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Unfortunately, today was another day when I was lectured by Neville Richardson, the head of Chemistry. There may not be much wrong with his lecturing, but the subject matter that he teaches is just fundamentally dull, so this morning I decided to keep a record of the lecture's content using a Dull-Graph. I have reproduced it here using Excel. (Incidentally, as I've said before, I'm unsure why it's called "Excel" - it doesn't really excel at anything. In addition, my copy is missing vbaen32.olb, an object library that must have been left behind when I crudely copied it over from the laptop.)
Because of the lack of any sort of dull-o-meter or similar instrument, the graph is measured on just how much I wanted to fall asleep during the lecture (although above about 75%, I think that changes from "falling asleep" to "Please God, make it stop".)
Neville always starts at 11:00 on the dot, ignoring the vast majority of people who wander in after this time because of having had better things to do beforehand - walking from other classes, so the level rises slowly after that. For a while it looked as if it was going quite well, but it soon elevated rapidly when he started on the interpretation of spectra - graphs which, somewhat ironically, look not dissimilar to the one above.
It reaches a peak around 80%, ten minutes from the start. I can't recall why as I must have already been nearly asleep at that point, but it did get a little better, only to rapidly rise again. This time, he was on a roll and kept bombarding us with unintelligible analyses and formulae.
Slightly further on, you'll notice two unusual dips at 46 and 51 minutes. The only reason for these anomalies is that the projector broke down at these points, which prevented him from lecturing for a while and awoke the class from their peaceful slumber.
Fortunately, as the level was beginning to rise again, the clock hit 11:55 and he decided to stop, which was just as well as if it had gone on for much longer I think I would have been unable to complete the graph.
So why did I bother writing a detailed analysis of how boring my lecture this morning was? Well, quite frankly, it beats writing a computer science essay.
Because of the lack of any sort of dull-o-meter or similar instrument, the graph is measured on just how much I wanted to fall asleep during the lecture (although above about 75%, I think that changes from "falling asleep" to "Please God, make it stop".)
Neville always starts at 11:00 on the dot, ignoring the vast majority of people who wander in after this time because of having had better things to do beforehand - walking from other classes, so the level rises slowly after that. For a while it looked as if it was going quite well, but it soon elevated rapidly when he started on the interpretation of spectra - graphs which, somewhat ironically, look not dissimilar to the one above.
It reaches a peak around 80%, ten minutes from the start. I can't recall why as I must have already been nearly asleep at that point, but it did get a little better, only to rapidly rise again. This time, he was on a roll and kept bombarding us with unintelligible analyses and formulae.
Slightly further on, you'll notice two unusual dips at 46 and 51 minutes. The only reason for these anomalies is that the projector broke down at these points, which prevented him from lecturing for a while and awoke the class from their peaceful slumber.
Fortunately, as the level was beginning to rise again, the clock hit 11:55 and he decided to stop, which was just as well as if it had gone on for much longer I think I would have been unable to complete the graph.
So why did I bother writing a detailed analysis of how boring my lecture this morning was? Well, quite frankly, it beats writing a computer science essay.
