Contra Dance Lengths

January 31st, 2023
contra
There was recently some discussion on how many minutes callers typically run a contra dance, with a lot of "well, it depends" answers. There's a place for that, but I think it's also helpful to have some numbers. I went back over the last ten evenings where I have recordings:

It looks like 8-9min is pretty common. How much variability is there within an evening?

Most callers stayed between 6.5min and 12.5min: one ran two dances shorter than that; another ran eight longer (in two evenings). If you're going to run dances much over or under 8-9min it's good to warn the band so they can plan.

These were all 3hr evenings, and the callers called 8-12 dances. Two of the evenings with 12 dances had a square: those were shorter (4:51, 4:59) and I didn't count them above. This makes 2/106 squares, well down from 14/19 in 1965. Including the squares, here's the relationship between number of dances and dance length, inversely proportional as you'd expect:

Referenced in: Notes on Tony Parkes' "Contra Dance Calling"

Comment via: facebook, lesswrong, mastodon, substack

Recent posts on blogs I like:

The benchmarkpocalypse

There's been a lot of talk about the vulnpocalypse, to which I don't have much to add because I'm not a security person, but I haven't seen much discussion on the closely related (and to be fair, less serious, issue), the benchmarkpocalyps…

via Posts on August 17, 2026

You can't join the secret inner circle of cool effective altruists

I, and a lot of other people I know, seem to believe something like this:

via Thing of Things August 11, 2026

Microfictions 2

A few more microfictions, still no LLMs.

via Evan Fields August 7, 2026

more     (via openring)