How big is your Font to Cover the Earth?
I’ve been wondering about this since before high school and it’s been sitting in my drafts for months. The Question is, if I took all the letters I’ve typed onto keyboards all my life, what size font would it need to be to cover the earth?
This isn’t actually as hard to predict as you’d expect because there’s a handy application called WhatPulse that you can use to track keyboard and mouse clicks. It doesn’t record what keys are pressed, just that keys were pressed.
In an ideal scenario, I’d log my keyboard clicks for a month and extrapolate that into a year’s worth. I’ve been typing since about grade 4 and I think I reached my current typing speed around grade 7. Some simple math could tell me how much I’ve typed and at what rate am I currently typing. Unfortunately I come to a stumbling block. I spend +8 hours at work and I don’t have admin rights to install WhatPulse. Installing at home wouldn’t be an accurate representation because I don’t really type at home except for blog posts, mostly I just watch movies.
Unable to record my own statistics, I took the highest scores on Whatpulse which happens to be 218,269,111 key strokes at the time of this writing.
Google tells me that the Earth is 510,072,000 kilometers squared in surface area so each key click needs to take about 2.3368 km². It’s worth noting that “H” and “O” are the largest characters but a lot of those keyboard clicks are also spaces which take up less than half the area of an “H” or “O”.
A capital “H” in times new roman is nearly square, so taking the square root of 2.3368 km2 we find that the “H” is 1.53 km tall. How big is this? Well, “H” fits over Stanley Park and writing “Hello, I’m Keenan and this is the Edge Approach on blogspot” covers Vancouver.
Font size is measured in points. One point is the smallest whole unit of measure and slightly larger than a pica. In the early age of computers it was defined as 1/72 of an inch or 352.78×10−6 m. Therefore, the highest rated person on Whatpulse has a font size of 4,333,637.
Most people, myself included, don’t type nearly that much. Until I can find a way to get Whatpulse on my computer, I leave you with one more question: what font size does the average person get to in their lives if they’re born in the 1990s and how long would it take the average person to get a font size of 12?
got a solution? let me know in the comments
