Vibr8gKiwi

Hahahaha--holy cow dude, you might consider taking a deep breath and relaxing. If you're seriously worried that I'm teaming up with Macy's to present a false sense of how fast some term is spreading... well like I said, take a deep breath and try to get some perspective.

I explained what I'm doing, but anyone is free to do something similar using whatever terms or search engines they want. Hopefully others will do that--get some cross correlation going, or at least cover for when I forget to pull the numbers.

To me this is just amusing--it's not my life or some big research project.

viscousmemories

Sorry, cross-posted with you. The thing is there's absolutely no way to guarantee, or even a reason to have the expectation, that there will only be "noise" added. This new use of the word 'Bright', defined by it's creators as "a person who has a naturalistic worldview", is still brand spanking new, whereas people have been using the word 'bright' for a thousand other purposes for years. Wal-Mart, for example, is a huge company with a tremendous advertising budget. If they come up with a new line of clothes and call it "The Brights", you will see a surge in usage of that term on the Internet that completely dwarfs usage of the word with this new definition.

vm

viscousmemories

And as I said I suspected as much, I just don't know why you would want to amuse yourself in this fashion. Why not just count the stars in the sky every day and record and graph the data to see if there's a noticeable trend in their appearance and disappearance? Your results would be equally accurate and relevant to what you're doing with this Brights business, and you wouldn't be perpetuating a silly idea.

vm

viscousmemories

Freak.

Vibr8gKiwi

I agree with you that it's a waste of time. But I find it fun. Is that enough to stop the thread hijack thing you're doing or do we all have to wade through more ranting?

tribalbeeyatch

Right, and that sort of scenario could be ruled out with a little bit of legwork after the fact. I would propose that IF there is a run of exponential increases or a significant change in the slope THEN there would be a decent motivation for scanning through the hits for some other new use of the word. As it stands, it would just take too much effort to cull through the thousands of hits. This is a 'just for fun' sort of project after all. Narrowing the search might also be a good idea, but it might present problems of its own. For example, the additional term "naturalistic" would certainly decrease the number of initial hits and the number of 'misses' among them, but it might also greatly decrease the 'hits' as the term catches on. My reasoning being that if it were to truly catch on, then there would be an ever-decreasing need to clarify the definition of the word with words like "naturalistic". Perhaps Vibr8gKiwi could collect data for such a narrowed search in addition to that for the terms he's using so far, though.

viscousmemories

Aha! The 'appeal to derailing' fallacy!

Okay, so it's not a fallacy. Fine. I'll shut up. Sorry. Just please, please don't be a tool for these people. At least take Gurdurs hints and provide some more accurate numbers. They have already suckered enough people by getting Dawkins et al. to sing their Bright tune. Don't let them get you!

vm

viscousmemories

Ah, yeah. Okay. I see your point there.

Another good point.

Perhaps. You'll have to take that up with him/her though. How is that pronounced, anyway? Vibrating Kiwi? In any case that's what it is to me, and I like it a lot.

vm

Oops. I think I just heard an echoing voice say, "Shaddup shaddingup, rabbit!"

tribalbeeyatch

Hmmm... For what it's worth (nothing, I know, so don't expect any change back), I don't take this as any sort of promotion of The Brights. It looks far too descriptive to be taken as prescriptive, in my opinion.

[edited to add]

And I don't care how much it catches on, there's no way that I'm going to be lured over to the darkside of The Brights.

Gurdur

I detest rhubarb.

I like strawberries !