fun with stats

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.



Fun with stats: V-day edition

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:

S L M D
1. “Disapprove” of him and his likes in
attempt to change the man.		 X X
2. Keep reminding him that she wants to break-up with him on a
specific set date.
3. Taking for granted, his ability to understand and compromise. X X X
4. Taking advantage of his generosity. In this case, she
starts becoming a gold-digger.		 X
5.
Getting her way whenever there is a conflict. Some would argue the man may be
passive at this point. But usually, the only thing he wants to avoid is a
meaningless argument.		 X X X X
6. Flirting with other men either in front of him or behind his
back.		 X X
7.
Cheating on him.		 X X X
8. Not understanding that his personality can grow to
become more enlightened.		 X X
9. Having sex
only when she wants.		 X
10. Not respecting his private/personal life. X X
11. Arguing over every meaningless detail of either “what he
said” or “what he did”.		 X X X
12. Having little tolerance and patience of his own
“flaws”.		 X X X X
13. Not saying “sorry” when she’s wrong.
14.
Not admitting when she’s wrong and always trying to get him to admit he’s
wrong when he really isn’t.		 X X X X
15. Blaming him for everything or anything that goes
wrong.		 X
16.
Not going to important events with him. (e.g. his graduation, lifetime
achievement award ceremony, their wedding, etc…)		 X
17. Not sacrificing nor compromising anything of
hers for his benefit. (Aren’t relationships suppose to be a two-way street?)		 X X X X
18. Telling him “I don’t love you,” yet still wanting to
have sex with him.



men treated badly

Fun with Stats: CatSynth 2006 Year in Review

What better way to reflect upon the year than with marginally meaningful statistics?

The following table represents the frequency of tags in all 2006 articles on CatSynth.com (except for this one). Tags are either those funny words at the bottom of every post or the category names that follow the dateline at the top of every post.

With 285 distinct tags during 2006, it is rather difficult to show them all in the graph above. However, most are only used once. As can be seen in the following pie chart (hey, who doesn't love a good pie chart?), the top 15 tags account for almost 50%:

Here are the top 33 tags for 2006:

cats			85
synthesizers		54
news			34
music			33
luna			26
weekend cat blogging	20
worthless kitty		17
kitty			17
art			17
wcb			14
new orleans		9
photography		9
experimental		8
electronic music	8
lebanon			7
modernism		7
osw			6
emulator x		6
stats			6
kitties			6
e-mu			5
beirut			5
fun with stats		5
podcast 		5
jazz			4
computer music		4
analog			4
improvisation		4
open sound world	4
funk			4
sculpture		4
mathematics		4
resonance		4

Happy New Year!



Fun with stats: Holiday Edition

From John Battelle's Searchblog, we have some self-described “fun stats for the holiday:”

If you were expecting something more directly apropos of the holiday season, consider a few of these gems courtesy of New American Dream:

* A typical middle income family earning around $45,000 a year saw its debt burden grow by 33.1% between 2001 and 2004, even after adjusting for inflation.

* Recent statistics show that in November of 2003 54% of consumers were still paying off credit card debt left over from the previous holiday season.

* The amount of household garbage in the United States generally increases by 25 percent between Thanksgiving and New Year's Day, from 4 million tons to 5 million tons.

* 50 million Christmas trees are purchased in the U.S. Of those, 30-plus million get carted to the landfill every year.

* The National Mental Health Association cites the financial stresses of the holiday season as one cause of the ?holiday blues? which, for many, transforms the holidays into a time of anxiety and depression.

So folks, lay off the credit card debt for a bit, and spend some more time with your family and friends, both furry and not so furry.

Maybe give a little something to your local animal shelter, too. You can find shelters and other organizations near you on Petfinder.