proposals

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…
Let's see if I can remember how to do this blogging thing.... Proposal 1: We started out doing it by the book. Picked a good research topic, and then found the appropriate RFP, with a deadline comfortably in the future. We had weekly brainstorming meetings to refine our research objectives and were just beginning to write some text, when something shook us. Suddenly our experimental design didn't seem quite so clever or practical anymore. We spent a couple of weeks trying to figure out new ways to approach the problem, and debating whether we were really going to go after the RFP after all.…