War Love and Metaphysics

Why not try some metaphysics?

Moving in sine waves, life constantly fluctuating.  Cyclical societal history, personal history.  Love, happiness, fear, hope.  Up and down.  Constantly. 

All one vibration, sort of true, quaintly speaking.

If you observe it you ruin it.

Google.  Everybody on the internet uses it.  True data, unimpeded by anything, available to the public.  I’m very torn about my thoughts on Google.  Since the first day I used it, I’ve loved it. 
It does have a pseudo monopoly.  But only because they’re good at what they do. 
All that data mining though.
But all that knowledge….

Ask any science nerd if they like Futurama. 
I think we all do, if not for this joke alone.  The Professor is at a horse race (in the future of course):

Announcer: And it’s a dead heat! They’re checking the electron microscope. And the winner is…number 3! In a quantum finish.

Professor: No fair! You changed the outcome by measuring it!

  Wikipedia explanation

*According to Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, it is believed that measuring a particle ultimately causes it to change its position. Professor Farnsworth is arguing that by measuring the race results, the position of the horses (and thus, the outcome of the race) was altered.

This instantly happens.  When you observe an electron it becomes what you are observing.  If you observe it as a particle, then it’s a particle.  If you observe it as a wave, then it’s a wave.

It’s the only funny science paradox besides Schrödinger’s cat.  They are related but one involves an excuse to mention an animal.  Which is like 10,000x’s more interesting than any other picture you can put in a science text book.  It’s all bearded old guys and graphs.  And once a text, there is a cute picture of a cat.

Schrödinger’s cat is basically a thought experiment.  It involves a cat that is both alive and dead in a box because of quantum mechanics and cyanide.  It’s explained very perfectly by this comic I found:

So many equations for physical life are based on sine and cosine.  Natural mathematics is so beautiful.  Perfect patterns.  Math would exists regardless of human definition, like language and objects, but more concrete.  We’re constantly sending math into space.  Some times I think God is an equation.

Constant wave of history, life, light, electrons.

This is a sine and cosine wave graphed together in a generic sense.  The black line is a sine wave and the blue line is a cosine wave.  My favorite has always been the sine wave.  I think it integrates easier too.

These cycles can be adjusted for phase shifts and units for just about any natural phenomenon you can think of.  Electronics work entirely off equations derived from variations of these two curves.

I was once with a friend of mine while I was taking a break studying for a pchem test and smoking.  I told him I was having a hard time understanding the math because the basic concepts were so abstract.  The conversation that ensued is now referred to as the time he made me stop talking because I was shattering his concept of reality.  Don’t worry, we’re still friends.  It was all in good fun 🙂

Anyways, I like science and math.  I really like analyzing data, I think it’s fun (and now I actually get paid to do it!).  I also find it enjoyable to see objects of similar shapes being mass produced.  I blame an episode of Reading Rainbow I saw as a kid where they visited a Crayola factory.  How It’s Made is one of the few shows I still watch on TV anymore.  As boring as that sounds, it’s actually a fascinating show filled with lots of robot action… 

Anyways, Google Trends is about the coolest thing ever for analyzing information about the internet. 

I found some really interesting social trends I thought I would share.

These graphs are on a relative scale, meaning the position on the vertical axis is based on relative volumes between each search term.  The searches are based on all regions of the US over all years data is available.  The bottom graph is the volume of news that was referenced on each topic.  I changed the links for the pictures, so each one takes you to the direct search results. 

This was my initial search, I was really surprised to find that what most people were concerned with was not Paris Hilton, but war (well with two exceptions).

I spent a while trying to find a search term to beat out war (yes love does beat out war, except when we invaded Iraq).  Interestingly it turns out Harry Potter peaks correspond to the down shifts in searches about the war.  Especially that last book. 
I think that’s a wonderful trend to see.  Educating and healing entire societies.  That’s impressive, even for a wizard.

I was trying to find what else would be increasing while the war searches were decreasing.  I was hoping math and science increases would decrease the war searches.  Turns out they are actually linked in sharp down shifts to war searches. 
Religion and politics didn’t play nearly as big of a role as I thought it would.  Especially religion, that was very surprising to me.  This is the most sinusoidal search result I found.  I thought it was especially neat because it figures math and science would move in a wave pattern.

After numerous failed attempts I finally found that movies, sex and music actually correspond to the decreases in searches for war, math and science.  The peak heights for movie searches are more directly linked though. 
Plus you can only compare 5 items at a time…

So then I wondered what the largest volume searches were. 
I always thought sex was the number one search term on the internet. 
Tuns out it is globally, but in the US we apparently need music to get in the mood.  Makes sense actually, our music industry is larger than most other countries, and I don’t think there is anyone who would argue with me that music and sex are not thoroughly intertwined with each other. 

Google works with a lot of countries that censor web access.  It always kind of pissed me off, but then again they are able to collect data from oppressed countries by allowing them access to google and collecting their search terms.  Even if they ultimately can’t view the site.  So that is good.

This is the same search globally.  India and Poland are making up for other countries slack on the sex searches…. 

The love search in both kind of looks like a heartbeat doesn’t it?  I wish I had data for 1,000 years from now to see if that uptick is constant at the same pace over extended periods of time.  Ha! 
Humanity’s heartbeat is love.  That’s a pleasant thought 🙂 

This is a nerd society trend. 
I guess we spend our lives being inspired by visual expressions of thought and falling in and out of love.  It seems we also reference more news articles on love.  Sigh….can’t do anything without researching it to death first.

There is also an overall downward trend in art searches.  I think that the internet has opened so many doors to creativity that art has less of a concrete definition now.  This site is art, youtube videos are art, web comics are art, science is art. 
Maybe this is the new Renaissance.  Well, at least I sure as hell hope so. 

It’s about time we evolved our thoughts again in a big way. 

I’m still really pissed we don’t have flying cars and space vacations 🙁

And here is one just for fun!

If you do a global search it turns out the Irish love David Hasselhoff the most!  Germans come in at an un-impressive 9th place.