Fantastic! A digitally generated picture is worth 2^10 words!

You've certainly embodied the philosophy of Edward Tufte:

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_gw/102-8193666-1218533?url...

There must be many cofactors that are hard to capture in an analysis like this. There's the "binaryness" of making it to the front page. There's also "time of day". A very interesting submission posted at a time when those who would be interested are not online may never gain enough traction to make it to the first page. A time-of-day analysis would certainly be interesting.