Stats

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:

Dona Nobis Pacem   48
Wordless Wednesday: La Sagrada Familia, Barcelona   43
"Wayback" Wordless Wednesday: Green Kitties   42
Wordless Wednesday: A Great Moment   41
Wordless Wednesday: Luna Sun Triangle   41
Dona Nobis Pacem: BlogBlast for Peace!   40
Wordless Wednesday: 43   39
Wordless Wednesday: Cat and Geometry   38
Wordless Wednesday: Centered Cat   37
Wordless Wednesday: Alley behind 49 Geary   37
Wordless Wednesday: Maneki Neko   37

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This list includes sites that are no longer active, and at least one person who has passed away.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.


CatSynth 2nd Anniversary (and Weekend Cat Blogging)!

July 19 is the Second Anniversary of CatSynth!

And by coincidence, we are hosting Weekend Cat Blogging (really, it is a coincidence). So we invite all our friends to participate and celebrate with us. As always, please leave a comment with your link, and we’ll post it during the roundup later this weekend.

Of course, we must post the photo of Luna that started it all on July 19, 2006:


`
and some fun stats for the occasion. Over two years at CatSynth, we have:

657 articles.
2,476 comments.
106,000 visitors.
298 “catsynth pics.”

The latter is using some custom analysis tools I created for the occasion, which also provide the top 33 tags/categories here at CatSynth:

cats 738
synthesizers 444
luna 280
music 169
news 136
wordless wednesday 101
weekend cat blogging 97
wcb 94
art 90
highways 85
personal 79
modernism 54
san francisco 50
stats 39
electronic music 35
experimental 34
carnival of the cats 32
mathematics 29
podcast 29
mp3 28
kitty 27
keyboard 26
friday ark 25
analog 23
photography 22
reviews 22
video 22
cotc 21
black cat 20
cats on tuesday 20
festival 19
california 18
chaos 18

Some tags, such as “photography”, should really be much higher.

Many readers may recall that last year, on our first anniversary, the site went down due to a rather annoying problem with our service provider, and we were sent into exile at the CatSynth FEMA Trailer. So we are leaving an anniversary post at the trailer as well.

A year ago, we at CatSynth had no idea what was going to be in store for us over the next year. A new job, a new home, a new life.

We traded the sun and greenery of our old home:

for our new home:

and life in the big city:

But some things remain the same. Luna, of course, is always here. And our friends and family. And CatSynth!

And we’ll still be here, continuing to do what we always do…

Some other significant milestones this weekend:

The 200th Friday Ark boards this weekend at the modulator.

Our friend Dragonheart is two years old today.

This is week also includes several birthdays for friends, whom we won’t embarrass by announcing their ages on our rather public forum…

It’s only one weekend after the Bad Kitty Cats Festival of Chaos first anniversary, so let us include it as well. This weekend’s edition will be at Life from a Cat’s Perspective with Samantha and Tigger.


Fun with stats: 100th Anniversary of Mother's Day

From the Associated Press:

55 percent of mothers are between the ages of 15 and 44.

81 percent of women between the ages of 40 and 44 are mothers. In 1976, 90 percent of women in that age group were mothers.

94.1 births per 1,000 is the number of births in Utah in 2006, the nation's highest. Vermont was the lowest with 52.2. West Virginia's was 58.3

10.4 million single mothers live with children younger than 18, up from 3.4 million in 1970.

83 percent of mothers who went back to work within a year of their child's birth returned to the same employer.

5.6 million is the number of stay-at-home moms in 2006.

Seven Strange Things About Me

Well, we (or rather I) got tagged by Megan and The Bad Kitty Cats with the meme Seven Strange Things About Me. This was almost two weeks ago, though we at CatSynth remember it like it was yesterday…

OK, so I decided to dust off the list of interesting facts about me from my music-and-professional site. It's supposed be the sorts of facts that would not appear in an official bio, program notes, or in the normal course of writing for this site. A few of them needed updating, like switching the career-related stuff to the past tense. I added a few more as well, pushing the total up to 95. And from that list, I selected 7 that I have deemed to fit the “strange” requirement:

05. I have never been to Kansas, but have visted every state that borders Kansas.
11. I call myself a cynical optimist.
32. I have a large orange stuffed clownfish named “Big Fishy”.
46. I once slept in a car and discovered the next morning that another car only yards away was ripped open by a bear.
62. I used to regularly listen to Stockhausen while having a bagel and coffee and reading the Sunday New York Times.
70. I am fascinated by crumbling concrete walls, graffiti, vacant lots, the spaces around highway overpasses/underpasses.
73. I have camped in Death Valley during the summer time. The daytime temperature was over 120F, and the night temperature was about 90F.

Hey, the requirement was “strange”, not necessarily “exciting”.

So the next step is to tag some more of our blogging friends with this meme (hopefully they're still my friends after I do so):

1. Meeyauw.
2. Gattina (of Gattina's Writer Cramps)
3. Jason of Xenogere
4. Jellypizza (I know, that's two in less than one week, but I'm curious to hear the results).

Bears, you're on notice!