A clinical Study

This afternoon I performed a clinically rigorous* study on the disgusting noises made by a clinician sitting at his desk in a shared office over a roughly 15 minute period from about quarter past 3 until my computer clock said 15:30.

Noises counted were

-Sniffing
-Snorting
-Clearing throat with vigour
-Other general mucousy noises tat polite considerate people try to minimise in public
-nonspecfic squelchy noises

Noises not counted were
- General Darth Vader style breathing
-Increased volume of breathing due to the strenuous effort of lifting coffee cup

Note: Subject is not currently suffering from a cold but suffers from the following g conditions which may be relevant

-Smoker
-Obese
-Thinks waking to fill the kettle up is 'exercise'

I counted the seconds between each incident, not including 2 periods where subject left the room

I then pasted my results into whatever stats package I had open on my computer

Here are the results in seconds

Number of values 32


Minimum 0.5000
25% Percentile 3.500
Median 11.50
75% Percentile 20.00
Maximum 180.0

Mean 19.02
Std. Deviation 32.52
Std. Error 5.749

Lower 95% CI of mean 7.290
Upper 95% CI of mean 30.74

One sample t test
Theoretical mean 1.000
Actual mean 19.02
Discrepancy -18.02
95% CI of discrepancy 6.288 to 29.74
t, df t=3.134 df=31
P value (two tailed) 0.0038
Significant (alpha=0.05)? Yes

Sum 608.5

You can ignore the t test, as it only shows that the mean wasn't 1 second, sadly you will see that these results are significant whilst my own data isn't today. As you can see the mean time between disgusting, stomach churning, noises was about 19 seconds. This is not out of the ordinary it just happens I am more aimless than usual today.

* n=1 is the sort of awesome statistics medics publish all the time,

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Seriously

I AM GOING TO STAB SOMEONE IN THE THROAT WITH A PAIR OF SCISSORS