I See The Murmurations

I see the murmurations of the black-birds

And stand there in awe of the numbers

I think about the effort it took

To get them all there

- CosmicLettuce

(text generated by me, image generated from Grok)

Magnetometer Bike Ride

A bike ride with the magnetometer on my phone recording at about 60Hz.  I've got x, y, z, and r axis data:

And here are the corresponding power spectra (spectrograms):

Bike Ride Spectrogram

This is a spectrogram of the accelerometer data collected on my smartphone as I ride my bike.  The y-axis is the time (it was about a 909 second -- 15m 9s -- ride) and goes from top to bottom.  The x-axis is the frequency (0 to about 100Hz) and goes from left to right.  Lots of interesting harmonics and other complex structures.  This is sampling every 100 measurements, or at about 2 Hz (once every 0.5 seconds):

The plot above is also the sum of the x, y, and z axes.  Here are the individual axes:

X:

Y:

Z:

Here's a plot of the z amplitudes (in g's) versus time (x-axis, seconds).  This is sampling about every 0.5 seconds.

Here's the same data, but just every data point with no skipping:

Here's another ride earlier that day, going the opposite way.  This is the x-axis g-force on the smartphone accelerometer:

Happy Mole Day!

Happy Happy Happy Mole Day!

This is my third favorite number!  Behind pi and e.

Dawn 22 October 2025

 My location:

Messages From God

Stopping for gas in Benson:

typical gas pump, right?

The gas pump stops when the tank is full, so this is how many gallons was needed.

7 is a special number.

Yes, something like that...

Listening To Orion

This is a new and strange form of data analysis, so I'm starting simple and "looking" at some pretty basic stuff.

The constellation of Orion is rising in the early evenings this time of year, so I thought it appropriate to focus on what can be heard when using some data about the seven brightest stars of Orion: Betelgeuse, Rigel, Bellatrix, Mintaka, Alnilam, Alnitak, and Saiph.

What do the angular distances between Betelgeuse and the other six stars sound like?  I calculated these distances and translated them into audio frequencies.  The shorter the distance, the lower the frequency.  And this is what I got:

Orion Angular Distances

I then took the physical distances (in light years) between us and each of these stars, and did the same thing.  Again, the shorter the distance, the lower the frequency:

Orion Physical Distances

Finally, I took the visual magnitudes of these seven stars and translated them into audio frequencies.  In this case, the brighter the star (smaller magnitude), the higher the frequency.  To get this:

Orion Magnitudes