from the annals of enough about the motherfucking hypothalamus, already!

my inability to focus on neurobiology today and consequent search for diversions led me to an interesting new google feature: trends [conveniently found at trends.google.com]. this feature allows you to enter a search term and see the amount of internet traffic that this item has generated world-wide over the past few years. there is also a trend line for how much this item has appeared in the news, below. additionally, you can break down the trends by region and/or by time.

so, for example, here is how much the world has cared about rudy giuliani since 5 years ago:

you can see that his numbers went up when he was a legitimate contender for the republican presidential nominee, nobody really gave a shit after he bombed out, and then a blip of interest in early september when he dissed obama for being a community organizer:

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trends allows you to do head-to-head matchups, too. we can see in the following graph that, as many pundits have said, among the young and technology-saavy, once the campaign got going mccain never really had a shot:

another interesting matchup: hotdogs vs. hamburgers

as expected, nobody really cares about either of them in the middle of the winter. i was surprised to see hotdogs perpetually losing the battle though.

besides politics and meat, i found trends to be a useful tool for life affirmation. here we can see that sleep and beer have been remarkably consistent in their popularity over the past few years, with beer showing a definitive advantage over sleep during the warm summer months, and sleep closing the gap during the cold and dark winter:




this graph shows that, since 2003, sol and ashley really have stuck together, showing a slow but consistent upward tick:

a plot of new york vs. the world shows that we are definitely living in the right place:


now to bigger quesitons: what of peace, doom and butt? doom peaked in early 2004, i guess right after W started his 2nd term, but has since gone downhill dramatically. butt, on the other hand, has had the upper hand in the past year.


so there you have it folks - 2008, year of the butt. google said so.