Under the weather

I recently got over a cold. Like most people (I hope), I don't like colds, and they often seem to be going on forever. If only there was an easy way to tell when I was over the hump, and the worst was behind me. Sure, I could pay attention to whether I 'feel' better, but that's not very scientific. What's scientific is graphs. And what could be more scientific than a graph plotting the number of tissues I use over the course of a cold?

So, for science, I kept count of the number of tissues I used during my cold. It's not glamorous work, but such sacrifices have always been necessary in the pursuit of human knowledge. The main features seem to be a very sharp increase early on (I had a couple of days of mostly a sore throat before the sniffles set in), a peak at around the 5 day mark, and then a more gradual decline as I got it out of my system. I hope many of you will appreciate the choice of colour here, the "communication theory" module I took as part of my statistics MSc is surely not wasted.