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Comment by quxpar | Hacker News Reader

The stats department at columbia must be pretty strong if you can publish a blog article where the only data cited completely disproves your point.

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I'm can't tell if the author is going for irreverent levity, or actually thinks they are expressing something meaningful here. The Google graph doesn't even seem relevant from an earnest, literal perspective.

>The stats department at columbia must be pretty strong if you can publish a blog article where the only data cited completely disproves your point.

Actually it does nothing of the sort, except correlation-ally. It counts searches for hiccups online, which is close but not exactly the same to someone getting hiccups.

No, the data cited is not for online searches. I expected the same, but it goes back to the 19th century. Probably it's the frequency with which the word appears in scanned literature, which is even farther removed from anything relevant to blog, given the way synonym and idiom usage changes over time.

Google Trends shows a marked increase in searches for hiccups from 2004-present, also.

> Why doesn't the data match my anecdote? I know, I'll write a blog post about the good ol' days of playing outdoors, living in the moment!

What I don't understand is why he doesn't find the data for 2000-2020. Like how can he even begin to claim "its bigger than ever" when the last 20 years of technological advancement seems to be crux of his argument.

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