Flickr has a lot of sunset photographs. Too many, some would say.

To build this graph I collected just a few of them, by searching for photos that have been tagged “Sunset”.

I collected only 100 photos from the hundreds posted each day of the preceding 365 days, so that the photos are evenly distributed across the past year. There are over 35,000 photos shown in the graph.

I positioned each photo horizontally according to the day it was taken, and vertically according to the hour it was taken.

By making each photo translucent, I created a “hot spot” which shows when the most photos were taken, each day of the past year.

The bright band shows the approximate time of sunset for each day. You can see that as the year progresses, the time of the sunset changes.

The deepest dip in the band corresponds to the summer solstice (about June 22), and the highest part of the band corresponds to the winter solstice (about December 22).

This is the second time I’ve graphed the curve of the sunsets using Flickr sunsets. The first time, over a year ago, I used all the photos then available, which produced a more inconsistent looking graph:

Mystery Tags

Can you can figure out what tag was used to make this next graph? (click on it to find out)

And here’s another mystery tag with a characteristic time signature – can you guess what it is?

APEX Electronics is a technology junksurplus yard, just a few minutes from my home in lovely Sun Valley. This past weekend, the southern california chapter of Dorkbot made a field trip up there.

I always miss the Dorkbot events, because they happen on Saturday afternoons, when I’m teaching high school kids at Art Center. Fortunately, Eecue from blogging.la did an extensive blog entry and photo gallery of the trip, which I am enjoying vicariously.

Sweet!

I put up a new Whitney Music Box variation for the holiday.

Happy Halloween!

I had a fantabulous Friday up at Yahoo! doing the jbum dog & pony show for one of their regular developer talks. I showed a bunch of fun little projects from the past two years including various Flickr Hacks and the crowd favorite, the Whitney Music Box – always nice to see the “most hypnotic website evarrr” on a big screen! Plus I got to introduce a bunch of Kircher-virgins to my main man. A crowd of Kircher-virgins is better than a new jar of peanut butter.

The highlight of the day for me was breaking naan with a goodly number of folks on the Flickr team: Stewart, George, Heather, Cal & Kakul. What a down-to-earth and cool bunch of people! This group has single-handedly increased Yahoo!’s hip-quotient by a factor of 11.

All in all, a most excellent day in what is turning out to be a most excellent year!

* * *

At the lecture, I paraphrased a quote I stumbled across about a year ago, from a 17th century writer (+- 2 centuries). The quote, as I remember it, was “The eye likes surprise, the ear likes comfort.” To my mind, the quote is a great encapsulation of the greater ability of our optical circuitry to handle new information. It also helps explain why the visuals in the Whitney Music Box make the music more enjoyable.

The problem is, I can’t find the quote anymore! I’m clearly misquoting it, because according to both Google and Yahoo, I’m the only one who ever said it. Oy! Various permutations of the quote aren’t working for me either. If you can help me find the original quote, and author, I’ll give you a dollar.

I did originate this quote, however:

Bumgardner’s Law: Any sufficiently large collection of photos must contain at least a few Buddhist monks.

UPDATE: Pamela Fox dug this up – Thanks Pamela!

“The ear tends to be lazy, craves the familiar and is shocked by the unexpected; the eye, on the other hand, tends to be impatient, craves the novel and is bored by repetition.”
W. H. Auden

This is indeed the quote I was paraphrasing. It comes up on the first page when you search for “body quotes,” which is how I originally found it. My version:”The eye likes surprise, the ear likes comfort,” is a bit pithier, no?

* * *

The Yahoo dev talk was well received, I think. Here are reactions from George and Schill.

If you‘ve been looking for a tutorial on how to make these kinds of annoying color effects in javascript, you’ve come to the right place, as I’ve written one.

And here it is.

Beck’s The Information is the first CD in a long while that I’ve purchased. Because of all the extras, I consider the 10 bucks I spent on the actual CD well worth it, for a change.

1) The album is excellent, and covers a wide range of styles. The sound engineering, as always, is amazing.

2) The cover is blank graph paper. Insider there are 4 pages of stickers so you can design your own cover. Sweet!

3) A DVD is included which contains funky homemade videos for each track.

Now here’s the strange part:

My dog, Andrew, loves the videos on the DVD. When they are playing, he pays far more attention to the TV screen then usual. I suspect this is one of the few pieces of video content that dogs are actually able to understand and appreciate.

I came home tonight to find my Whitney Music Box software toy got mentioned on digg, which increased my website traffic by a factor of 100.

Way cool! Thankfully, my hosting provider (dreamhost) has been handling the increased load like a champ. No problems so far!

Hey! If you’re one of those who have compared the sounds of the Whitney Box to either “Forbidden Planet” or a “Horror Movie,” you have not been exposed to nearly enough electronic or experimental music! OHM: The Early Gurus of Electronic Music (CD Set) is an excellent way to broaden your electronic music vocabulary.

If you are looking for more hypnotic stuff, check out the “Fun & Games” link on the menu on the upper right.

If you’ve been here before, you may have noticed some changes in the look of the site.

For Breast Cancer Awareness Month, I’ve turned my site pink.

As you travel around the tubes of the interwebs, you will notice many other sites have as well. This is not only a good way to raise awareness for Breast Cancer, but also to exercise your CSS chops.

You can learn more about this campaign at the website PinkForOctober.

The mosaic shown above is constructed from screen snapshots of other websites that have turned pink. You can interact with the mosaic here.

When October is over, I will turn my website some other color, but I haven’t decided which one yet.

I don’t read a whole lot of fantasy literature, and in particular, I don’t have much use for warmed over Tolkien, such as the works of Terry Brooks. Having said that, I am currently getting a kick out of reading the Temeraire series, by Naomi Novik.

The books, which reimagine the Napoleonic wars with an airforce of dragons and their aviators, are best described as “Patrick O’Brian plus Dragons.” Novik is clearly a fan of O’Brian, and there is no better role model for an author writing about this period. Imagine taking the characters of Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin from the Master and Commander series, and then replacing both Dr. Maturin and the H.M.S. Surprise with a very intelligent yet naive dragon, and you have the basic gist.

The success of the books (currently up to three: His Majesty’s Dragon, Throne of Jade, and Black Powder War, lies in Novik’s strict adherence to historic realism, with one rather large exception: The Airforce. Thus, the reader avoids a lot of nonsense about elves, dwarves, and an annoying lexicon of made up gibberish which tends to plague the novels in this genre.

Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson has bought the rights to these books for movies, and it is easy to see why. The battle scenes, involving 100 gun ships of the line and squadrons of dragons are exciting and highly visual. At the same time, like O’Brian, the more intimate scenes involving the social mores of this time evoke Jane Austen.