The recent downtime of mudcat was several hours judging by the last posts before, and the resumption of new posts. The rather significant diffence between the number of "top" and "BS" posts that returned should tell us something about differences in the regional distribution of the most prolific posters for the two sets. The 'cat went down fairly late in the evening, when "sensible" BS participants might have retired (unfortunately, those are a small sample?) and came back up possibly at a peak time** for Euro areas. (I haven't looked carefully at the time zones most likely, and probably won't this time.)

** Prior observations have shown that the biggest "hump," if the frequency of posts is considered, generally is at about the time Londoners would be arriving at work and have the perhaps more powerful office computers at their disposal and nothing much else to do. There's often a lull when one might expect they slip out of the office to go for the morning brew in the same time zone. No statistical analyses to indicate correlation reliabilities have been done, however.

The "Aussie bump" seems possibly correlated to when they arrive home from the evening pub, but the sample is quite small so that hump is barely visible most days. Correlation with changes in coherence by time of day has been suggested as a distinguishing feature, but would require fairly sophisticated study, and likely would not reveal much about the Aussies, since they seem pretty consistently incoherent (to the rest of us) all the time.

The US spans too wide a range of time zones to identify specific peaks in postings. Those attributable to USers are more of a random splatter not suggestive of any useful curve.

John