Top 10 “Why” Questions on Google

I often play around with keywords in Google Suggest to see what could be what most people type.

It’s very interesting and sad to see what are the top 10 “why” questions from about 148 million people that used Google as of last month.

Top 10 “Why” questions in English

Why Poems?
I guess some people are very jaded, or don’t get why do we have poems. I’d say this would be the same as “Why Music”, “Why Movies”. Sad… or maybe they’re looking for poems that ask the question “why”? I don’t get this one.

The top 3 US states asking “Why Poems” are Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana.

why live
A lot of suicidal people looking for answers in Google, crazy shit. Let’s hope Google’s first result page is very encouraging to keep living. The first result goes to suicide.com. Again, Sad, but interesting to see that there’s a lot of people who ask themselves that question. I must be one very happy person, never crossed my mind such a thing.

The top 3 states with suicidal tendencies on Google seem to be Kentucky, Iowa and Rhode Island. Things must be hard in those places these days.

why jokes
There seems to be a bunch of “why” jokes around. The first search result takes you to a long ass list of jokes that start with the word “why”. For example:

Why is “abbreviated” such a long word?

The top 3 states in need of why jokes are currently Michigan, Indiana and Iowa.

why jason aldean
No clue who’s this dude, but let’s see why they ask why him…
First search result takes you to a YouTube Music video of a country love song. Good choice of a word, I bet there’s been lots of “Why” songs, but this one is the one kicking ass now.

The top 3 states where this question comes from are, West Virginia, Kentucky and Maine.

why is the sky blue
This is a very popular one, and Google often uses it on it’s PSAs for Google Adsense.
The answer lies in light and the atmosphere.

The top 3 states wondering about the color of the sky are Michigan, Kentucky and Utah. They must have pretty blue skies over there.

why to men have nipples
Good one! This is a very tough to answer, there’s really no definite explanation, mine would be that we have still a few thousand or more years to go until we mutate and get rid of them, pretty much evolution in the process is my belief.

Top 3 states wondering about man nipples are Nevada, Tennessee and Indiana.

why did michael jackson turn white
This one truly cracked me up. Out of all why questions in the world, the majority of people using google are wondering about what happen to one man. Leave the poor guy alone. The first search result takes you to a cronological essay about Michael Jackson’s morphosis, I bet it does answer it. The second result is an answer in Wiki Answers which tells us 3 theories, but in the end none knows how he actually did it, it’s all rumors that eventually will come out unless all the parties involved die and no documentation is left behind about the procedures.

I guess if someone knew how to do this and it was an easy process there would already be one huge industry for self-racists to convert to white. I know a few myself that would be inline as soon as they’d have the money.

The top 3 states wondering about Michael Jackson’s pigmentation changes are Florida, New York and New Jersey.

why do dogs eat grass
So I guess a lot of Dog owners can’t figure out why their carnivore pets tend to be mowing the lawn or eating grass and then vomiting.

Top 3 dog owner states wondering about this behaviour are Oklahoma, Louisiana and Kentucky.

I’m starting to think that people in Kentucky need to have a lot of questions answered, where the hell did we ask for questions before Google, I guess we lived in a world ruled by rumors and miss-information since most people didn’t really go to the library to have mundane questions answered.

why did I get married
Again, some people think of Google as their psychologist or as a frustration release text box… or maybe they’re just looking to find out about a movie, which comes up as the first search result.

Top 3 states having second thoughts about their marriage are Mississippi, Louisiana and Georgia.
What’s with the people in the south of this country?

why is my poop green
This tendency seemed to have picked up towards the end of 2008 on Google trends. The first result takes us to a Yahoo! Answers page, and it seems to be related with vegetarians pooping green, with iron, with colorants in food, or deficiencies in the digestive process.

Top 3 states pooping green are Wisconsin, Missouri and Indiana.

Sources: Google and Google Trends.

Dream: Export Company Dream

I was at a restaurant, it was so full they had a buffer table outside, I sat there to wait for Mauricio who was going to meet me. There was a man siting there, he was reading the menu. All of a sudden Luis Coa came, he greeted Mauricio with a handshake, he shook my hands with two hands, like a politician. Then he said “Hi Dad”, then we all laughed and said how small the world is, I told the that this was very funny since I thought recently about the way humans trust each other. It only takes a single node of trust to let us do things we’d never dream of with complete strangers.

Minutes later we were talking business, I’m not sure if it was his dad but I know I was supposed to start up an export company in Miami.

Then I’m in New York, somewhere in Brooklyn or Astoria, I had to look up for my mom since I was bringing her down to Miami, she did not live with Nicole. She lived atop a latin restaurant that now was claiming was a healthy place. Outside there was a sign that said “I Lost ___ pounds eating at [I can’t remember the name of the restaurant]”, and when I saw it I was like “yeah right”.

I went up stairs, now I remember, this place reminds me of the first room I got in West New York, NJ. It was old, seemed unsafe, and I barely fit through the spiral stairs which were surrounded by white metal bars. I only had the key to downstairs, before I called my mom looked out and saw me, can’t remember what she said.

Next thing we’re somewhere far, the dream or what I remember from it mixes parts from a long river with yellow transparent waters, a beach area of my childhood, and the mountains of la guaira. It was day but it looked like the night. Then I was showing my mom about a kid who could control the water, and he and a friend came close to where we stood, some sort of cement pier, they came with surfboards and they controlled the water. Then I told her how she should see what he does in the winter with almost frozen water.

She told me to jump and swim in front of them, I looked down, there were rocks at the bottom, but very far down, there was somebody walking down there without a tank, and I said to her no way, she asked why, I bullshitted her about the rocks, I was just afraid to jump.

The water I remember had like a membrane of dirt on top.

I can’t remember much more, but I know the dream goes on to a part where I’m doing some exports and everything is doing well.

September 24th 2009
Dream Log to help achieve Lucid Dreaming

N95 – 2 years later

I got this phone on August 1st, 2007, this is how it looks now, 2 years later.

I’m still doing my research on what phone I should get.

How it looked the first day (August 1st, 2007)

Reference: Linux Network/Bandwidth Monitoring CLI Tools

I often want to see how much bandwidth is consumed by my network interfaces and how this is happening. There’s plenty of tools available in the linux world to monitor your network activity.

If you’re a Ubuntu or Debian user you can try the ones I use by installing the following packages.

sudo apt-get install iptraf ethstatus dstat iftop ifstat nload bwm-ng

Then try each one of those on your command line and have fun exploring what they can do.

If they’re not on the path of your user account, then try them using sudo.
eg. sudo iftop

If this short list of the tools I use does not satisfy you, I suggest you read this more comprehensive list of monitoring tools

Iterative Sierpinksi Fractal (drawn on HTML5 Canvas)

So maybe you’ve seen this very famous fractal called the Sierpinksi Fractal.

A few days ago I heard that you could create this fractal pattern by simply plotting out of a random sequence of mid points of an ever growing set of these mid points. So curiosity added with my apetite for playing with the HTML5 Canvas object and you have me playing on a saturday afternoon and then blogging about it.

Drawing this thing

Usually you’d think of drawing the Sierpinski Triangle the Recursive way, specially if you’re a CS student. The algorithm would be basically… For each triangle you create 3 triangles, one on top, one on the left, and one on the right (in the order that you want), repeat and rinse for each new triangle (until you decide to stop… you can use for example the height of the next triangle to stop, if too small stop)

But then I heard on some online video lecture about fractals that you could obtain the same results in an iterative fashion, no recursion whatsoever, just generate point after point randomly following one basic rule.

Choose 3 points in a plane, then choose 2 random points of the 3 and draw the middle point of these 2. Do the same for the new set of points. If the 3 initial points represent the vertices of a triangle you have yourself a Sierpinski fractal triangle. If you don’t choose an initial triangle, you’ll also get Sierpinski but it looks as if you were looking at the triangle from a random angle.

I must say I was pretty amazed when I saw it working… TADA!!!!


Try it on your browser
(Tested and works under Firefox 3.5, Chromium 4.0.2, and Safari)

That’s how it looks when you draw 800k random mid points.

PS: It runs faster in Chrome, props to Chrome developers.

If I Ruled The World – Driving Edition

– All traffic lights would have regressive timers to let drivers know when the light will switch from Green to Red and from Red to Green. No more guessing, and no more honking on people to move their clueless asses.

– Traffic lights would have sensors for about a mile before each on every direction, no need to have people sitting at red lights when there are no cars coming. Current sensors suck balls.

– All highways would have 50mph minimum speed limit, and optionally a 90mph speed limit.

– To get a driver license you’d have to complete an obstacle course at a speed of at least 60mph. People who can’t do this should not be allowed to drive.

– Cars would Jam Cellphones Signals as soon as they start moving. I’m sick of stupid people on zombie mode when driving, they’re damn dangerous for everyone around, not to mention the ones texting while driving, those probably deserve to have accidents and die or get a big scare as a process of natural selection, too bad that when it happens they kill innocent people along the way.

– If you waste 3 seconds to get your car moving when a light turns green, the traffic light will take a picture of your license plate and send you a ticket for wasting 3 seconds times the number of people you have behind you.

– Drawbridges would be disabled everywhere between 7-10am and between 4-7pm. It’s ridiculous how many man/years in productivity are wasted everyday when these things open up and hold up hundreds of cars so that one stupid boat can pass, specially at peak hours.

– In the future, if cars are to drive themselves, there’d be controlling computers at intersections making sure cars don’t have to ever stop, coordinating car speeds, making them go from all directions at the same time and trying to keep a minimum separation between them only by a few feet. It’d be pretty exciting to go through an intersection on a world like this. No more stupid traffic lights.

If I think of more I’ll keep updating this list.

Birthday Trackbacks (30 yrs old – 2009)

As a way to thank back all the people that took a few seconds, minutes, or even hours preparing a happy birthday message for me, here’s the list of all of you. (Here’s last year’s)

– My beautiful wife
– Laura Borman [uk] (It was great to see you this year in London)
– Erika Acosta [es]
– Adelaida Moubayyed [es]
– Jonathan Mujica [ve]
– Gustavo Tovar [ve]
– My mom
– My sister Nicole
– My dad
– All the Swaman [ve,usa,uk,china]
– My aunt Kata
– My aunt Yennis
– My grandma Avelina
– My grandpa/uncle Juan
– My aunt Goya
– My aunt Rosa who took so much care of me during my teen years and I’ll never forget it
– My cousin Angel Eloy who this year made some cool videos
– My parents in law
– Katay Santos [called from China this year]
– Jairo Boudewyn [ve]
– Abigail Reyes [ve]
– Jose Molina [co]
– Fitim Blaku [es]
– Helena Hui [ny]
– Hania Bednarski [ny]
– Antonio Jordana
– Sabrina Quintero
– Josmig Farreras
– Gabe Perez
– Alejandra Aparicio
– La Tati [mia]
– Mariuber Torres [ve]
– Zlatin Balevsky
– Marcelina Knitter [ny]
– El Titi [ve]
– Nancy Molina [co]
– Victor M Filippini Jr [mia]
– Aixela Valentin [ve]
– Eduardo Filacchione
– Glevys Malaguera
– Jeir Martinez Molina [co]
– Ana Gabriela [ve]
– Wayka Marino [ve]
– Mariela de Baron [ve]
– Jessica Leon [ve]
– Jose Ramon Godoy [mia]
– Daniel Pons [es]
– Ciro Duran
– Dave Nicponski [ny]
– Carlos Javier Carbonell [uk]
– Maura Patricia Murgas [co]
– Sinnis Espinoza [ve]
– Ale Penichet [ve]
– Stefano De Chicchis [ny]
– Pablo Moubayyed [ve]
– Maria Angelica Guevara [ve]
– María Cione [it]
– Cynthia Villoria [es]
– “Huguito” Londoño
– El @Infelix
– @vampy
– @luisraa
– @Niro
– @edgar
– @croncho
– @martin_twelve
– @DobleD
– @musicaymas
– @tesne
– @JoseManuel
– @Marole
– @GilCVV
– @HernanGarcia
– @R4mcst3r
– @rom
– @jamvtw
– Valeri Martinez [co]
– Roger Kapsi [ny]