My new obsession

Watching the population clock on the US Census Bureau website. The clock updates every minute, so you can see how many babies are being born in each minute. You can see it for the United States and for the entire world. It is so fascinating. I’m not even kidding.

I was watching Arrested Development after work today, and it occurred to me that I wanted to find out some information from a recent census (educational attainment by state, if you’re interested), so I went to the website. And there was the population clock, in the upper right-hand corner. I’m enthralled.

Because every single minute, it changes. Which means that at the end of every minute, all these babies have been born, brand new babies, which is fascinating all by itself, because you know, a minute ago they were still living inside of another person, and now, this minute, here they are, whole independent people who will eventually walk and talk and have affairs and jobs and illnesses and brilliant successes. (And yes, I realize how cheesy this sounds, but I can’t help it, that notion is so remarkable.) I find myself wanting to do Tarot card readings for all the new babies, to see what’s going to happen, but I can’t, there are too many of them. Every minute, more babies born. Wow. I only remembered Arrested Development when the credits rolled, at which point I realized I had missed the entire episode. Something about "Afternoon Delight".

The only way this could be more fascinating was if it had one for deaths as well. But the clock never loses numbers, because it updates every minute, so if anyone’s dying, it’s being counted out by the babies being born. I suppose this is probably a good thing. Imagine my chagrin if I had to choose two separate clocks to look at, maybe one at each side of the page. My eyes would get tired looking back and forth. The US and world population clocks are right on top of each other, and there are only two of them, so it’s no problem.

Also of note: When I start reading US Census Bureau reports, I sometimes start wondering about statistics that don’t matter. In particular I often wonder how many times a word or name crops up in a book. This is something I worry about because I write, and I get nervous about using words I like too many times. Or sometimes I just feel like finding an average number of times a certain common word is used in a certain number of bestselling books, like how many times on average do the current NY Times bestsellers use “good” as opposed to “bad”. ("Good" appears on an average of 23.7% of NY times bestseller pages (the top ten hardback fiction and the top ten paperback fiction), and "bad" appears on 8.3% of NY times bestseller pages. Just After Sunset by Stephen King has the highest percentage of "good" - 36.4% of pages; while The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz has the highest percentage of "bad" - 15.6% of pages. In case you were interested. Though I suspect that nobody in the world is interested in that information.)

(Incidentally, Martin Millar says he likes using the word "good", and here's the stats on that: Of the four Martin Millar books currently in print, 41.6% of the pages have "good" and 16.8% have "bad". For the interested (I KNOW THAT NOBODY CARES I CANNOT STOP MYSELF IT IS A SICKNESS), the book in which he says he likes the word "good", while it has the second-highest percentage of "good" incidences of all the four books, is still 23.5 points behind the book with the first-highest percentage. It also has the second-highest (by a far, far smaller margin) percentage of "bad" incidences.)

Today I remembered that my friend Laura had complained about Stephenie Meyer using the word “chagrined” too often in her Twilight series, so I investigated on Amazon. Results: She started out with three uses of “chagrin” or “chagrined” in Twilight (two should really be the limit, Laura and I decided, but we can live with it), then cut it down to one in New Moon (go Steph!). Then things started to go downhill. In Eclipse, the third book, she used it four times, and in Breaking Dawn, five. But the real winner is her non-vampire book The Host, which used “chagrin” or “chagrined” a grand total of seven times. That is many.

Since I’m on the subject of Stephenie Meyer, and I have my camera right here next to me, I think this is a good time to post the picture of the thing Vey made for Anna. I am so, so jealous of Anna. It is three-dimensional art which is already cool, and it is also an unbelievably excellent feminist palimpsest. I love it. The picture doesn’t do it justice. In real life it is still more magnificent than it is here. If you can believe that.