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Comment by omarhaneef | Hacker News Reader

Before anyone takes this too seriously -- and it is surely too late for that -- I should point out that they did nothing to disambiguate the length of the movie. It may not be the coughgeist but the ... er ... timegeist (they should have a german word for it).

Anyway, the point is, coughs per hour would help us know if audiences simply favor longer or shorter movies at different points in time.

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That still requires some calculating before comparing movies, since it's much harder to compare a short film to a bladder buster. Using an average runtime as standard length F, then calculating coughs (C) per F would yield a value that can be more easily compared between films, regardless of length.

The German word for 'time' is 'Zeit', so that would be 'Zeitgeist' :)

Wouldn't want to leave the joke unexplained now, would we

As a non-German speaker I found the joke about the joke informative and humorous.

Same, I then went back to the original comment and thought "damn, that's a clever joke".

waffl is likely a German speaker. So of course not.

German speakers also can't resist replying to rhetorical questions.

> German speakers also can't resist replying to rhetorical questions.

This should have been, "German speakers also can't resist replying to rhetorical questions, can they?", should it?

There's a metajoke in here somewhere.

https://youtu.be/llE7wT1BKt8

They said they normalized the cough count, which I'm assuming means time adjusted?

> We calculate the Coughgeist for each year by determining the median expulsion count of that year’s nominees and then normalizing it.

Probably adjusted for the number of nominees per year

Ah missed that. They normalize for the coughgeist not the number of movie coughs.

Dauergeist [dowr-ghaist]

= Durationgeist :)

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