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[Spindrift]

So I was playing around with one of the most amazing programs ever - Wolfram Alpha - when I decided to type in "mermaid".
Did you guys know that the word "mermaid" was first used 625 years ago in 1386?

Also this is a really cool graph:
1323

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=mermaid&a=*C.mermaid-_*Word-

[taom]

whoa! that is so neat! look at the frequency usage in 1600! that's intense!!!

[malinghi]

Statistics kick ass! Way to go Spindrift. This makes me want to look up other stuff about mermaids. Check out this plot of the popularity of google searches for the word "mermaid" over the last year:

http://www.google.com/trends/viz?q=mermaid&date=ytd&geo=us&graph=weekly_img&sort=0&sa=N

This is just for America. Mermaids haven't caught on in most other countries yet, so if you look at the results world wide the increase is too small to see.






Another way to try to zero in on the hobby of mermaiding and try to avoid results for other stuff relating to mermaids, is to see the popularity of searches for "mermaid costume":
http://www.google.com/trends/viz?q=mermaid+costume&date=all&geo=us&graph=weekly_img&sort=0&sa=N
For every year on record people only searched for "mermaid costume" in the months leading up to Halloween. This year though interest started earlier, and spiked higher than ever before.

http://www.google.com/trends?q=mermaid+costume&ctab=0&geo=us&geor=all&date=all&sort=0

[Spindrift]

This is really awesome. I feel almost like a mer-expert conducting all sorts of analyses. :D Haha now I'm wondering what kind of experiments could be done that would involve mers and chi-square calculations.

[Mermaid Saphira]

Pretty cool stuff!! :D

[AniaR]

that's so neat to see