*Whacks speakers with the Mallet of Astaroth* Stop being so embarrassingly _happy_!

This image amused me quite a lot this morning, after I got up at nine o'clock and missed Roy Dyckhoff's last lecture before the break. I was kept up by the people at the end of the corridor who sounded they were throwing bins about - so I called the porter up again. That's four times now.

In fact, I'm sure my radio alarm went off, letting Classic FM bombard me with its slew of terrible adverts which have now worked their way subliminally in to my brain thanks to them being played so often when I was half asleep. I must have just turned it off and gone back to sleep, but I have no memory of doing that.

OK, you now have permission to skip the rest of this entry, unless by some miracle you found the first one of these funny.


As I'm sure you'll remember, at the beginning of the week I plotted how boring Neville's lecture was on a graph. For comparison purposes, today I did the same.



I won't attempt as detailed an analysis of this as last time, but there are a couple of interesting points. He started slightly later than normal this time, which was very welcome. Unfortunately he launched straight in to it, but soon became understandable this time. That didn't prevent the boredom level from rising steadily.

At 31min, he mentioned Jablonski (Yablonski) diagrams, and anyone who reads SomethingAwful will recognise that name, so that got my attention for a bit. However, it wasn't long before Jablonski diagrams proved to be the most boring thing in existence.

The tidal wave of dullness was reaching critical levels when he suddenly mentioned lasers. Now, lasers are a great cure for boredom, there's nothing boring that could possibly be said about them... well, unless you're Neville Richardson. Thankfully he decided to finish early, which was just as well - I hadn't had any breakfast and was on the point of eating the graph to sustain myself.

Now, thanks to the Excel skills that I learned in primary school, I can overlay and compare the two graphs.



As you can see, this produces a rather illegible mess, but when the first graph is subtracted from the second a useful comparison can be drawn.



Areas where the line is above the zero point are when the second lecture was more boring than the first, and when the line is below it it indicates the opposite situation. It would be possible to determine which lecture was more boring by integrating to compare the areas under each side of the axis, but I'm honestly not that desperate for something to do (and I don't know how to do it in Excel anyway).

I've been thinking about what all this means (apart from the fact that I need to get out more) - boredom isn't a measure of the dullness of the lecture itself, as if the lecture is dull then boredom will keep on increasing, rather than remain constant. Therefore, dullness must be a measure of the accelleration of boredom that it will cause. So you could also differentiate the graphs of my boredom to find the rate of change of it - the dullness of the lecture.

dB/dx (x) = D, where D = Dullness and B = Boredom

Forgive me if that's wrong, I think I've gone a bit strange and I can't remember my Higher Maths any more. To finish off, the plot of log(Monday) versus 1/(Thursday) is displayed here.



Now, I'll be the first to admit that I have no idea what this is meant to represent, so I've just called it "Frank". It's pretty useless as far as analysis is concerned, but I'm sure that you'll agree that it's an interesting squiggle.