Re:English is heavily left-handed
by majormajor on Thursday September 13, 2012 @12:53PM
(#4517214)
Based on a thoroughly scientific glance at the white keycaps on the Apple keyboard I use at my desk at work—which get amazingly dirty amazingly quickly—the most used key's when I'm working are largely punctuation: some set of 9, 0, [, ], backspace, \, enter, shift, and /. Surprisingly, my left shift key is cleaner than my capslock key at the moment, which I didn't expect at all given how much I hit shift-9 and shift-0 in particular.
But this is probably horribly biased because when I get a snack I eat it with my right hand, which I assume makes keys on that side get dirtier quicker.
Re:English is heavily left-handed
by sirdavidoff on Thursday September 13, 2012 @01:28PM
(#4517448)
Perhaps the keys you use more often are cleaner than the others?
The center may be whiter but they get that terrible grey circle on them.
I don't know what you guys do to your keyboards but I don't want to ever touch them...
Actually, if you ignore the letter frequencies entirely, this is only 1% off what you would expect based on the 11/15 split. As others have pointed out, the difference here is made up by punctuation. It would be interesting to measure frequency of key usage including punctuation and see which side (if any) comes out on top.
One thing I have noticed is that most control commands (copy, paste, close window, switch window, &c) are left dominant, which makes sense if you have the mouse in your right hand.