This is unexpected — in 1999 mathematician Mike Keith programmed a computer to generate knights’ tours using Warnsdorff’s rule and then labeled the successive squares A, B, C, etc. to see whether any 8-letter words emerged. After about a million tours, he found two, UNSHAVEN and ARCHIVAL:
M T Q B W D O F E T W F G J Y H
R C L O P G X C V E F Y X G T K
U N S H A V E N S D U H U L I Z
D K P S H Y B U D G Z K X M L S
Q V G J I T M Z A R C H I V A L
H E R C F I L A F C J W N I R M
W D G J Y J A L Q B A D O P K B
F I X E B K Z K B E P O J C N Q
After some further searching he also found PERORATE and EPIDURAL. See the link below for more results.
Every regulation major league baseball, roughly 240,000 per season, is rubbed with “magic mud” from a single source, a tributary of the Delaware River. It’s harvested by a single man, 62-year-old Jim Bintliff, who keeps the precise location secret even from Major League Baseball.
Shopping at a mall one afternoon, Dave Morice and his son Danny came across a set of poseable wrestling action figures. One accessory was a breakaway table that came in two jagged halves. The store had a policy that allowed customers to return a broken toy for one that wasn’t broken.
Morice said, “Now here’s a problem. The table comes broken in two. If it wasn’t broken, then it would be broken. In either case, it’s broken.”
Danny said, “Yeah! That means we can take it back any time for a brand-new one.”
“That’s another problem,” Morice said. “They couldn’t replace it with one that wasn’t broken.”
In contemporary secretary schools, training emphasizes the inhibition of reading for meaning while typing, on the assumption that such reading will hinder high-speed performance. Some support for this assumption derives from the introspections of champion speed typists, who report that they seldom recall the meaning from the source material incidentally.
— William E. Cooper, Cognitive Aspects of Skilled Typewriting, 2012
We don’t even know the keyboard. A 2013 study at Vanderbilt asked 100 subjects to take a short typing test; they were then shown a blank QWERTY keyboard and given 80 seconds to label the keys. On average they typed at 72 words per minute with 94 percent accuracy but could correctly label only 15 letters on a blank keyboard.
“This demonstrates that we’re capable of doing extremely complicated things without knowing explicitly what we are doing,” said graduate student Kristy Snyder.
It had formerly been believed that typing starts as a conscious process that becomes unconscious with repetition. But it appears that typists never memorize the key locations in the first place.
“It appears that not only don’t we know much about what we are doing, but we can’t know it because we don’t consciously learn how to do it in the first place,” said psychologist Gordon Logan.
