April 23, 2005
Language: the anti-beer?
According to BlogPulse's "Trend Search", "language" is negatively correlated with "beer":
The beer spike in the middle of the plot was of course St. Patrick's Day.
For the rest of it, there's no mystery: more people blog about "language OR languages" during the week, and fewer on weekends, whereas "beer" is the opposite. The sad thing is that on any given day, only about 1 blog in 60 mentions either language or beer.
It's interesting that "drugs" doesn't show any clear weekly rhythm:
Nor is there any obvious longer-term relationship between drugs and language:
But what's with the linear downtrend in language since mid-January? Some sort of semesterly rhythm, I suppose...
It would be nice to be able to see a list of words sorted by the relative magnitude of the weekly component in the fourier transform of the time function of their blog frequency -- that would be the relative spectral amplitude at 1/(60*60*24*7) = 1.653439e-06 = 1.65 µHz, for those who insist on SI units.
Posted by Mark Liberman at April 23, 2005 06:40 AM