When my roommate’s alarm goes off, he invariably presses the snooze bar. This continues in nine-minute cycles until I have to rouse him myself. All the alarms I have seen have a nine-minute snooze interval. Is this a standard number, and if so, where did it come from? –Matt Mc, Indiana, Pennsylvania
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(2) Engineers believe their bosses come to check on them every ten minutes.
(3) Physiologists have found that a sleeper who doesn’t want to get up will fall back into a deep sleep if left for longer than nine minutes. Yeah, right.
(8) On a digital clock, nine is the greatest interval obtainable by advancing some sort of “snooze counter” on the ones column. But why mess with the ones column? Why not put the snooze counter on the tens column and advance that by one?
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): illustration/Slug Signorino.
