The Cycle 19 demand curve

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:

i-2cbecaf67c32e08b1a2ccb3b29ebbc47-prop19.jpg
this is the linear plot, the time is in theorist units, rounded
data collected anecdotally from facebook...

i-53ebdca0e8145c12b25fa75a7f1d6364-lprop.jpg
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...

More like this

Just for yonks, I grabbed the WHO confirmed Avian Flu cases list and did a little plot of cumulative cases vs time... The blue curve is cumulative cases; the red curve is cumulative deaths. The date is the approximate date of WHO report, with 28 Jan 2004 as the zero date (11 cases, 8 deaths).…
Is approaching 1 per minute and accelerating. Proposals of course! Yes, it is Happy, Happy Hubble Proposal Deadline Day! You've downloaded yer new and improved APT20 (Astronomers Proposal Tool); installed the updated Java; bookmarked the subtly changed Proposal Guidelines, and even written some…
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…
Hubble multicycle large proposals were due today... Julianne tests the conjecture of proposal number invariance under simple scaling. Looks to be annoyingly close to correct with about 40 proposals in by the deadline. I still think we need to check the proposal success probability as a function of…

#955 at 02:45:33 GMT

#988 at 03:12:48 GMT

Here are some more culled from Facebook and my e-mail (you've seen some of these already):
#113 ~Wednesday afternoon
#576 @ 2:58 pm EST
#584 @ 3:06 pm EST
#734 @ 5:45 pm EST
#943 @ 9:36 pm EST
#959 @ 9:51 pm EST
#967 @9:56 pm EST

967 @ 02:55:46 GMT

By Anonymous (not verified) on 25 Feb 2011 #permalink

158 thursday 16 21 GMT
297 friday 5 55 GMT
386 friday 15 46 GMT
429 friday 17 11 GMT
470 friday 18 16 GMT
599 friday 20 24 GMT
616 friday 20 55 GMT
849 friday 23 30 GMT

By Anonymous (not verified) on 02 Mar 2011 #permalink

ID 73 at 2011-Feb-22 06:26:23 EST and ID 74 at 2011-Feb-22 06:35:32 EST

By Anonymous (not verified) on 02 Mar 2011 #permalink