Staring Contest

Unresolved Speech?

Fri, 17 Sep 2021 22:56:03 +0000

On the latest episode of the Reconcilable Differences podcast, John Siracusa and Merlin Mann open the episode by discussing the “sing-song” or “uptalk” openings of some YouTube videos. John mentions the LockPickingLawyer introduction as an example of this; he feels as though the end feels like it’s hanging or unresolved.

I was so intrigued by this that I stopped listening to the episode and started investigating. I went to the most recent episode of the LockPickingLawyer channel and grabbed the first couple seconds of audio.

lockpickinglawyer.m4a

You can certainly hear what John is talking about. I tried figuring out what the closest pitches were to each word, but my ears are not very well trained. So, I turned to technology instead. I found that there’s a pretty cool Python package called crepe that uses a trained neural network model to estimate the fundamental frequencies of a given sound sample (as well as its confidence in that estimate). After quick installation of the package and its dependencies, I was able to predict the pitch from the clip.

Ranking the Butterfield Diet

Mon, 09 Mar 2020 23:00:07 +0000

The Brian Butterfield diet is a very funny sketch from The Peter Serafinowicz Show. I wanted to know what the objectively funniest options for Treat Day were, so I fired up Survey Monkey and asked the members of the Do By Friday Discord to rank all the items from the video. For some reason, thirteen people filled out the survey.

The results have been…increbidle

I averaged the results to get an average rank for each item (circles in the plot below). I’ve also shown individual responses (small squares). Note that better ranks are toward the right.

Results of an extremely scientific Butterfield Diet survey.

I’ve also grouped the items into arbitrary tiers based on their average rank. Let’s go through them together.

C-Tier

C-Tier results

Double-click to edit…

Most people ranked these items in the bottom half, but there’s not a whole lot of difference between them.

A Translated Guide to The Taken King Changes

Wed, 26 Aug 2015 06:03:04 +0000

Steve Lubitz of the Isometric podcast complained in their most recent episode that all the articles about the new Destiny expansion, The Taken King, were written in fairly-incomprehensible Destiny-lingo (Destinese?). I figured I’d take a shot at explaining what’s new in the expansion in terms that a general gamer could readily understand.

I am by no means a hardcore Destiny player. Since I don’t have a regular group that also plays (and little energy/time to try to find one), I haven’t done the serious endgame content like raids or most of the other content that doesn’t automatically match you with other players. I do have a character at the highest possible level, but that’s about it.

I’m going to start with a summary of what Destiny is to lay the groundwork for understanding what is changing with the expansion. This will try to hit the highlights; it is not intended to be comprehensive.

What is Destiny?

Destiny is a first-person shooter that has some elements similar to massively-multiplayer online games (MMOs, like World of Warcraft. It can be played by yourself, cooperatively with a few other players, or competitively with teams of players facing each other. When you play by yourself or cooperatively, you are completing missions or scenarios against computer opponents (called player-versus-environment modes, or PvE). Competitive modes are called player-versus-player, or PvP.

Parallel Treks

Thu, 18 Dec 2014 18:24:00 +0000

Around the time the podcast Random Trek completed its first 30 episodes, a quantum fissure mysteriously appeared. Naturally, we investigated it using a subspace differential pulse and — to our surprise — we discovered 10,000 parallel timelines which all had their own versions of Random Trek.

After recalibrating the sensor array (as you do), we were able to determine which episodes have been watched so far in these parallel universes. We used these data to address some of the pressing questions from the Random Trek fanbase.

First, did our timeline’s Random Trek really have an unusual number of Voyager episodes as it was starting out? For reference, ours had two of its first four episodes from Voyager, six out of its first 20, and seven out of its first 30. We can look at the distributions of the episode selections across all the timelines to see how unusual this was.

As Random Trek’s host Scott McNulty might say, spoiler alert: it’s not very unusual. About a quarter of the other timelines (2,420 to be precise) had two or more Voyager episodes in their first four episodes. Below, you can see the distributions of the first 20 episodes and first 30 episodes (our timeline’s values are marked with red triangles). Our timeline is sitting close to the middle of the Voyager distributions. Perhaps the most unusual thing about ours here appears to be the relatively low number of Deep Space Nine episodes, as only 891 of the other 10,000 timelines had two or fewer DS9 episodes in the first 20, and 923 had four or fewer in the first 30 episodes.

Graphing The Incomparable

Fri, 10 Jan 2014 05:01:09 +0000

It turns out I’m probably going to have good reasons to need to learn Python in the near future, so I’m finding little projects to practice writing scripts. The Incomparable recently wrapped up the year with a retrospective episode in which some people talked about being on more than in the past, while others mentioned they were on less. I was inspired to see if there was a way to visualize who has been on episodes together and how that has changed over time.

I collected data from the RSS feed and the web site to figure out which people were on which episodes. I could then put that into a matrix with episodes as the rows and people as the columns (with 1’s or 0’s depending on whether they were on the episode or not). Multiplying the transpose of that matrix by itself gives a new matrix that shows how many episodes people had in common. (This is just like what Kieran Healy did in his Paul Revere metadata post.)

Through the Eyes of the Jackals

Tue, 26 Feb 2013 02:18:28 +0000

Example cloud generated from title submissions for The Incomparable episode 108.

With all the great podcasting content produced these days, I often end up wishing for easier ways of finding past episodes. Memory does not always serve well enough, and clicking through episode descriptions can be tedious (and unreliable for podcasts that span many topics in a single show).

Clearly it would be great to have some way of searching or browsing podcast episodes, but it’s equally clear that it’s hard to do without accurate transcriptions.

As I’ve mentioned before (in my only other post so far), live listeners of shows on the 5by5 network can submit title suggestions via Showbot, which was created by Jeremy Mack. Suggestions are almost always quotes from the shows, and during popular shows the submissions are so frequent it seems almost like a live transcript. Of course it’s not—submissions are unsurprisingly biased toward humorous or silly quotes—but I wondered if they could be used in some way.

Show Titles

Fri, 27 Jul 2012 14:24:32 +0000

One of the fun parts of listening to 5by5 shows is helping pick show titles. Jeremy Mack created the Showbot, which lets members of the 5by5 chat room suggest titles as the shows run live (it also lets anyone vote for their favorite suggestions).

Of course, the hosts have the final say over what title gets used, and, as you can imagine, different hosts have different preferences for show titles. For example, John Siracusa, host of Hypercritical, only will consider things that are actually said on his show as possible titles. Inspired by Kieran Healy’s recent analysis of show durations, I decided to look at naming trends across several 5by5 shows and see how they have changed over time.

The main variable I looked at is the show title’s “originality.” That’s in scare quotes because I’m defining originality very narrowly – here, it is just a reflection of the number of Google hits for the exact title phrase. Since the data span many orders of magnitude, I log-transform the number of hits (adding 0.5 to deal with zeros) and call it an “originality index.” Note that numerically smaller indices are more original, so I have reversed the y-axis on the graphs to put the indices that reflect more originality at the top.

Hypercritical Word Clouds

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

These word clouds were generated from all the title submissions for each episode of the 5by5 podcast Hypercritical. The relative sizes of the words are based on tf-idf (instead of just counts). Basically, they reflect how each episode was perceived through the eyes of the jackals.

Hypercritical 100: Metacritical

Hypercritical 99: New Siracusa County Bros. U

Hypercritical 98: Hardware Machismo

Hypercritical 97: Idle Doodles

Hypercritical 96: Blue Peter

Hypercritical 95: Black Friday

Hypercritical 94: Shrink, Shrink, Shrink!

Hypercritical 93: A Magic Elf in My Computer

Hypercritical 92: The Tim Cook Era

Hypercritical 91: Adolescence

Hypercritical 90: Salad Days

Hypercritical 89: Lazy Sunday

Hypercritical 88: Nobody Leaves Email

Hypercritical 87: Smarter and Harder

Hypercritical 86: Naked Robotic Core

Hypercritical 85: Just Check the Checkbox!

Hypercritical 84: Spared No Expense

Hypercritical 83: Dishonorable

Hypercritical 82: The Opposite of Comprehensive

Hypercritical 81: Channels of Control

Hypercritical 80: Memory Palace

Hypercritical 79: Grandpa Uncle Joe

Hypercritical 78: Sins of the Father

Hypercritical 77: Nucleation Site

Hypercritical 76: Selling a Dream

Hypercritical 75: Just a Dinosaur

Hypercritical 74: Everybody Wants to Rule the World

Hypercritical 73: 22 Degrees

Hypercritical 72: Seven Levels of Air Quotes

Hypercritical 71: Bristling With Controls

Hypercritical 70: Deja Vu

Hypercritical 69: Sport of Kings

Hypercritical 68: Patent Hands

Hypercritical 67: A Pill That Helps with Whatever

Hypercritical 66: The Housewives of Siracusa County

Hypercritical 65: Look Right into the Eyes of Your Sweetie

Hypercritical 64: You Will Die Instantly!

Hypercritical 63: Talking to the Bear

Hypercritical 62: A Sack Containing Scum from a Pond

Hypercritical 61: I Ran Out of Bombs Long Ago

Hypercritical 60: Reversing the Polarity

Hypercritical 59: Safari is Apple's Google

Hypercritical 58: No More Numbers For You / The Four Tuners

Hypercritical 57: Computational Skeuomorphism

Hypercritical 56: Belt and Suspenders

Hypercritical 55: Region of Pain

Hypercritical 54: Public Service Announcement

Hypercritical 53: Brad Pitt Gets to Contribute

Hypercritical 52: Marked for Deletion

Hypercritical 51: Unjustified Confidence

Hypercritical 50: Maximum Deflection in All Directions

Hypercritical 49: Pinching the Harmonica

Hypercritical 48: Blue Ocean

Hypercritical 47: Brute Force Attack

Hypercritical 46: Not Entirely Nefarious

Hypercritical 45: Star Wars is Not a Blog Post

Hypercritical 44: A Little Bit More Sad

Hypercritical 43: The Scorpion and the Frog

Hypercritical 42: The Wrong Guy

Hypercritical 41: The Homer

Hypercritical 40: When The Hobby Light Goes Off

Hypercritical 39: Quasimodo Backpack

Hypercritical 38: Virtually Spotless

Hypercritical 37: A Story of Triumph

Hypercritical 36: Wedge

Hypercritical 35: Wrestling an Alligator

Hypercritical 34: Pride in Craftsmanship

Hypercritical 33: Square Bracket Colon Smiley

Hypercritical 32: The Next Big Move

Hypercritical 29: In Too Deep

Hypercritical 28: Trust, But Verify

Hypercritical 27: Nakedly Optimistic

Hypercritical 26: White Smoke

Hypercritical 25: Invisible Software

Hypercritical 24: Sometimes It Hurts

People of The Incomparable

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Graph of people on The Incomparable podcast

The graph below visualizes how the different contributors to The Incomparable podcast are connected through the episodes they’ve been on together. Lines are drawn between people who have been on at least one episode together — the more episodes a pair has been on together, the thicker the line and the closer together they are. You can also click and drag the circles, which can sometimes help you see the connections more clearly.

You can also see how the relationships have evolved over time by changing the timeframe with the drop-down menu. You can see a graph based on all the episodes in a single year, or all the episodes from the beginning up through that year.

You can see similar data as a matrix and view which episodes are shared over here.

Timeframe:

Skeletors All the Way Down

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Yes, it’s another visualization for The Incomparable podcast, and this time it’s even sillier than usual.

During Episode 200: Butter Zone, Steve Lutz was able to expand his recursive clip loop collection further, assisted by a few fans. At the time, the panelists discussed that eventually the tangle of references would be too much to keep in one’s head and suggested someone make a graphical representation of it. Steve said that “that guy who made the relationships graphs” should do it. So, finally, here it is!

To be fair, Alex Chan beat me to the punch by about half a year with quite a nice diagram, but I hope I can complement that earlier one here with some additional interactivity and audio.

The circles below represent episodes, and the Skeletor-colored circles are those with recursive content. Clicking one of these will play the relevant audio from that episode, then trace its references back in time before returning. Give it a try!

Episodes:

The Incomparable Panelist Explorer

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Use the diagram below to see which panelists have appeared together on The Incomparable podcast most often. Darker squares indicate more times being on an episode together. You can hover over a square to highlight the pair of names corresponding to that value.

Clicking on a square reveals the specific episodes they appear on together below (or all the episodes for a given panelist if you click a black square on the diagonal).

You can look at similar data as a graph showing connections between people.

Click on a cell to view specific episode information

Last updated 2014-12-20 (through Episode 226).

Visualizations

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Just-for-fun visualizations built from some of my favorite podcasts’ data.

People of The Incomparable: Graph of how the show’s contributors are connected through the episodes they appeared on (last updated 2014).
The Incomparable Panelist Explorer: Matrix and timeline views of panelists and the episodes they appeared on (last updated 2014).
Hypercritical Word Clouds: Word clouds from the title submissions for each episode of Hypercritical.
Skeletors All the Way Down: Visualization and audio exploration of the Incomparable’s recursive clip loop (through episode 441).

Staring Contest

Unresolved Speech?

Ranking the Butterfield Diet

The results have been…increbidle

C-Tier

A Translated Guide to The Taken King Changes

What is Destiny?

Parallel Treks

Graphing The Incomparable

Through the Eyes of the Jackals

Show Titles

Hypercritical Word Clouds

People of The Incomparable

Graph of people on The Incomparable podcast

Skeletors All the Way Down

Episodes:

The Incomparable Panelist Explorer

Click on a cell to view specific episode information

Tagged as “Books”:

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Visualizations