You have arrived at the mid-week hump. Have a $container of $beverage and enjoy some reading before you speed along with the rest of your life.

I still need your help!

I am working on something, but discovered an odd thing around how keyboards behave. Last week I sent out a 3.5 minute keyboard test you can do in your browser.

I have received over 400 submissions, but many connections are still tenuous, like are Apple keyboards slower or faster than non-Apple keyboards, or are cheaper keyboards really faster than more expensive ones? Making a submission helps me do better analysis. I will share the results in a later article!

If you have already done it, send it to a friend or three!

New articles

Is the Monaco Grand Prix decided at qualifying?

A few years ago a Formula 1 driver said the Monaco race is decided "nine times out of ten" by qualifying placement. That sounded made up, so I had to check. Turns out ... maybe? It depends on how we count.

Full article (6–15 minute read): Is the Monaco Grand Prix decided at qualifying?

Flashcard of the week

At some point I collected a few proportions related to source code.

Roughly how much of a Fortran program is assignments?

I didn't find much research on this in modern languages at the time, but there's a lot from the '70s and '80s, using older languages. The answer for Fortran is

Half

This probably says something about how Fortran is a relatively low-level language that requires a lot of assignments to do things, but I also don't think it's a crazy number to assume even for some modern imperative languages.

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• my broken wrist (it is healed now, but still hurts at some angles),

• my new keyboard (I'm starting to really get used to it now – to the point where I'm considering bringing it even if I'm just working away from home for a day or so),

• my Emacs startup optimisations (it has been surprisingly nice to be able to reboot Emacs without a significant wait), and

• four books (I plan on following up on at least two of them in the next premium newsletter).

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