Who knew it could be so fun to calculate statistics about the length of a podcast? Kieran Healy has made some beautiful plots, as well as subjecting other 5by5 shows to the same treatment. Oli Hawkins did some nice hypothesis testing on Twitter.

But Don Schaffner answered the question we all want to know: how long before 5by5 is running Hypercritical 24x7? By fitting a line through all the shows, he showed the answer is 371 years.

What about the shows just before episode 51, where John Siracusa said, “I want to try for something shorter.” If he hadn’t started to rein it in, how bad would it be? This bad:

After doing a linear regression on episodes 35 through 50 (shown in red), we see the length is increasing at 2.75 minutes per episode. At that rate, we reach the 5by5 singularity (Siracusarity?) at Hypercritical episode #3672 in a short 69 years.

So, John’s true goal is revealed and achieved: Hypercritical has stopped getting longer.