Christmas vs. Halloween vs. Easter vs. Thanksgiving vs. Valentine's Day

My yummy Christmas dinner is almost digested ;-) Time to check on the old Yuletide's status in comparison with the other big—esp. in the US—holidays.



As expected, each holiday had its own seasonal peak and Christmas had the biggest one. Second was Halloween: everyone likes to dress up... Easter peaked in March-April (not fixed in the normal sense). Note that Canada's Thanksgiving Day in October was dwarfed by the US one in November. Valentine's Day was last. Let's have a look at the country rankings for each holiday:











The results were more or less as expected. A few observations: Halloween with its Celtic roots was also important in Ireland (no. 3) and even in Belgium (no. 6)—as a Belgian, I have actually no clue why that would be; of course, I haven't lived there in decades. Why Easter registered so heavily in Australia (no.1) and New Zealand (no. 3) was also kind of puzzling. That Thanksgiving registered at all outside the US and Canada might provide further proof of the supersized influence of esp. the US in the world. South African Googlers were the second-most interested in Valentine's.


Photo Copyright j_wijnands, CC Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 Generic

Air vs. Earth vs. Water vs. Fire

Today, I investigated the four classical elements that, according to ancient Greek, Medieval, Renaissance, Hindu, Buddhist, Japanese, etc. cultural/philosophical traditions, combine in different proportions to account for everything in the world.



Air dominated this face-off. Earth came next but had an irregular trend line: it started the lowest, then went all the way to the top in September 2005 only to settle in second place. Water and fire completed the quartet. How about the country rankings for the four elements:









A few observations: the US seemed very interested in fire and water but not so much in air and even less in earth. Indicative of the stereotype of Americans maybe? Fire and water reign, two aggressive and antagonistic elements contrary to the more subtle earth and air. Maybe Americans are not well grounded (earth), always have big dreams (air)? ;-) Popular psychology, it's a funny thing. How to explain New Zealanders' fondness for air and then fire? They are dreamers with spunk? Haha, of course this is all rather simplistic. Still...

Update: See also the next post.

Flu vs. Asthma vs. Pneumonia vs. Bronchitis vs. Sinusitis

Today, I heard on NPR about a new web site: Google Flu Trends. It lets you see where there is more search volume for flu in the US so you can track flu activity by state with comparison for previous years. In other words, this is a Google Insights for Search analysis presented with a more user-friendly interface. It made me think: maybe I should face-off five common diseases?



Worldwide, the flu virus dominated, followed by resp. asthma, pneumonia, bronchitis and sinusitis. The large peaks in October 2004 and October 2005 should correspond with serious flu epidemics. The seasonal aspect of the flu is well known: it occurs in winter. Pneumonia and bronchitis also showed small increases in winter. I proceeded to perform the same analysis for nine English-speaking countries/territories: Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, India, Ireland, New Zealand, South Africa, the UK and the US.



















The winter of 2005-2006 was a significant peak for the flu in all these countries, other peaks displayed more variation. Some countries, e.g., Ireland and New Zealand, really only had one flu epidemic while for instance Canada and the US had a flu peak every winter. In India, the diseases' trend lines fell through time, perhaps reflecting better prevention and/or treatment through the years?

There is another way of looking at the data: by disease.











Note that the Philippines were no. 1 three times. Germany, Austria and the Netherlands popped up in the top 10 for bronchitis because the term was exactly the same in German and Dutch, unlike for other diseases.