
@@Henrix1998 there is data for that (look up most common words in English on Wikipedia).
I feel like you missed two strong hypothesis of why minimum is so fun to type: repeating (similar length) paths and consistently similar angles (ignoring 0/360° ones)
It is surely the "common pattern" that makes it.
If your hypothesis is correct, bananas should be very fun to type. and indeed it is. To me, switching between hands also helps with the fun, so bananas is more fun than minimum :)
I like it because it rocks back and forth with two fingers and because it's an odd number of letters long, meaning that it also sounds nice to type.
This video is so much better trying all these words out. They are all so amazing!
13:42 “you’re in hypotenuse town” sounds like what a tangent hears when it moves into a neighborhood of sines and cosines
Because tan doesn't need the hypotenuse to be calculated?
Hi Matt. Question: What is the most circular word (360°) with the most angles but the lowest standard deviation or however you measure the roundness? (4x90° excluded)
And as a contestant of "minimum", I would propose "wert". It's the German word for "value" and very satisfying to write as you just roll all of your fingers over the keyboard
That'd be a cool "fad"
I think a lot of what he likes about 'minimum' is because he only types with 1 finger per hand. for me, the best words to type are ones that start and end on the left hand with any right-handed letters in the middle. that way it's, click with right hand, start typing immediately because left is already there, and right hand is back on the mouse before I've finished typing
I've always liked how WERE is to type. Back and forth.
"Stewardesse" is, I believe, the longest word written entirely by one hand when using the 10-finger-technique.
*Stewardesses*
My Scrabble dictionary contains "sweaterdresses," which is longer.
Yup, that's an annoying one. It just feels wrong to type without both hands doing something!
This is brilliant I loveeee this word
The longest one for the right hand is "hypolimnion", which I also find to be a lot of fun to type
Thanks for the shout-out during the Mathematics, He Wrote intro sequence. Hello to you too, and yes, it was worth pausing it to see what you were typing.
20:00 So what I’m hearing is that King Zog of Albania has the pointiest possible name for anyone to type
Also yes I promise King Zog of Albania is a real person. My favorite fact about him is that he may have been the heaviest smoker in human history, consuming over 100 cigarettes everyday.
"zog" is also used as an expletive by Orks in the Warhammer 40k universe!
One of the most weirdest trivia i've seen but this video is all about a weird trivia so very fitting
@@neurofiedyamato8763 It's a historical footnote, thus it is my duty to make it known lol
The longest English word is "SMILED".
The "S" and the "D" are separated by a MILE.
SKILOMETERD
@@purrplaysLE a mile is longer than a kilometer so skilometerd unfortunately is not the longest one :/
@@zirkereuler5242 snineteenandahalfkilometersd
sMILEs.... slightly more alliterative, if you push the meaning of alliterative or if you can use an s for a bracket/parenthesis....plus it is plural. I win.
SLIGHTYEARS
I like your geogebra work to visualize your point! Great job, and very interesting video for sure!
I am a single finger on each hand typer as well. Matt, you are seen, you are valid, you matter.
Hi Matt, as someone who paused the video to work out exactly what you were typing in, it absolutely was worth it.
Fun fact for anyone who hasn't read any of the discworld books: In "Sourcery" there's a wizard (hopeful archchancellor-to-be) Called "Virrid Wayzygoose", which given Pratchett's love for language, most certainly is a spin on "wayzgoose" (which may be pronounced way-se-goose). Also his first name is a misspelling of "Virid" (which means 'green').
Hypotenuse town sounds like a great tourist destination!
Absolutely love these videos matt!
the most fun word to type is qwaszcerfacterization. I made it up 2 seconds ago and it is the process of making up new words on the spot
"When you go up and down, you're in hypotenuse town" should be a shirt
Yes more cringy math pun shirts that’s what we need lol
Mathematics He Wrote with the Stand Up Maths music remix is the highlight of my day
I use the Pythagorean theorem, dot and cross products almost everyday, the perks of being a game programmer :D
Cross product sucks, use wedge product.
@@engelsteinberg593 no
@@AntonioBarba_TheKaneB It do suck, because can't be used in higher or lower dimensions than 3.
@@engelsteinberg593 so what? games work in 3D space
@@AntonioBarba_TheKaneB 1) Is a misspractice the existentce of the cross product.
2) The Wedge product outputs a sensical rotation plane meanwhile the Cross product outputs a nonsencical vector.
Fun fact, if it is 19.05mm it is because it originaly was 3/4 of an inch or 19.050mm
Congratulations, you've made me actually laugh out loud. Tea came out of my nose at the part where you conclude how the video got at the point of words with turns in the same direction...
Ah, I see - Matt is introducing a new keyboard language: Anglish!
I love Anglish
The Angles would be proud (if they could understand any of this). The Saxons and Jutes? Not so much.
Interestingly, Anglish is a "language" where English is written without borrowed words.
On Dvorak, “minimum” is a perfectly alternating right-left-right-left-right-left-right.
On colemak it's all on the right but with no finger repeated.
Nice. If you touch type rather than hunt and peck alternating words are definitely more satisfying 👍
As are many words in the Dvorak layout which is precisely why I have been typing in Dvorak for over a decade.
As we all know, calculating the exact distance between each and every pair of letters on the keyboard for a mathemathical youtube video is a thing i do in everyday life, thus pythagoras is a very important and obviously useful thing you use in your day to day life.
The maximum amount of fun writing is definitely given for the name of my hometown Dresden. The n is a little off from the rest, but writing the first six letters is just pure joy because you can write it in a nice and smooth rolling move.
Yeah, you should put in partition to rename it to dresdes. or dresdew.
Well, as far as I know, Dresden is called Dresde in French, which gets rid of the n
This is a video that answers a lot of questions no one really asks, but I find extremely entertaining as my mind already goes off on long tangents trying to figure out singularly trivial matters. (Yes, I know someone asked these questions, but not in relevant, day to day activities, im just making a silly comment that also shows that I liked this video and I found it entertaining as my mind also follows a similar thought path on silly things)
Right! Stop that! It's silly! Very silly indeed!
The intro is amazing. I love reading what he wrote on the typewriter. 1:30 for reference