[omarhaneef]

Before anyone takes this too seriously -- and it is surely too late for that -- I should point out that they did nothing to disambiguate the length of the movie. It may not be the coughgeist but the ... er ... timegeist (they should have a german word for it).

Anyway, the point is, coughs per hour would help us know if audiences simply favor longer or shorter movies at different points in time.

[JoBrad]

That still requires some calculating before comparing movies, since it's much harder to compare a short film to a bladder buster. Using an average runtime as standard length F, then calculating coughs (C) per F would yield a value that can be more easily compared between films, regardless of length.

[waffl]

The German word for 'time' is 'Zeit', so that would be 'Zeitgeist' :)

[hhmc]

Wouldn't want to leave the joke unexplained now, would we

[enkid]

As a non-German speaker I found the joke about the joke informative and humorous.

[cfcosta]

Same, I then went back to the original comment and thought "damn, that's a clever joke".

[bhaak]

waffl is likely a German speaker. So of course not.

German speakers also can't resist replying to rhetorical questions.

[Garlef]

> German speakers also can't resist replying to rhetorical questions.

This should have been, "German speakers also can't resist replying to rhetorical questions, can they?", should it?

[willis936]

There's a metajoke in here somewhere.

https://youtu.be/llE7wT1BKt8

[edmcnulty101]

They said they normalized the cough count, which I'm assuming means time adjusted?

[theejazz]

> We calculate the Coughgeist for each year by determining the median expulsion count of that year’s nominees and then normalizing it.

Probably adjusted for the number of nominees per year

[edmcnulty101]

Ah missed that. They normalize for the coughgeist not the number of movie coughs.

[obfuscator]

Dauergeist [dowr-ghaist]

= Durationgeist :)