fatvegan

The distribution of requests for Big Day Out tickets (and probably most concert tickets) on the Ticketmaster site is quite interesting. At 9:01 the queue was 3 minutes long. I bought some tickets and was done by 9:05. At 9:06 the queue was over 20 minutes long. I'm surprised at how many people must have arrived at 9:03 rather than 9:01. You'd think if you were keen enough to be there at 9:03, you'd try and get there two minutes earlier and it would become a frenzied race of atomic clocks and network latency. But it's not. It's just a traditional old race of some flattish log-normal distribution of human error.