Almost two years ago the "The Pulse of Spain" was made, based on the same idea (disclaimer: the designers of this are also designers for our product (and dear friends)).
It's in Spanish, unfortunately. You have to click on the tiles to activate them and they'll start pulsating. If you have Flash, there'll be sound.
Then I opened the image with fhread and found the offset for the delay time. Look for: Delay Time (1/100ths of a second). ( Since the delay time has only 2 bytes reserved that means the max delay would be 65535. That is why some gifs have more frames than the other, when by logic all would need to have the same count )
Then I opened the image with photoshop which shows every frame on a separate layer.
Then you just multiply the delay with the number of frames.
I got the ratio of 3786.72 to 1 for earthquake-1 to earthquake-4. e1 is about ~3s so that would make e4 occur every ~3 hours.
The ratio should be correct. But my seconds calculation was off by a factor of 4 for some reason. Maybe I missed some format specific stuff. You can try it for the rest of the GIFs if you want.
EDIT2:
A very quick estimate, looking in the other files:
The GIMP (http://gimp.org) is very handy for editing animated GIFs. Each frame is loaded as a layer, with the frame's duration appended to the layer name.
On the Mac, GraphicConverter[0] has been my go-to app for this kind of random graphic stuff since the mid-90's (wow, it's a 22 year old app now!). "Movie Information" in the windows menu says there's a 300 second period on the Old Faithful GIF.
That would be far too high a rate. Old Faithful erupts approximately every 90 minutes, or 5400 seconds (though it can vary quite a bit -- 45 - 125 minutes):
The audio appear to be subtly broken, with audio moving between left and right channels. Somebody should convert the audio to mono, and upload the video again. :-)
Once upon a time it was a giant star that rotated once every dozen or two hours. Eventually it ran out of fusible material, and gravity pulled it all in until it became solid neutronium.
Most of the angular momentum stayed with the core, and there you are.
And sufficiently dense that the composition of matter inside is fundamentally different, consisting mainly of neutrons, unstable at ordinary pressure.
The radius of neutron stars is measured in small multiples of the Swarzschild radius for the mass of the star. That is, the radius at which the star would become a black hole.
I highly recommend Dragon's Egg, a hard sci fi novel by Robert L. Forward, as well as its sequel, Starquake, for anyone wanting to expand their mind with a fascinating portrayal of neutron star physics, dealing with the hypothetical possibility of life on their surfaces. The relative physical scales of time, space, velocities and forces are mind-boggling compared to our normal intuition.
Because preservation of angular momentum and gravity plus sub atomic forces and centrifugal force plus mass increases due to relativistic effects balance out roughly there for this star. Much more mass would create a black hole.
Without further inquiry I will assume your answer as correct. That said, I do believe her/his question was more of affordance and less about the particular mechanism. At least that is the way I took. A sort of "How peculiar of a place our universe is to allow such phenomenon."
See my response to gkya's complaint about his feed reader. Firefox includes an odd feed reader called Live Bookmarks. It almost certainly works differently from your feed reader, and implies a different "workflow."
One thing it does nicely is display things properly, because it (the "reader") doesn't display anything at all, it just points to an updated feed. When you follow the link, it just goes to the page and displays it like any other page.
I haven't seen a single comment about the turn lights gifs.
that's something that always intrigued me. why mine and the one from the car in front of me never matches? I wonder if there's a reasonable explanation other then "by chance".
Even two cars of the same type never seem to match up. They will often sync for a while, but then gradually get out of synch until they are 180 degrees different.
I suppose it is down to minute differences in lighting circuits, bulbs and all sorts of other things.
Somewhere out there is a population of cars with the same exact turn signal frequency as yours. But the chances of you stopping behind it at a set of lights while you are both signalling to turn and noticing are very, very small.
I believe it's by design. Differing indicator frequencies make the signals more noticeable.
Back in the old days, turn signals were actuated by bimetallic thermal relays - a simple and highly reliable device. They were constructed with a range of frequencies by manufacturers and sold mixed together, so cars might receive the same part number but with an essentially random on/off period. This part would also mechanically create the familiar clicking sound of a turn signal actuating.
These days indicators are controlled electronically and I assume the randomness is programmed in.
That's interesting and kinda funny since you still get the familiar clicking sound when your turn signal is on I can only assume that this sound is made artificially. It immediately reminded me of the fact that computer keyboards are naturally silent but they engineer in "clicky" sounds. This was very important in the old days when people were transitioning away from type writers and were accustomed to the audio feedback. Now we still have this, but keyboards are a lot quieter these days.
There are keyswitches that do click naturally, e.g. buckling spring keyswitches [1]. And it might be subjective, but I type faster with audible feedback, even though it can drive other people in the flat nuts.
They are intentionally made to be different, even on the same kind of car. I think the circuits used to be made with high-tolerance (high-variability) capacitors to make sure they would come out differently. But now it's all computerized, and in fact I think they are programmed to drift a bit faster and a bit slower as they run!
Old hazard lights, like the ones in rows along construction sites, used to blink more-or-less in time despite not being manually synced. The lightbulb itself would act as a weak photo-diode, so when a neighboring light was on, it took a minutely smaller time to charge the circuit. Eventually they would sync up :)
I don't really know, but I guess it's because they used to use mechanical switches with bimetallic strips, that vary their time with temperature. Nowadays computers probably control all those aspects, so I think new cars' frequencies will match, especially if they're the same model.
In my opinion, that is a joke on the apparent Doppler effect. The car in front of you is making a turn, and thus you are ( probably )moving towards it. The real difference is much lower.
The first time I loaded the page each of the gifs would appear spaced a few seconds apart. So the table kept loading and adding rows and I could read each one as it was added. The requests are still being initiated 1m after initial page load.
That was a great effect, prolonging the initial experience. Its important in UI to pay attention to the time element - how the experience progresses for the user as they explore.
Now they are all in the cache so they appear right away. You have to clear cache to get the initial effect again.
My stupid RSS reader showed this to me as a single, static image. I wouldn't see it in animation if it wasn't posted here, so thanks a lot for posting!
Firefox has an odd RSS reader, called Live Bookmarks, which leverages the browser's bookmarks feature. I use it to access my tab categories in pinboard; each tab has an RSS feed, and each combination of tabs has an RSS feed.
When you click on a feed to subscribe, it places the feed in the bookmark system and when you see it in your bookmarks it shows an RSS icon.
To see what happens with this XKCD, I cleared my cache and history and everything, then subscribed to the feed, then clicked on the latest entry in that feed, Frequency.
It was interesting to watch it develop. It starts as a grid of elements, each displaying the word FREQUENCY. (You can see the same effect by forcing a reload of the page, but I wanted to see how Live Bookmarks would display the page, hence the tedious trip report to this point).
Each element's gif gets turned on row by row and (I think) column by colum. The first row is turned on immediately, the second soon after, and the rest of the FREQUENCY elements are transformed into animated gifs little by little, row by row.
If I close the tab and come back to it, they're all animating right away.
So that's how Firefox Live Bookmarks RSS reader handles this page.
Side note: some of you will have seen the effect of transforming from a grid of FREQUENCY elements to animated GIFS right away when you viewed the page. Others, like me, might never have seen it. I'm one of those people who queues up a handful of tabs to read, and then goes through the tabs one by one. By the time I got to my Frequency tab it had already gone through its transformation.
That's a lot of babies. And a disconcerting number of deaths as well. I'm also surprised the number of mocking birds getting killed by cats isn't that far from the number of humans dying.
Who's talking about getting the death rate up? What about lowering the birth rate?
And don't get me started on Bill Gates' bullshit arguments. These are long-term trends, his recent "it's been getting better! (for the last 40 years)" cannot be extrapolated over the next centuries.
Bill Gates' "bullshit" is backed by research which you could rebut if you cared to do so.
The world currently produces enough food for 11 bn people. World population is expected to expand to about 9 bn in the middle of this century. This is using current production techniques.
I don't think overpopulation is responsible for most of the world's problems and in fact I think death is the biggest problem we have. The increase in population over the last few hundred years correlates with our massive increase in technology and industry.
Properly displaying animated GIFs seems to be an "advanced feature". I have seen a lot of apps that are not able to do it properly. I guess it depends on the render engine they use to display images...
As far as I'm concerned, displaying animated GIFs is a bug not a feature (its use here notwithstanding), and I'd report it as one if I thought the Chrome team would take bug reports from the likes of me, so if your viewer doesn't have that bug, be happy!
Lots of apps implicitly put images in a "never changes after the initial render" category. Retrofitting what is effectively a movie format into that can be interesting.
Somehow it gives me the (obviously mistaken) impressions that people have sex in North Dakota in the time it takes the gif to blink and that people in Phoenix put condoms on but aren't then having sex but are perhaps doing something with those new shoes.
Looks like there's scope for a startup or two around vibrators with the size of that market.
It's in Spanish, unfortunately. You have to click on the tiles to activate them and they'll start pulsating. If you have Flash, there'll be sound.
The link is:
http://img.actibva.com/pulso2/