200 Years

 I recently watched a video that sums up the past 200 years of worldwide socio-economic changes in about five minutes.  Sounds like a real snoozefest, right?  Wrong.  Check it out for yourself below.

I was completely blown away by the elegance of the presentation, and, in any case, I am a real sucker for long-term metrics like this.

Speaking of which, Google has come out with something called Google n-Grams which graphs trends in the written frequency of words or combinations of words over the past 200 years.  You can get a sense for how important a topic is/was (to the literate folks who were fortunate/rich/powerful enough to get published, anyway) by searching the database for keywords.  Some of my searches are below:

The Eternal Struggle

It looks like "good" has been on the decline for the past couple of centuries, but is still way ahead of "evil". Similar trends pop up with "angel vs. demon" and "God vs. Satan" with similar upswings for the good guys in the 1980s after a long drop.

Science vs. Religion - Fight!

It looks like science reached parity with religion somewhere around 1920 and has been in the lead ever since.  Go science!  I knew the invention of the tommy-gun would push us over the top!

Meek, Schmeek!

More interesting than the fact that "eye for an eye" has consistently been ahead of "turn the other cheek" are the weird spikes every 70 or 80 years.  We should be due any minute now...

You can also do more than two comparisons at a time like in the examples below:

The Chumbawamba Index

The New York Index

Here is what the search for "Y2K" looks like.  Notice the bump in the 1950s and 1980s.  Weird.

Unless... Kind of suspicious that the bumps somewhat line up, eh, Doc Brown?

I look forward to wasting huge swaths of time looking for meaningless correlations in the future.  Enjoy!