Posted by Here at King Cricket, we have a strong history of EXPERIMENTS. Here, a mere 15 years after the last one, is another EXPERIMENT.
Regular King Cricket correspondent Ged writes…
Abstract
The null hypothesis was that reading at the Hundred would be hampered by distractions whereas reading at the Test Match would be significantly more productive. However, under strict scientific experimental conditions at Lord’s, reading at The Hundred yielded an average of 23 pages per hour (pph) whereas the Test Match yielded merely 8.75 pph. The alternative hypothesis, that The Hundred is better suited to intense reading than the Test Match, is proved. 99.9% CI. The author has no competing interests.
Main article
I’ve rarely tried reading novels at cricket – I tend to go for shorter material such as plays, poems or articles. But I have been meaning to read The Course Of Love by Alain de Botton for years and decided to give it a go at the Hundred.
I spent six hours at Lord’s, primarily in the Upper Tavern Stand, while the double-header between London Spirit and Northern Superchargers unfolded.
Not even the bangin’ beats provided by Jess Iszatt, nor the live performances on and off the field prevented me from devouring 138 pages of the novel during the six hours I spent at Lord’s.
Ten days later, I was able to conclude the experiment due to the last-minute, temporary indisposition of Charley the Gent Malloy, which meant I was guestless for day two of the England v India Test match.
I spent eight hours at Lord’s on day two, primarily in the Lower Tavern Stand, trying to conclude reading The Course Of Love…
…but I only managed to read 70 pages of the novel that day.
I concluded the novel (c12 remaining pages) on day five of the Test, during which I also read most of the poems in Muted Serenades by Frank Dillon.
Conclusion
For reading novels at cricket, I recommend the Hundred double-header ahead of a day at the Test match. But I would recommend Muted Serenades for reading at cricket ahead of The Course Of Love.
Big fan of this piece from Ged. We’d been hoping to deploy it with better timing but there’s a spot of the old covid in the house so unfortunately we’ve had to use it to plug a hole in our “live” coverage. (No cause for concern. There’s just too many people to manage so we’re not going to be able to write owt for a day or so.)
What statistical distribution did you model with Ged? Normal, t squared, poisson? I’m intrigued!
I think we can assume Gaussian for this experiment, JB.
Excellent question, though. Were Daisy to conduct the same experiment I think we’d need to use a Poisson distribution to model the confidence intervals.
Not sure this site ever got better than the Jaffa Cake experiment, to be honest. Even counting the capybara gif.
It was the Jaffa Cake experiment article that hooked me in to this site and I had no aspiration to compete with that masterpiece.
Jess Iszatt has far too many consonants in her name. 80 per cent consonants to 20 per cent vowels? Madness.
Is it not 70-30 – same as your surname?
Where did this digression come from?
Her full name is 10 letters. Two vowels. 80 per cent.
Maths!
Three vowels. 70 per cent.
Counting.
I am an idiot. I read her name ten times and didn’t see the I as a vowel.
As you were.
It’s a very thin letter. Easy to miss.
Sums. Stats. Errors.
I’m in quants heaven.
Iszatt so
FYI
Excellent – we need more of these. Ged, do you plan to test the soundness of these results in other grounds as well? You know, to eliminate all possible external influences like weather and such on this brilliant conclusion?
No.