CatSynth

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):

The 11 most commented posts:

And the top comment contributors:

This list includes sites that are no longer active, and at least one person who has passed away.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

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

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.

(Click to enlarge)

stats fun with stats lolstats cats lolcats

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.

earth day
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fun with stats

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% 	mondrian2 	15 	2.38% 	crazy cats3 	15 	2.38% 	new world trade center4 	8 	1.27% 	parabola5 	6 	0.95% 	new world trade centers6 	5 	0.79% 	New World Trade Center7 	5 	0.79% 	betta splendens8 	5 	0.79% 	breeding fighting fish9 	5 	0.79% 	fishy10 	5 	0.79% 	the new world trade center-11 	4 	0.63% 	The Sphere WT-12 	4 	0.63% 	black cat13 	4 	0.63% 	cats fighting14 	4 	0.63% 	cats musical15 	4 	0.63% 	circuit bending16 	4 	0.63% 	panther animal17 	4 	0.63% 	piet mondrian18 	4 	0.63% 	the new world trade center19 	4 	0.63% 	vtech phone circuit bent20 	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.

stats
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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.

fun with stats
pi
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Today's chart rates four ex-girlfriends against criteria from an article at everything2.com:

Just like how women can be treated badly, men can also be treated badly. And for some reason, men are socially engineered to take more crap from the woman. Here are some of the things women who treat men badly do:

fun with stats
valentines
men treated badly
women

This chart represents the most popular automotive colors for North America in 2004.

That is one fine-looking chart!

but which one is the new black?

stats
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cars
automotive
colors