Hubble Plateaus

In times past we have lovingly tracked the proposal frenzy as the near annual Hubble Space Telescope proposal deadline approaches.

As was noted by Julianne several years ago, and confirmed over the last half dozen cycles, the shape of the curve of number of submitted proposals as a function of time until the deadline is nearly invariant.
Interestingly, the total number of proposals also does not change much, some dips and spikes with the loss and availability of instruments, but the total is near stationary and some measure of the statistical saturation of the ability of astronomers to put together coherent proposals in a finite time.

Anyway, here is this year's lot, culled from a small sample of fb posts:

hst14

Same-same...

@astronomolly kept it real on twitter in the run up

More like this

Looks like the inflection point is somewhere around 6-8 hours before the deadline. Is that the point where we start trying finish the proposals we already have on our plate, instead of generating new ideas?