“The Measure of Fidget”, 1985-06-25 ():
…But when the audience is bored the several individuals cease to forget themselves and they begin to pay much attention to the discomforts attendant on sitting long in the same position. They sway from side to side, each in his own way, and the intervals between their faces, which lie at the free end of the radius formed by their bodies, with their seat as the centre of rotation varies greatly.
I endeavored to give numerical expression for this variability of distance, but for the present have failed. I was, however, perfectly successful in respect to another sign of mutiny against constraint, inasmuch as I found myself able to estimate the frequency of fidget with much precision. It happened that the hall was semi-circularly disposed and that small columns under the gallery were convenient as points of reference. From where I sat, 50 persons were included in each sector of which my eye formed the apex and any adjacent pair of columns the boundaries. I watched most of these sections in turn, some of them repeatedly, and counted the number of distinct movements among the persons they severally contained. It was curiously uniform, and about 45 per minute. As the sectors were rather too long for the eye to surely cover at a glance, I undoubtedly missed some movements on every occasion. Partly on this account and partly for the convenience of using round numbers I will accept 50 movements per minute among 50 persons, or an average of 1 movement per minute in each person, as nearly representing the true state of the case.
The audience was mostly elderly; the young would have been more mobile. Circumstances now and then occurred that roused the audience to temporary attention, and the effect was twofold. First, the frequency of fidget diminished rather more than half; second, the amplitude and period of each movement were notably reduced.
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