In the mean time, I've become interested in unraveling trends in data. I deal with data all the time in my work, and I really hadn't been all that interested in it. I was more interested in simply learning from what others had observed and understood.
I feel that the universe is full of cycles and networks that explain the way things are, at many different scales. Examples of cycles that dominate what we perceive, as humans, are day and night, the seasons, even the different stages of the moon. Examples of networks are the connections among people at different levels: friendship, romance, work, communication, and more. And the scales at which these cycles and connections go are very wide. We can think of networks of blood flow in our fingers, and fluxes of water in the Columbia River. We can think of cycles of our heart beat almost once per second, but the beat can go up and down throughout the day very likely linked in some way or another to the cycle of day and night.
Today I learned about this google tool that shows you the frequency of the use of any given word in books in the last 200 years. It shows that the relevance of women is going up, and that the relevance of Earth is going down, in the minds of the English speaking publishing people. I understand why women are becoming more relevant, since they share more power with men than in the past. I guess the relevance of Earth is becoming smaller since our daily life, surrounded by great technological achievements, distances each time more from our planet. For example, it's dark outside, and it could just as well be bright, I am just typing here in my computer. I think this is not good for preserving the natural landscapes in the way our great grand parents new them. Only a few acres protected by national parks will remain pristine in a few years. The terms Man, Water, Money and Energy remained within the same rank of relevance in the past 200 years.
The popularity of the term Man is declining, perhaps it's the term Social what is taking over?
