Santa's War on Science


Corpus Collosum
shows us this graph of search frequency on Google for the word "Science."
i-2a57c8cdd4afc6c10259d6dd17e16d51-science.jpg

And asks "What could it possibly mean?"

What it means is this: The following is a graph of search frequency on Google for the word "Santa."

i-c69cda430565f2d5f090a7b0a6bb5580-santa.jpg

The graphs are from Google Trends. Just in case it is not utterly obvious, the steep annual dip in science is exactly correlated with the Santa Spike.

What is not entirely evident is why are there two Santa Spikes per year? The larger one in December makes sense, but this later one in Feb/March does not. Unless you know that this is the time each year of the Santa Barbara Athletic Round table. ... Ah, THAT Santa...

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Amusing. Of course, the December plunge in 'science' searches also corresponds to school break. Which could also explain the apparent disinterest in 'science' during the summer months. (Presumably, traffic from the Southern Hemisphere can't offset all those Americans on summer break.) But what's interesting is that the frequency of searches fror 'science' seems to wane progressively through the spring semester. Those kids slacking off as the weather gets nice!