this post was submitted on 05 Feb 2024
194 points (94.5% liked)

Showerthoughts

29567 readers
1359 users here now

A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The best ones are thoughts that many people can relate to and they find something funny or interesting in regular stuff.

Rules

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
top 28 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 45 points 9 months ago (2 children)

And then there's me, always setting my alarm clocks to some odd numbers like 7:03 on purpose. Don't really know what that purpose is, but hey :)

[–] [email protected] 12 points 9 months ago

Omg same! I've been doing it on purpose since I was 12. Never a round number or multiple of 5. Changing it slightly every few days.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 9 months ago

I’ve been doing this for years as well since I once saw a calendar notification (which is at 9:00 for an all-day activity) stop my alarm after ringing for a second. Been paranoid ever since…

[–] [email protected] 35 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Probably moreso in the past 10 years as more and more people moved to using their smart phone as an alarm which has exact time unlike our bedside clocks which had a couple minutes of range depending on when you set it.

[–] [email protected] 49 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (5 children)

The year is 2071. You wake up to a dull vibration from your neuralink chip. Strange, its 2am.

You dont realize it, but a power failure and faulty CMOS battery on a mainboard somewhere has caused a server to reboot with the wrong BIOS time. Before NTP gets a chance to update the internal clock, the server sends out what it thinks is a massive backlog of alarm triggers, waking almost every sleeping person on the planet simultaneously.

Somewhere in the abyssal zone, the sudden collective pulse of mental energy causes an ancient evil to stir and wake from its million year slumber. The age of sleep has ended, only a perverse and endless twilight nightmare can now fill Hypnos' void in the minds of men.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 9 months ago

Ooh write more please.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 9 months ago (1 children)

The year is 2071. You wake up to a dull vibration from your neuralink chip. Strange, its 2am.

You dont realize it, but a power failure and faulty CMOS battery on a mainboard somewhere has caused a server to reboot with the wrong BIOS time. Before NTP gets a chance to update the internal clock, the server sends out what it thinks is a massive backlog of alarm triggers, waking almost every sleeping person on the planet simultaneously.

Somewhere in the abyssal zone, the sudden collective pulse of mental energy causes an ancient evil to stir and wake from its million year slumber. The age of sleep has ended, only a perverse and endless twilight nightmare can now fill Hypnos' void in the minds of men.

Roll for initiative

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Natural 1. You fall into a coma which is sort of like going back to sleep.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

good ol 1d1

[–] [email protected] 9 points 9 months ago

Damn it, we've birthed a new chaos god.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 months ago

This is what happens when you buy your neuralink on wish.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 9 months ago

Is good. I bet we would have some massive power failures as well.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

The time isn't exact. I don't know why it drifts, they should be able to use the GPS signal, but I have two devices, one with an alarm, and another with a notification that goes off at the same time. They're never more than a second apart, but which one goes off first changes.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 9 months ago

It'd be interesting to see how the distribution of sleep and awake times has changed over the last centuries. A decade or two ago this would have easily still been true but much less so since the typical nightstand alarm clock wouldnt have time synchronization. Further back alarms would be worse and worse so less true. I imagine if there's even church bells and specific hours when people need to work it makes sense awakening would be more tightly clustered than sleep time. I wonder when the trend would reverse if ever, maybe before indoor lighting but maybe before industrialization as a whole.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago (3 children)
[–] [email protected] 36 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Probably referring to alarm clocks.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago

Oh. I thought it was a reference to people dying in their sleep...

[–] [email protected] 10 points 9 months ago

🎵 He sees you when you're sleeping, he knows when you awake... 🎶

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

Hack apple’s servers and get all the health data.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I don't see why that would be true. People generally fall asleep about as often as they wake up, so the number of people who fall asleep at the same time and the number of people who wake up at the same time, averaged over all moments of a day, should be pretty much equal.

[–] [email protected] 31 points 9 months ago (3 children)

Na you have large population centers where a lot of alarm clocks go off at exactly 7am. The same people fall asleep over a longer interval of time the night before.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 9 months ago

that is a good point I didn't think about alarm clocks

I suppose every half hour there would be a surge of people waking up lol

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

Plus anyone who does in their sleep.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Of course there are moments where more people awake at the same time than fall asleep at the same time. In the second 07:00:00 , yeah, more people awake than fall asleep. The same isn't true for 22:13:35. And if you look at all seconds of the day you will find that on average, each second the amount of people that fall asleep is roughly equal to the amount of people waking up.

What you are talking about is variance. There is a higher variance in the times of people falling asleep than there is in the times of people waking up. That does not mean that "more people wake up at the same time than fall asleep". There are times of the day when significantly more people wake up than fall asleep, but as a counterweight, on prettey much all other times, the amount of people falling asleep is slightly higher than the amount of people waking up.

So actually, it's the reverse. Given that most people wake up to alarm clocks, if you pick a random time of the day, it is likely that in that second more people fall asleep than wake up

[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 months ago (2 children)

However, that’s not what the title is saying. The title says that more waking times are lumped at the same second in the morning.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

The title says "There's more people who wake up at the same second than people who fall asleep at the same second". One could (and most people seem to) interpret this as "the maximum amount of people waking up at any given second is higher than the maximum amount of people falling asleep at any given second", which is a statement I agree with. I interpreted it as "The amount of people waking up at any given time is higher than the amount of people falling asleep at the same time", which is of course false.

It seems we just weren't talking about the same thing. You were talking about the maximum values of both distributions, for which the statement is true, while I only considered the distributions' median and mean values, for which the statement isn't true.

I disagree that the post makes clear OP is referring to the max values, but I guess that's because english is not my first language, and my statistics background likely made me over analyze the statement.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

This, and also just that it's not that deep. It's ShowerThoughts, not ShowerEpiphanies.