Snooze, snooze, snooze, snooze!

Did you ever wonder why the snooze button on alarm clocks is set for 9 minutes instead of 10 or some other arbitrary number?

Maybe its a way to help prevent OCD. You know how you gotta wake up on a specific division of time, like on the hour, on the half hour, or 45 minutes. I never set my alarm to some random ass time like 9:43, then again maybe it's just me. Maybe if the snooze was set to 10 minute intervals and you had you alarm set on the hour, you would have to snooze three times so that you don't wake up on a random time like 10 or 20 minutes into the hour, but by then you might already be late. I'm not really serious about this theory.

Another idea is maybe 10 minutes into the snooze you'd fall into a deeper sleep that is harder to wake up from. Very doubtful though, since sleep cycles don't go in 10 minute intervals, but rather 90 minute intervals.

Here's the officially boring answer:

By setting the snooze time to 9 minutes, modern digital alarm clocks only needs to watch the last digit of the time. So, if you hit snooze at 6:45, the alarm goes off again when the last digit hits 4 - at 7:54. They couldn't make the snooze period 10 minutes, or the alarm would go off right away - or the clock would take more circuitry.

Historically speaking, there's another element to the answer. Clock experts say when snooze alarms were invented, the gears in alarm clocks were standardized. The snooze gear was introduced into the existing mix and its teeth had to mesh with the other gears' teeth. The engineers had to choose between a gear that made the snooze period nine-plus minutes or 10-plus minutes. Because of the gear configuration, 10 minutes on the nose was not an option.

According to these clock historians, engineers chose the shorter snooze, figuring "less than 10 minutes" seemed more punctual and marketable than sending people back to dreamland for "more than 10 minutes." The public became accustomed to this, and clock makers have generally stuck with it.

Kaiji

Kaiji is such an awesome anime. It has so much emotion and I love the psychological stuff. Here are some of the my favorite and most intense moments. Of course to enjoy them full you should see the whole series or at least the whole story arc.

Note (12/7/2010): Wow I wrote this a long time ago and forgot to finish it. Anyway here is part of the most intense scene. It's not the whole thing, but I'm do lazy to edit the video myself so I used someone else's youtube upload.