Every year we contemplate the Hubble Call for Proposals demand curve.

Four years ago we started to quantify the demand curve

the calm rational analysis soon broke into a nerd gambling frenzy

we then started theorizing about proposal scale invariance which annoyingly enough apparently works

by then Julianne was analyzing the observations of the proposal submission rate – this was back in the good old days when blogging was hot and we had time to actually do stuff

so, can’t let a good analysis down:

this is the linear plot, the time is in theorist units, rounded
data collected anecdotally from facebook…

and the log-lin plot.

Damn, we’re predictable…
the break from approximate e^(t-t₀) seems a bit stronger this year, which is not surprising given the two extensions (first from 8 pm to 10 pm EST and then till 3 pm the next day).
I suspect though that the curve won’t asymptote much higher than the naive extrapolation, sounded like people were burned out by the time the extensions were announced.

More data is needed, in particular more low numbers and denser sampling during that critical last hour, though I fear this year’s extrapolation will be hopelessly corrupted by the capricious extensions…