Landing Face First in P

“Yay! It took all night, but I finally finished this term pappppppppppppppppp
ppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppp
ppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppp….”

Have you ever pulled an all-nighter only to sleep through the class for which your project was due? Ever worked so late you fell asleep facedown on your keyboard and then woke to an incoherent mess of random characters on the screen? If so, you probably had to delete quite a bit. How many incoherent characters would you accidentally type by using your keyboard as a pillow?

By holding down one key, you can gauge that a keyboard can type about 30 characters per second. If you get an average night’s worth of sleep (~8 hours), you’ll have held the key down for about 29,000 seconds. You can then compute the number of incoherent characters on the screen,

total # of characters = (# of characters per second) · (time)

= (30 characters per second) · (29,000 seconds)

= 870,000 characters.

You’d have close to one million characters, or about 200 single-spaced pages worth.

Well, it’s late. I should probably get some sleeppppppppp