Teesside Snog Monster (jiggery_pokery) wrote,
Teesside Snog Monster
jiggery_pokery
  • Mood: amused
  • Music: Q: moods starting with a or b likely to be overrepresented?

Good start to the day

Got to sleep last night at probably about 1 o'clock and woke up at about 11. A friend has a theory about sleep that it tends to take place in cycles of an hour and a half, so when you go to sleep, you need about half an hour at the start to get used to sleeping, then you will find your sleep most restful if you sleep for a multiple of an hour and a half - so eight hours is good, six and a half is good, five is doable and so on. Not sure if there is any science to back it up, or whether it's actually exactly an hour and a half or more like 85 minutes or more like 95 minutes, or even if it varies from person to person. But there are times when I wake up, drop off to sleep and wake up an hour and a half later and then wonder. Probably not more than coincidence at the moment, but there might be something in it.

Weather is pretty clear at the moment. I am very tempted to try to get my bicycle fixed and go riding on it this afternoon. The bookmakers suggest Sunderland are 1/33 (that is, 33-to-1 on) to get relegated this season. No, that last one isn't a good thing.

Oh, and the LiveJournal portal has a list of the most viewed FAQs and how frequently they have been viewed - the most frequently viewed of them all has a number of views which is into five figures for the first time. I had a theory that the popularity of the FAQs was governed by a Zipf distribution, because it looks pretty close. In practice I think it's probably closer to a power law distribution with power about -0.8ish. Well, I thought it was cool anyway.

There's just been an extremely funny ad on ITV now. Brits, try watching ITV for a short time, it's likely to get repeated sooner rather than later and unlikely ever to be shown again after today. It's an advert for The Guardian (a.k.a. Het Grauniad, in accordance with its long-ago tradition for excessive typographical errors). A fairly generic Formula One car pulls into the pits. They have a reasonably authentic set of graphics and either one of the actual commentators or a reasonable facsimile of the same. The pit crew change all four tyres very quickly. The driver gets out of the car and runs over to a marked square where the rest of the crew spin him round three times. The driver then stumbles back towards the car and manages to get back in at the second attempt. He pulls away and we hear the car crash, with the commentator commentating "Oh no, it's all gone pear-shaped".

It's all because The Guardian have a monthly sports magazine and one of the features in this time is about how to make Formula One more interesting. Well done, guys, your very funny advert has just sold an extra copy.

What the advert didn't make clear, but is rather relevant, is that this monthly sports magazine is going to appear in tomorrow's edition of The Guardian. Good. More chance of the ad being repeated later today. Oh, and I'm thinking of the Observer which has a monthly sports magazine; the Guardian's F1 supplement is a one-off. Easy to get the two confused.
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