Slashdot Mirror
Cambridge Computer IDs World's Most Boring Day
smitty777 writes "Scientists hard at work at Cambridge used a computer algorithm and nearly 300 million historical facts to identify the most boring day in history. The winner? On April 11, 1954, absolutely nothing happened. That is, unless you count the most boring day in the world happening."
Must be the second most boring day ...
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
That's my birthday, you insensitive clod.
No left turn unstoned.
Incorrect. Open a terminal and type cal 9 1752
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
all you would need is a dataset of all the interesting things that happened. Your dad tying his shoelaces is in no way interesting
It's all a matter of perspective: my dad tying his shoelaces would have been a major achievement, considering he had Parkinson's diseases.
In the same vein, consider, for instance, a bedouin, constantly on the move in the desert, who doesn't have access to any newspaper, TV, and pretty much doesn't know or give a fuck about anything outside his little world of camels and trading. For this guy, 9/11 was a completely ordinary day.
Despite what most westerners believe, it turns out that most things we consider important and newsworthy aren't even known to the vast majority of the world's population. So the most boring day picked up by Cambridge was only boring to people who share Cambridge's worldviews.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Seriously? Why are so many people reacting negatively to this?
Look, here's what happened: the researcher came up with some system for weighing the importance of events, probably kinda like page rank but with more structured information, and fed it a ton of historical data.
He then realized that from there, calculating the least important day (as defined by the sum of the importance of the events that happened during that day, I imagine - it certainly wasn't an average over the importances) was essentially just a query away.
Seriously guys, what's wrong with doing that? This researcher came up with a useful system that can answer this sort of question relatively easily, decided to ask the question and got a blurb about it in the newspaper. It probably took him all of five seconds to pose the question to the system, and then a max of maybe a couple of minutes for the system to spit out the answer. It's not like the whole thing is going to be tossed in the trash can now that this one useless question has been answered!
To determine the most boring day, you either need every fact or one fact: That on Good Friday, 1930, the B.B.C. evening news announcer led the bulletin with "There is no news tonight" and gave a piano recital in place of the normal bulletin.
Mentioned on the BBC website
or according to the software used, does the fact that the day was recognised as one on which nothing happened make the day itself interesting.
This person who did this work, Mr Tunstall-Pedoe, is not an academic Cambridge University. He is not even a scientist or researcher. He is the CEO of his own firm True Knowlegde (sic).
The connection with Cambridge is that it happens to be the town he lives in. He also attended the university there, 15 years ago, and still does part-time teaching of undergraduate courses.
This silly story is just an attempt to raise the profile of his company. The "results" should be considered in the spirit of fun and not as legitimate scientific output.
By name-dropping Cambridge, in order to try and impart some credibility to the story, both the original Telegraph article and Slashdot summary intentionally misleading.
Boooooring!
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
Considering the current state of scientific journalism, that is basically all I need to conclude the system does exist.
Man, maybe some genius was being made that day. Pretty interesting to me. Even if it would take 9 months to poop out.
Skipped sex ed, huh?