Saturday, January 22, 2011
Conservation of bogeymen
Are you ever worried that we all need something to worry about? Something big and global that substitutes for the Devil and Hell? Behold, the output of a Google Labs search query -- books about nuclear war and books about climate change, by year, over time. I suspect that if the investigator had layered in books about overpopulation and famine and resource exhaustion there would have been another peak between 1960 and 1980, centered around 1973 or so.
What's next?
6 Comments:
By 
JPMcT, at
Sat Jan 22, 06:23:00 PM:
It looks like the "Hyperbole Baton" got passed from nuclear winter to global warming in the early 90's.
It will be interesting to see how the media will handle the next government-approved scare. The number of digital "natives" is exponentially increasing as well as a healthy level of skepticism amongst the educated.
Either they hoped that we all wound have been on the commune by now...or they are going to have to dumb us down.
By The Leading Wedge, at
Sat Jan 22, 06:50:00 PM:
Tried your suggestion TH, and added a couple of others. How famine comes out is quite interesting.
http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=overpopulation,global+warming,climate+change,oil+crisis,nuclear+war,famine&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=0&smoothing=3
By 
, at
Sat Jan 22, 09:28:00 PM:
Who was writing books on nuclear was between 1803 and 1810?
Did Bonaparte have something we don't yet know about? And why didn't he use it on Russia?
By , at
Sat Jan 22, 10:17:00 PM:
and yet when micheal crichton, always the smartest guy in the room - unless there's somebody *else* who graduated summa from harvard, then aced harvard med while writing bestsellers in his spare time - wrote a book about this EXACT topic, the 'intellectual elite', none of whom could carry crichton's jock, rolled their eyes and hooted him down.
"state of fear". specifically, the 'mad prof's' speech in re govt/media-invented boogeymen to keep the proles in line, clamoring for protection. the graph is perfect: JUST as the 'nukes' scare is winding down, the 'global warming' scare is cranking up. you can see them literally passing each other on the way up/down. now, since 'warming's all been proven to be a gigantic crock o' dung, ("i used your trick to hide the data" - phil jones(?) email to michael mann), they're gonna need to gin up a new one pretty soon.
i'm hearing whispers of "mass starvation" and "no drinking water", or maybe those are just trial balloons. fret not, though: they'll come up with something.
By Gary Rosen, at
Sun Jan 23, 02:23:00 AM:
Hey, where's "space alien invasion"?
By antithaca, at
Mon Jan 24, 10:28:00 AM:
This graph is useless without The Zombie Apocalypse charted as well.
