Stats

CatSynth 1st Anniversary

Today we celebrate CatSynth's first anniversary.

It's been one year since we posted this photo on July 19, 2006:

The idea came from a friend who said something like “dude, you should do a website about cats and synths.” So I did. Really didn't have too much idea what I would write about. I quickly learned that there was quite an abundance of pictures of cats and synths, and sites like matrixsynth had been collecting such images for a while. Indeed, one of the first external “CatSynth pics” to be posted here was of matrix's own cat JD:

Sadly, we recently learned that JD passed away this month. We offer matrix our sympathies. It's always sad to hear about cat friends passing away (or human friends, for that matter), and we at CatSynth have seen our share this past year.

I expect to post more this evening reviewing the year with photos, not-so-useful stats and the other things we at CatSynth like to think we do well…





The CatSynth Eighty-three

It seems like everyone these days has a “top 100 list”, indeed we are listed on a few of them. Well, we at CatSynth like to be different, so we're introducing the “CatSynth 83.” All sites related to cats, synthesizers, electronic music, or any of the other topics frequently discussed on this site like highways, mathematics, software, etc., can apply. We will list to top 83 participating sites. So come and join the only top-sites list based on a neglected prime number.

And we have a winner (or two, or three)

Well, the visitor counter passed 15000 sometime after 9PM tonight.

And the winner is…well, it looks like it might be a tie (possibly a three-way tie). I'll announce names once I've successfully contacted and verified everyone.

How could there possibly be a tie for the 15000th visitor, you ask? Well, it looks like the counter might have a bit of an issue, especially for sites with a fair amount of traffic. I run a version of sphpblog, slightly tuned and modified for my own needs/interests. Indeed, that's how I was able to program in the “contest” to declare a winner when the counter hit 15000. However, the counter seems to have stayed at 15000 over three visits from three unique IP addresses, which resulted in a “tie.”

I have gone through the site logs to verify this; and I will honor the prize for each of the people who can legitimately claim to have “won.”

As for the counter, I will either have to write my own to replace the current one, or use one of those outside services. It looks like the total visits for CatSynth may have been severely undercounted because of this, and I might try some simple statistics to get a better estimate. Note that this only affects the internal site counter, not any of the outside services, like “Top 100s”, or ads.

Certainly a reminder to question the reliability of some other electronic counters out there:

Visitor 15000 Contest

Well, we are rapidly approaching visit 15,000. Not bad for a blog with such an esoteric theme that has provoked reactions like “now there is officially a website for everything.”

In honor of this milestone, we are planning to award the 15,000th visitor a free copy of my CD Aquatic and a $10 donation to the charity of his or her choice.

At the current rate, I would suspect 15000 will occur either Friday or Saturday, but it might be sooner. And RSS subscribers don't count, it's got to be a visit to this site that is logged for the counter. I just programmed in the award logic, so I know.

Good luck, and keep reading!

Bloggers Choice Award Nominations

Well, it looks like we've been nominated for Blogger's Choice Awards in three categories:

My site was nominated for Best Geek Blog!

My site was nominated for Best Animal Blogger!

My site was nominated for Best Blog About Stuff!

Of course, half of all the sites I visit these days are nominated for Blogger's Choice Awards. But nonetheless, we at CatSynth ask for your support, if nothing else it's a bit of fun. I think our best chance is in the Geek Blog category. In the Animal Blogger category, there's very little chance of competing with sites like Cute Overload, dailykitten or the lolcats.

From the nominating statement:

“cats, synthesizers, music, art, opinion” Yes, it's a blog about cats and synths, a strange combination that seems to work. Lots of cute photos of cats posing with, and occasionally playing, music gear. Also features frequent appearances by the lovely black kitty Luna, pretty much the *star* of the site. This site is quite informative, in terms of various global issues, such as pet food recalls, interesting stats of highways, information about people and places (ie New Orleans). This website has many visitors, especially kitty lovers and those people who like music and synthesizers as well. It's got class, it's got variety, best of all, it's got kitties!

I'm glad someone out there appreciates my “highways” posts.

Fun with stats: Earthday Edition

Some “chilling facts” from the Environmental Defense Fund:

1     Rank of 2006 as hottest year on record in the continental United States.

1     Rank of America as top global warming polluter in the world. [though China is doing their best to capture title]

20%     Percent increase of America's carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of fossil fuels since 1990.

15%     Percent increase of America's carbon dioxide emissions forecasted by 2020 if we do not cap pollution.

80%     Percent decrease in U.S. global warming pollution required by 2050 to prevent the worst consequences of global warming.

78     Number of days by which the US fire season has increased over the past 20 years – tied closely to increased temperatures and earlier snowmelt.

200 million     Number of people around the world who could be displaced by more intense droughts, sea level rise and flooding by 2080.

358     Number of U.S. mayors (representing 55 million Americans) who have signed the U.S. Mayors Climate Protection Agreement pledging to meet or beat Kyoto goals in their communities.

0     Number of federal bills passed to cap America's global warming pollution.

0 1     Number of times President Bush has mentioned “climate change” or “global warming” in his previous six State of the Union speeches.



Fun with stats: search strings for April

The 20 most common search strings (out of 376 total) for the first week of April that lead people to CatSynth and my other websites:


1 	22 	3.49% 	mondrian
2 	15 	2.38% 	crazy cats
3 	15 	2.38% 	new world trade center
4 	8 	1.27% 	parabola
5 	6 	0.95% 	new world trade centers
6 	5 	0.79% 	New World Trade Center
7 	5 	0.79% 	betta splendens
8 	5 	0.79% 	breeding fighting fish
9 	5 	0.79% 	fishy
10 	5 	0.79% 	the new world trade center-
11 	4 	0.63% 	The Sphere WT-
12 	4 	0.63% 	black cat
13 	4 	0.63% 	cats fighting
14 	4 	0.63% 	cats musical
15 	4 	0.63% 	circuit bending
16 	4 	0.63% 	panther animal
17 	4 	0.63% 	piet mondrian
18 	4 	0.63% 	the new world trade center
19 	4 	0.63% 	vtech phone circuit bent
20 	3 	0.48% 	Mondrian

Up until this month, “Mondrian” in various combinations has topped the list, because of my popular Mondrian Machine page I did several years ago. More searches are now leading directly to CatSynth, including the variations on “New World Trade Center.” That one is a bit surprising. I did a rather lengthy article on the fifth anniversary of 9/11, and apparently it places quite well in Google's image search. Go figure.



Fun with stats: digits in Pi

From Eve Andersson's Pi land, we have these histograms of the frequency of (base 10) digits.

The first 100 digits of pi:

0 8
1 8
2 12
3 12
4 10
5 8
6 9
7 8
8 12
9 13

Things even out pretty nicely by about 1 million digits:

0 99959
1 99757
2 100026
3 100230
4 100230
5 100359
6 99548
7 99800
8 99985
9 100106

The digits are just white noise, there might be an interesting pattern now and then, but that is to be expected statistically. Besides, these are base 10 digits, which are an arbitrary representation based on the fact that we have two hands with five fingers apiece…

I could share some more interesting facts and formulae, but printing the greek character pi on a blog is, as they say, a pain in the butt. And I am not in the mood for that tonight.