Asian Lilies bloomingly in bloom

I wonder if these lilies started as someone's Easter gift and then planted. These flowers are on stalks about four feet tall and there are tons of them.

This purple is a cool color so in spite of there abruptness and how they stand out where they are, I like them.

Happy 4th Anniversary Honest Hypocrite - statistics on posts and comments

Today is the 4th Anniversary of the Honest Hypocrite. Please help me celebrate! I don't normally have meta-posts on this blog, posts about posting are less interesting than posts about anything else. I will allow myself the luxury of a meta-post today to celebrate both four years of the blog and over 150,000 page loads. I am sure that my high school English teacher would be delighted by my essay output and I am glad that you all are reading, and from the comments that some of you are enjoying it.

This anniversary wouldn't be complete without graphical and statistical analysis.

A plot of the posts vs. the date of posting shows that I have maintained more than a post every two days but less than a post a day over the four years. 1052 posts in four years yields an average of 0.72 posts/day.

A plot of the rate of posting shows that on occasion I have been able to keep the monthly posting average at almost two posts/day. Those rates are unsustainable and usually mean something interesting is happening or I am on vacation.

For true understanding of the data I think that histograms tell a fuller story than averages.

A histogram (click above for larger) showing the fraction of days with a given number of posts reveals that 46% of the days I have a posted on this blog (The breaks in the plot indicate a change of scale). The outlier day (6/20/2007) with 14 posts is from posts from my phone while I was at a baseball game.

My kind readers are also interested enough to comment on this blog. A histogram (click above for larger) showing the fraction of posts with a given number of comments shows almost 31% of posts have comments, some with many (The breaks in the plot indicate a change of scale). Interested or aggravated readers are commenting readers. Pointing out the uselessness of collected pull tabs for Ronald McDonald house and suggesting some high value alternatives generated 39 comments. Disparaging Ted Neely of Jesus Christ Superstar fame generated 34 comments. A post on how the cosmic background radiation might contain a message from the creator of the universe based on an article in arXiv that I also suggested to BoingBoing generated 22 comments and thousands of visitors, it was the first big hit on this blog. A post about the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina generated 14 comments and a mini flame war on self-sufficiency, prejudice, federalism and common courtesy.

All of these posts have generated more than 150,000 page loads since July 20, 2009 when I started tracking the page loads using Statcounter.

The plot above (definitely click for bigger) shows a histogram of the fraction of days in a half year for with a given number of page loads binned for easier viewing. I have offset the histograms by 10% each half year to separate them and make them easier to read. The y-axis which shifts up should make reading that axis a little easier. The trend in these plots is upward as the bulk of the curve shifts from 0 to 50 page loads a day in the first year or so to 90 in year 2 to 3 and finally to 150 page loads a day in year 4. There is evidence that as I have cut down the number of posts/day in the last 6 months that page loads have suffered a little.

The highest day on this blog was 3838 page loads on December 15, 2005 when that post about the microwave background radiation was picked up by BoingBoing. These days it is consistently 150 page loads a day, which tells me that at least someone is reading. In the future we will review some more stats and some favorite posts.

Not a new cloud type - it's just a gravity wave

Yahoo has a news story about a picture of clouds taken by an Iowan woman that is inspiring meteorologists to define a new cloud type. By the way, there is a Cloud Appreciation Society and they are pushing for it.



(Picture from Yahoo and AP)

This looks very much like the gravity wave clouds I saw in Delaware in October, and to many other pictures of undulating clouds which I thought were just called gravity waves.

Thus I thought these clouds had names already.

Time Travel and love

This Saturday Morning Breakfast cereal comic reminded me of the classic time travel novel The Man who Folded Himself by David Gerrold. If you haven't read it go read it now(Amazon) to avoid the spoilers below.

In the comic above the man crassly uses his time machine to go to a time when the girl is in the mood, not realizing that if he in the present has a time machine and has this idea, he in the future might do the same thing and thus a crowd of eager men converge on the one time his love interest was in the mood. Extra humor comes from the fact that it appears to be only a single day from the evidence of all the guys at every age who appear.

David Gerrold's novel follows the life of a man whose mysterious uncle leaves him a time machine which he then uses to travel through history altering it to suit himself even as the newly created history becomes more and more bizarre. He even meets up with himself. David Gerrold is unafraid of exploring all of the implications of this and the man even has sex with himself. In the novel there is a never ending party at a house outside of time where various versions of himself are always there. In several incidents in the novel older versions of the man keep propositioning younger versions of the man for sex, much as in the story in the comic above.

The time travel device has ended up creating many alternate versions of history and thus create many different versions of himself. At one point he even meets an opposite sex version of himself.

Gerrold's novel is complex and bizarre and very interesting. I invite you to read the novel and count how many characters are in it.

SIZZZRS license plate in Delaware

I am guessing that this SIZZRS license plate in Delaware belongs to a tailor (get it? Scissors). I was thinking "sizers" but then realized the short "i" way of saying it. On the other hand tailors let clothes out and take them in so maybe "sizers" is the correct interpretation.

COUNTER license plate

I am guessing that this person claiming the title of COUNTER on their license plate is an accountant. That or they are a variable in a loop in a computer program.

What other professions can you think of that might cause someone to get this license plate?

Now if I could only get that guy with "bean" on his license to park next to this one...

Wesley Snipes fan in Delaware

Could this person be such a fan of Wesley Snipes that they have a BLADE II license plate to commemorate their favorite movie? Is there a companion BLADE license on another car somewhere?

Were those movies that good?

Overturned Truck on Rt141 in Delaware this morning

I saw this overturned truck at Rt141 Spur and West Park Drive on my ride in this morning. Fortunately I was going straight so I merely had to wait for the policeman to let us through. Only the truck was there when I went through but the News Journal says it was a multi-car accident.



This might be the first published picture of the scene. Because the truck was at Rt 141 and the on ramps to 202 and this is a popular left turn for the A I DuPont hospital, that means the next intersection to go that way at Rt 141 and Children's Drive the left turn was very backed up because people couldn't turn earlier. I think about how an accident has other ripple effects. The next turn was backed up for five times as many cars as usual, which is just asking for a rear end collision from an inattentive driver.

On the way further south on Rt141 I also saw a DNREC emergency response truck going the opposite direction to the scene (I am assuming). This was on the Tyler McConnell bridge and I had to pull to the right on the bridge, where there really isn't any room, to let him go past me as he was coming towards me on the left. I suspect that means there was a spill of something. Perhaps in the cargo, though the article says a fuel spill was reported.

I hope everyone is alright. The window on the truck cab was broken out, but it wasn't clear if that happened in the accident or as part of getting the drive out. Police, Fire and ambulance were on the scene.

Honest Yet Hypocritical Furniture Design

The Honest Hypocrite in hip contemporary furniture font.

(via Cody Haltom, via Neatorama, via Josh Spear)

Blue Heron on Shellpot Creek - Video

After complaining of the difficulty of taking pictures of the Blue Heron that frequents Shellpot Creek behind my house, I was able to get it hunting fish on video.



In the video above watch it dive after a fish and ruffle its wings.



Here is a brief moment of flight that I mostly missed.

Someday I will get a better camera with a sharper telephoto lens and a blue heron blind and I will be set.