Musings
 Text Messaging
Since Mike's been flying for the airlines, we've fallen into "texting" as an additional means of communication. Sure, we talk on the phone frequently, exchange emails, and even chat when we're both online. Something just can't beat the convenience of a quick text message; a quick "thinking of you" wthout the time commitment of a phone conversation.
Even though we've been texting a lot, I still don't have a knack for speediness with the "keyboard." Put me in front of a QWERTY keyboard and I can rip out some impressive WPMs! But the number-letter sequence of a standard phone keypad is still beyond me. Why are the most used letters of the English language 2, 3, or sometimes even 4 button presses in!?
Let's look at Wheel of Fortune. Here's how the 5 vowels and the 5 most requested consonants measure up with number of button presses to get the letter:
AEIOURSTLN
1233234132
With the exception of A and T, the most popular Wheel of Fortune letters require 2.75 button presses!
Perhaps Wheel of Fortune is not the best analysis of letter usage in English. So the fine folks at AskOxford have done some leg work for me! Doing an analysis on the letters occurring in the main entries of the Concise Oxford Dictionary (11th edition revised, 2004), AskOxford evaluated the percentage of usage of each of the 26 letters. They came up w/ the following table, where the 3rd column for each letter represents a proportion, taking the least common letter (Q) to be 1. So E is ~56 times more common than Q.

E11.1607%56.882M3.0129%15.361
A8.4966%43.311H3.0034%15.312
R7.5809%38.643G2.4705%12.591
I7.5448%38.453B2.0720%10.562
O7.1635%36.513F1.8121%9.243
T6.9509%35.431Y1.7779%9.063
N6.6544%33.922W1.2899%6.571
S5.7351%29.234K1.1016%5.612
L5.4893%27.983V1.0074%5.133
C4.5388%23.133X0.2902%1.482
U3.6308%18.512Z0.2722%1.394
D3.3844%17.251J0.1965%1.001
P3.1671%16.141Q0.1962%(1)2

I have added a fourth column to each letter to indicate the number of button presses necessary to obtain the letter. On the whole, it takes 2.154 button presses to get any of the 26 letters of the alphabet. However, it takes 2.5 button pushes to get one of the 10 most used letters. And it takes 2.3 button pushes to get one of the 10 least used letters. To me, that's downright annoying.
Since it would take a miracle to ever dream of changing the telephone keypad number-letter convention, I guess I should consider one of those phones with a keyboard!!