Just when I thought I was already wasting too much time, a glance at Slashdot tells me that Google's 2005 Zeitgeist review is up. And how amazing it is at showing the sheer power of having the attention of millions of people and what they are thinking about at any given time. While they don't have any topics of particular relevance to physics, I found this one about natural disasters quite interesting. From even just the tsunami trend, you can see that 1) people as a whole have exponentially falling attention spans, and 2) the US still dominates Google usage -- otherwise you wouldn't get these dramatic "dips" in the search frequency. And it's equally amazing to me that the peak interest in the hurricane approached that for the tsunami, again probably showing US dominance in using Google, and perhaps the internet in general.
Anyway, lots of neat stuff in these pages. Anyone know how to get access to similar graphs for any particular search term?
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