http://www.happymonday.info/.

Well the Graun did sort-of promise a daily Science page when they withdrew the Life supplement on Thursdays and went back to a kind of Computer Graun, but they have gone back on that …

Ah, thanks Ben!

Thanks Ben!

Maybe Ben’s on holiday and that’s something everbody knows.

What most annoys me about all these formula stories is the way they try to assign a value to something that is relative to the person who’s reading it.

You mean like a horoscope? Hmm.

Obviously measuring pain on an individual basis during treatment can be useful as the baseline remains the same.

I was simply referring to the generalisation that these formula’s all rely on and the lack of quantifiable units they use.

Used properly, which, of course, doesn’t always happen, the pain scale is a slightly useful measure of relativity in an individual.

‘Yesterday my pain was 5 but after I took your drug my pain was 3.’

(That doesn’t mean your drug reduced my pain. It might just be that you’ve been kind enough to ask about me, so I feel better.)

Anyone who said ‘you are in 7 pain whereas he is in 3, so I will treat you first’ would be seriously awry.

For example take something like pain.

If you asked me to rate a particular pain on a scale of 1-10. My base line for 10 is a broken pelvis suffered whilst also breaking a wrist and a knee plus impact damage to an area that shall remain nameless.

Somebody else who’s been fortunate enough to not suffer anything worse than a hangnail has a totally different base line.

If your calling these science then you need to go get a good dictionary.

Thanks for the numerous refs. I may develop this info into a talk on how one study doe not answer a question, but scientific info may either increasingly point toward some pet hypothesis, or point to a bunch of random noise that is very annoying to your pet hypothesis.

Bugger.

That an academic put their name to this really goes a long way to showing that a carer in academia is a very poor indication for having a great mind.

(If it helps, my score for R = 0. Not because I haven’t broken any, but because I didn’t make any.)

I’m gonna guess that D is some arbitrary score that we get when we input the variables for a given day. We can then compare the days of the year using that score and arrive at our bullshit answer. The Daily Mail, presumably, input the data for every day in HISTORY and then found the one with the best/worst score. They must have, surely?

Can anyone enlighten me (and others) as to how Cliff Arnall obtained the result “19th January” from his “formula” for calculating the most depressing/miserable day of the year.

The formula quoted by the Mirror article is:

D = N + M (T+1) C R (B-S)/J.

where:
D = disaster
N = natural disasters
M = man-made disasters
T = temperature
C = post-Christmas gloom
R = number of New Year’s resolutions broken
B = borrowing
S = salary
J = job security

Specifically, if anyone could clarify the ranges/units of the above that would be a good start. e.g. are N and M the *number* of disasters? cumulative over the year? Is temperature in Celsius? Kelvin? and temperature of what? when?

If you get 19 for D as your answer, does that mean January 19th?

What values were used to get the 19th Jan answer?

Although I believe the “formula” to be, well, not really a formula, I would genuinely like to know how values for each of the right-hand side “variables” should be measured/deduced, and how the result for D should be interpreted.

Howard