A Fuss Price range – Futility Closet

Francis Galton quantified boredom. At a tedious assembly in 1885, he noticed that the gap between neighboring heads within the listless crowd started to fluctuate:
When the viewers is intent every particular person forgets his muscular weariness and pores and skin discomfort, and he holds himself rigidly in the most effective place for seeing and listening to. As that is virtually equivalent for individuals who sit aspect by aspect, their our bodies are parallel, and once more, as they sit at a lot the identical distances aside, their heads are correspondingly equidistant. However when the viewers is bored the a number of people stop to neglect themselves they usually start to pay a lot consideration to the discomforts attendant on sitting lengthy in the identical place. They sway back and forth, every in his personal means, and the intervals between their faces, which lie on the free finish of the radius fashioned by their our bodies, with their seat because the centre of rotation varies vastly.
He wasn’t in a position to estimate this numerically, however he did discover one other measure: He counted about 50 fidgets per minute in every part of fifty folks. “The viewers was largely aged; the younger would have been extra cell.” He urged “observant philosophers” at uninteresting conferences to estimate “the frequency, amplitude, and length of the fidgets of their fellow-sufferers” in hopes that “they could purchase the brand new artwork of giving numerical expression to the quantity of boredom expressed by the viewers typically through the studying of any explicit memoir.”
(Francis Galton, “The Measure of Fidget,” Nature 32:817 [June 25, 1885], 174–175.)