It still posits a legitimate question. Do people get hiccups as often?
Perhaps people do, but I used to get them much more often as a kid, and almost not at all for the past 10-20 years (1-2 incidents).
Maybe it's more prominent based on level of physical activity?
Or maybe people have different chances of getting the hiccups depending on age (e.g. more often young)?
Perhaps this (getting less hiccups over time) is just true for me and the author (and other random people, and not some majority). Again a question would be, why is it so?
There is not stupid question, but there are stupid kneejerk refusal to ponder a case at all...
Well, that's a knee jerk reaction of the kind I was talking about.
For one, the data in the graph is "searches for the word in Google". It's not about occurrences of hiccups (which is what the article is about). Hiccups could be raising or merely searches for hiccups could be (for some other reason).
Second, the author posts a personal observation. 99.9999% of people on earth could have the hiccups all the time, and it wouldn't invalidate his own observation that he personally doesn't seem to get them as often. That still calls for an explanation (could just be luck, but what it is remains to be explained in some way).
Third, even if we assume more searches = more hiccups, the data show something equally surprising (the inverse of what the author says is equally perplexing: why would we have more hiccups than before? And not just because more people are on the internet (and thus ask more questions), but even after internet access sort plateaued in the english speaking world, there's still substantial rise in such searches. Is that true? Would normalised (e.g. to ratio of people with internet access over time) searches data look the same? If so why?
The "mentions in literature" chart that's posted in the article is comparable to "volume of searches", because they both pertain to societal change. A data-centric evaluation of the phenomenon would focus on actual "occurrences of hiccups".
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.
> 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.
Sometimes skunks become important to kids because they are inside video games.
Take a look at Gogle trends for "red dead skunk". A lot of kids were using Google to figure out where to find a skunk in the game Red Dead Redemption in June 2010.
This is a joke article, right? If not the author needs to read an article on how to support an argument. Preferably not one written by himself, since it seems he is deficient in this skill.
For a long time I've been able to cancel my hiccups just as they begin. I can't do it all the time, maybe about 90% of the time. I wonder how common this ability is.
