I don't know why, but deadlines - academic, professional, personal, domestic - always seem to stack up. For example, this weekend I had to finish three chapters for my supervisors, take advantage of weather good enough to go sky diving, finish and practice my presentation for AI2009, and our laundry was being refurbished and had just reopened, so I had a whole lot of clothes to clean too. On top of that there are all the usual extras, things like studying Mandarin and writing in my journal and dealing with administrivia for the Exeter MCR.

In comparison, the previous few weeks and weekends had been much less busy. This surprises me because that time period included the end of term, which is when I would have expected deadlines to peak, if ever. The above deadlines are all pretty much independent. Why aren't they more uniformly distributed?

So far, I don't know. One possibility is that although they might appear superficially independent they actually aren't. AI 2009 is a Christmas holiday conference, and it makes sense that work peaks at or near the end of a term. A term finishes just before Christmas. Thus those two deadlines aren't independent. Further, the skydiving opportunities come to a close as the winter deepens, and for that reason it was important to take advantage of the rare - and last, till February - chance to jump on Saturday. Not sure why the accommodation office decided to renovate the laundry now but there seems to be a seasonal temporal arrow which ties the others together.

Perhaps there are other reasons they aren't independent too. On the other hand, maybe they are indpendent. If they were then the size of any particular stack would be approximately binomial, and every so often you'd get big stacks like this. I haven't resolved this phenomena yet, and it's not clear what it would mean or imply if I did. In fact, it's probably not important, but I'm sure my mind will keep prodding at it. Somewhere down the line I‘ll write a part two.