CatSynth

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.

fun with stats word count wordle technorati palin

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:

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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:

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.

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.

Woke up this morning around 8AM to find we had reached exactly 80,000 visits here at CatSynth. Just one of those coincidences.

Today is:

1) The 20th anniversary of the chemical attack on the Iraqi Kurdish town of Halabja (March 16, 1988).

2) The 40th anniversary of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam (March 16, 1968).

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!

(Click to enlarge)

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…

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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.

catsynth top sites prime number