From horchacha on YouTube, via matrixsynth:
This marks our 1500th post on CatSynth!
Stats
Fun with Highways: Saint Catharines
Facebook provides a number of interesting statistics about fans, one of which is the cities (or metropolitan areas) in which they reside. The top cities for CatSynth are not surprising: New York City is #1, with San Francisco and other Bay Area communities high on the list. But one has consistently stuck out among the top cities: Saint Catharines, Ontario, Canada. Today we pay tribute to this rather surprising enclave of CatSynth Facebook fans in our own unique way: a “Fun with Highways” article.
Saint Catharines is located in the Niagara region of Ontario, on the southwest edge of Lake Ontario, not far from Niagara Falls. It’s official nickname is the “Garden City” and is unofficially nicknamed “St Kitts” by people in the area (thanks to regular reader Sue St. Clair for providing this insight).
The city is served by two major highways (known as 400-series highways in Ontario): highway 406 and the Queen Elizabeth Way (QEW), which connects Buffalo, NY and Niagara Falls to Toronto. The QEW has an interesting history, not only for its name but also its distinction as one of the oldest divided highways in Canada. Below one can see the Garden City Skyway portion of the QEW spanning the city’s other historic transportation feature, the Welland Canal.
[Public domain image via Wikipedia]
One of the first long road trips with my family growing up went through Niagara Falls and Toronto, and I’m sure I passed through Saint Catharines on the QEW with little notice, despite my penchant for staring out the window and observing road signs. One tragic story of the QEW in Saint Catharines involves the death of hockey star Tim Horton in an automobile accident – I mostly know about him not from hockey but as the eponymous late owner of the chain where my friends in Canada go to get their daily coffee.
Interestingly for a highway article, Saint Catharines is also home to the headquarters of the provincial Ministry of Transportation – or rather a headquarters of the Ministry of Transportation, as there seem to be several. Of course, the city is also home to many parks and gardens as the name would imply. One more iconic is Montebello Park.
[Public domain image via Wikipedia.]
The pavilion in the photo above overall has a very classic appearance that one would see in many town parks from this era. But that one structure on the left also evokes a more modernist aesthetic with its unadorned smooth curves. There is something very 1960s about it. Additionally, Montebello Park has a significant connection to Central Park in New York City which I leave as an exercise to the reader.
Fun with Stats: Nobel Peace Prizes by Country
In light of today’s Nobel Prize award in peace, a little number-crunching of peace prizes by country (using this Wikipedia page as a data source). I actually did not guess this distribution in advance.
| United States | 22 |
| France | 10 |
| United Kingdom | 10 |
| Germany | 6 |
| Ireland | 5 |
| Sweden | 5 |
| Belgium | 4 |
| South Africa | 4 |
| Switzerland | 4 |
| Austria | 3 |
| Israel | 3 |
| Argentina | 2 |
| Bangladesh | 2 |
| Canada | 2 |
| China | 2 |
| Egypt | 2 |
| Norway | 2 |
| Poland | 2 |
| Portugal | 2 |
| Russia / USSR | 2 |
| Costa Rica | 1 |
| Czech Republic / Austria-Hungary | 1 |
| Denmark | 1 |
| East Timor | 1 |
| Finland | 1 |
| Ghana | 1 |
| Guatemala | 1 |
| India | 1 |
| Iran | 1 |
| Italy | 1 |
| Japan | 1 |
| Kenya | 1 |
| South Korea | 1 |
| Macedonia | 1 |
| Burma (Myanmar) | 1 |
| Mexico | 1 |
| Netherlands | 1 |
| Palestine | 1 |
| Romania | 1 |
| Vietnam | 1 |
You can read a speech by the most recent winner Liu Xiaobo here.
CatSynth 4th Anniversary
Another year has past since we started this site four years ago. Thanks to everyone who already wished us a happy anniversary, and to the folks at the Cat Blogosphere for their shout-out today.
And just as we have with previous anniversaries, we are celebrating with statistics of questionable import.
Over the past four years, we have written 1220 posts, and readers have contributed 6699 comments. We have received 293,916 visits. This comes out to about 5.5 comments per post, and about 43 visits for every one comment left. We also have about 270 “catsynth pic” or “catsynth video” posts. Make of these numbers what you will.
In terms of tags and categories, there are not really any surprises. These top terms do reflect what the site continues to be about:
| Cats (cat) | 704 |
| Synthesizers | 449 |
| Luna | 277 |
| Music | 246 |
| Art | 190 |
| weekend cat blogging | 183 |
| WCB | 181 |
| San Francisco | 160 |
| Personal | 153 |
| News | 151 |
| Wordless Wednesday | 147 |
| Reviews | 134 |
| Photography | 132 |
| Modernism | 91 |
| Highways | 82 |
| Art | 74 |
| analog | 74 |
| video | 74 |
| cats on tuesday | 70 |
| electronic music | 62 |
| synth | 62 |
| performance | 55 |
| carnival of the cats | 45 |
| Travel | 45 |
| black cat | 44 |
We now turn to stats specific to the past year. The top five days for visits since July 19, 2009 are:
| November 6, 2009 | 1036 |
| April 18, 2010 | 859 |
| May 11, 2010 | 808 |
| October 15, 2009 | 787 |
| March 22, 2010 | 780 |
Hmm, November 6, 2009. Who knew our post on Reconnaissance Fly and Noertker’s Moxie at the SIMM Series would get so much attention 🙂
The posts that received the most comments over the past year:
And the top commenters over the past year:
| kitty | 203 |
| Mickey | 143 |
| CatSynth | 96 |
| Gattina | 75 |
| SandyCarlson | 51 |
| Sukhmandir Kaur | 50 |
| Robin from Israel | 38 |
| Beth @ 990 Square | 37 |
| Katz (And Other) Tales | 32 |
| cindy | 31 |
| AVCr8teur | 30 |
| jams o donnell | 47 |
| Carver | 26 |
| Sniffie and the Florida Furkids | 23 |
| Beth F | 23 |
| Cats of Wildcat Woods | 22 |
| Ms. Latina | 20 |
| Snowcatcher | 19 |
| Digital Flower | 18 |
| Susan Adcox | 18 |
| Cafe Au Lait | 17 |
| The Chair Speaks | 16 |
| Harry Spotter | 16 |
| Jewelgirls Katz | 15 |
| Judi | 15 |
| Nikita Cat | 15 |
| jason | 12 |
These are the stats that change the most from year to year, as we welcome new readers and others fade away for any number of reasons. One interesting thing to note is our two top commenters (who have retained those spots for the last two years running) are both from Canada.
Our Facebook page gives us a new source of questionable stats to reflect upon. We have received about 30 contributions (pictures or videos). The city with the most declared CatSynth fans is New York. The countries with the most fans (after the United States) are Canada, the United Kingdom, and Finland. These are all plausible, but I am a bit skeptical of Facebook’s data gathering and presentation tools.
Thanks to everyone who has read and supported us, wherever you happen to be, and we’ll look forward to more over the next year…
Fun with stats: The Year in Hate and Extremism
I heard this report last night on Fresh Air, and then went to read the original article at the Southern Poverty Law Center. Here are some not-so-fun statistics:
- The number of hate groups in the U.S. has been going up for years, rising 54% between 2000 and 2008. The number of groups rose again slightly in 2009 — from 926 in 2008 to 932 last year — despite the demise of a key neo-Nazi group.
- Furious anti-immigrant vigilante groups soared by nearly 80%, adding some 136 new groups during 2009.
- An astonishing 363 new Patriot groups appeared in 2009, with the totals going from 149 groups (including 42 militias) to 512 (127 of them militias) — a 244% jump. (If you’re not familiar with what a “Patriot group” is, you can read more here.)
- A new poll from Harris interactive finds that 40 percent of American adults think that Obama is a socialist; 25 percent believe that Obama was not born in the United States and is therefore not eligible to be president; 20 percent say Obama is doing many of the things that Hitler did; 14 percent say Obama “may be the Antichrist.”
- According the SLPC’s map of extremist and hate groups, the state with the second largest number of groups, after Texas, is California.
It’s easy to forget sometimes, but your friends here at CatSynth could be targets for such groups. Far less of a danger than an auto accident, statistically speaking, but still…
CatSynth video: dronecat
From sduck409 on YouTube, via matrixsynth:
“”Bigfoot the cat gets minimal on a Roland JD-800”
Bigfoot should really join in one of our Droneshift performances!
1000th Post
Today we at CatSynth publish our 1000th Post!
To mark this milestone, I created this mosaic featuring a few of Luna’s appearances:
[click to enlarge]
A few fun statistical facts about our first 1000 posts:
- Luna has appeared in 238 posts almost 25%.
- To date, there 270 cat-and-synthesizer posts.
- As of this writing there are 5439 comments, or an average of 5 comments per post.
- Over 150 Weekend Cat Blogging posts.
- 115 Wordless Wednesday posts.
- Approximately 10% of posts feature our current hometown of San Francisco.
Here are the top 25 terms:
| Cats | 582 |
| cat | 414 |
| Synthesizers | 348 |
| Luna | 238 |
| Music | 200 |
| weekend cat blogging | 153 |
| WCB | 152 |
| News | 149 |
| Art | 145 |
| Personal | 133 |
| Wordless Wednesday | 115 |
| San Francisco | 97 |
| Modernism | 88 |
| Photography | 86 |
| Reviews | 77 |
| Highways | 70 |
| synth | 62 |
| electronic music | 59 |
| cats on tuesday | 56 |
| analog | 45 |
| carnival of the cats | 43 |
| video | 43 |
| Music | 40 |
| Travel | 38 |
| midnight monday | 36 |
CatSynth 3rd Anniversary
Well, this site has now been running for three years. And we’re marking the anniversary the best way we can think of: with stats of questionable significance.
886 posts.
195,501 visitors.
4638 comments.
Over 15,000 spam comments squashed.
Over 400 cat-and-synth pics and videos
The top 20 terms (a term is either a tag or a category or both):
| Cats | 516 | |
| cat | 356 | |
| Synthesizers | 297 | |
| Luna | 215 | |
| synthesizer | 185 | |
| Music | 171 | |
| News | 146 | |
| weekend cat blogging | 136 | |
| WCB | 134 | |
| Personal | 120 | |
| Art | 115 | |
| Wordless Wednesday | 96 | |
| Modernism | 72 | |
| San Francisco | 68 | |
| synth | 61 | |
| Photography | 61 | |
| Highways | 60 | |
| electronic music | 52 | |
| Reviews | 40 | |
| cats on tuesday | 48 |
The 11 most commented posts:
And the top comment contributors:
| Kitty | 451 | |
| Mickey | 179 | |
| CatSynth | 138 | |
| Gattina | 136 | |
| whaleshaman | 81 | |
| Andrée | 73 | |
| Daisy | 71 | |
| Dragonheart & Merlin | 71 | |
| sher | 65 | |
| SandyCarlson | 60 | |
| jams o donnell | 44 | |
| The Right Blue | 44 | |
| kitikata-san | 42 | |
| Hendrix | 41 | |
| parker | 40 | |
| Matthew James Didier | 40 | |
| Katie | 32 | |
| Randall | 31 | |
| HotMBC | 30 | |
| Gandalf & Grayson | 30 | |
| Dennis the Vizsla | 30 |
This list includes sites that are no longer active, and at least one person who has passed away.
I did also go back and look at those early posts from July and August of 2006, expecting to reflect on how much things have changed over three years. But instead I found myself noticing how much things on the site have stayed the same…
Pi Day 3.14159…
[For Weekend Cat Blogging, please scroll down or click here.]
We at CatSynth once again, celebrate Pi Day on its three-digit approximation, March 14 (3-14).
We start with some interesting facts about the digits of pi. We presented statistics about the distribution in our 2007 Pi Day post. From super-computing.org, we present some interesting patterns:
01234567890 first occurs at the 53,217,681,704-th digit of pi.
09876543210 first occurs at the 42,321,758,803-th digit of pi.
777777777777 first occurs at the 368,299,898,266-th digit of pi.
666666666666 first occurs at the 1,221,587,715,177-th digit of pi.
271828182845 first occurs at the 1,016,065,419,627-th of digit pi. (that’s e for those who haven’t memorized it)
314159265358 first occurs at the 1,142,905,318,634-th digit of pi.
Last year, we showed the relationship to the Gamma function, and of course to Euler’s identity, which links pi surprisingly closely to the imaginary constant i and the number e. But it is also surprisingly easy to generate pi from simple sequences of integers. Consider the Madhava-Leibniz formula for pi:
Thus one can generate pi from odd integers and simple arithmetic. Another formula only involving perfect squares of integers comes from the Basel problem (named for the town of Basel in Switzerland):
In recognition of Pi Day, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a resolution this week:
And thus the sad history of pi in politics as exemplified by the Indiana Pi Bill of 1897 is put to rest. Now onto erasing the sad history of science and politics in general of the past eight years…
Fun with Stats: Wordle vs. Technorati Tags
I was reading this article on DailyKos in which the author plugged the transcripts of the vice presidential candidates in tonight’s debate into Wordle. I think it’s quite telling that Sarah Palin’s top word was “also.” Actually it makes sense in light of her recent interviews.
Anyhow, we at CatSynth tried plugging our own RSS feed into Wordle and produced the following results:
[click to enlarge]
I did appreciate the results on an aesthetic level, being interested in text art and conceptual art. But I was also surprised by which words were the most prominent. Certainly, we at CatSynth are quite proud to represent “music” and “performance”, but a similar analysis of our Technorati Tags suggests a different focus:
analog art black cat california cats cotc experimental music friday ark mathematics moog photography rip san francisco soma synthesizer video weekend cat blogging bad kitty cats festival of chaos bkcfoc carnival of the cats cat cats on tuesday electronic music highways keyboard luna midnight monday performance wcb wordless wednesday
Of course, Wordle is counting words while Technorati is counting editorially specified tags. Nonetheless, the contrast is interesting. The word count is likely to change more dramatically over a shorter period of time, especially with music and art reviews in the mix, while the tags are likely to feature cats and synths. It would be interesting to try this periodically.