Blog RSS Feed

Archive for February, 2012

What Twitterers Are Giving up for Lent (2012 Edition)

Saturday, February 25th, 2012

The top 100 things that people on Twitter are giving up for Lent in 2012.

This year, Twitter continues to take top honors. Facebook drops a few places compared to last year–has it become less-central to people’s lives? This year’s hot new site, Pinterest, almost makes the list, showing up at #118. (Incidentally, Pinterest has a number of Lent-related boards.)

Chocolate comes in at #2–however, if you add up all the mentions of chocolate in its various forms (“chocs,” “chocolate chips,” etc.), it totals over 14,000 mentions, enough to put it at #1.

This year’s biggest gainers are “breathing” and “makeup,” both of which jumped up more than 30 places in the list.

No celebrities make the top 100 this year. Boy band One Direction (aka #1D) is at #144, followed by Justin Bieber at #194 and Tim Tebow at #221. Last year’s curiosity, Charlie Sheen, only got two mentions; he dropped to #10,000 or so.

Overall, food was by far the most popular thing given up.

This list draws from about 300,000 tweets from February 19-25, 2012, and excludes retweets.

Rank Word Count Change from last year’s rank
1. Twitter 13,937 0
2. Chocolate 13,001 +1
3. Swearing 11,737 +1
4. Alcohol 9,998 +1
5. Soda 9,942 +2
6. Facebook 9,025 -4
7. Fast food 6,529 +3
8. Sex 6,146 -2
9. Sweets 4,973 +2
10. Meat 4,444 -1
11. Lent 4,171 -3
12. School 3,976 +1
13. Junk food 3,388 +6
14. Chips 3,150 +4
15. Coffee 2,263 0
16. Candy 2,217 +6
17. Bread 2,124 +3
18. You 2,056 -2
19. Smoking 2,002 +2
20. Giving up things 2,001 -8
21. Homework 1,908 +11
22. Food 1,800 +5
23. Social networking 1,754 -6
24. Religion 1,701 -10
25. Marijuana 1,594 +4
26. Beer 1,359 +4
27. Work 1,331 -3
28. Stuff 1,302 -3
29. McDonald’s 1,249 +21
30. Virginity 1,152 +7
31. Cookies 1,137 +3
32. Masturbation 1,134 +4
33. Ice cream 1,113 +15
34. Shopping 1,068 -6
35. Fried food 993 -4
36. Boys 956 +6
37. Sobriety 910 +7
38. Coke 899 +3
39. Catholicism 881 -13
40. Cheese 858 -7
41. Nothing 831 +5
42. Carbs 818 +16
43. Red meat 758 -8
44. Procrastination 738 +1
45. Desserts 733 +26
46. Pizza 714 +15
47. Pancakes 650 -9
48. Sugar 645 -5
49. Rice 633 -10
50. Breathing 631 +34
51. Me 628 +12
52. Texting 627 +3
53. Starbucks 623 +1
54. Fizzy drinks 595 +12
55. French fries 593 +7
56. Diet Coke 572 +21
57. Porn 562 +10
58. Tumblr 548 +12
59. Wine 546 -7
60. Makeup 539 +31
61. Liquor 534 -5
62. Booze 530 -22
63. College 524 +18
64. My phone 508 +30
65. Life 486  
66. Caffeine 466 -17
67. Laziness 453 +11
68. Chipotle 452 +30
69. Tea 445 +6
70. Chicken 442 +2
71. Cake 440 +3
72. Sarcasm 429 +4
73. New Year’s resolutions 422 +15
74. Takeout 417 +11
75. Men 412 -10
76. Pork 394 -3
77. Christianity 388 -18
78. Sleep 386 +1
79. People 384 +8
80. Caring 377  
81. Juice 357 +11
82. Snacking 345  
83. Lying 333  
84. TV 332 -31
85. Complaining 331 -2
86. Church 328 -35
87. Him 327 +2
88. Sweet tea 326  
89. Lint 326 -21
90. Vegetables 324  
91. Talking 323  
92. Bacon 321  
93. Being mean 320  
94. Pasta 316  
95. Eating out 316 +5
96. Negativity 314 -39
97. Eating 298  
98. Biting my nails 294  
99. Nutella 291  
100. Being nice 258  

Categories

Rank Category Number of Tweets
1. food 79,977
2. habits 21,836
3. technology 19,190
4. smoking/drugs/alcohol 19,073
5. health/hygiene 11,101
6. sex 9,948
7. irony 9,352
8. school/work 8,567
9. relationship 6,919
10. religion 4,157
11. generic 2,841
12. shopping 1,491
13. entertainment 1,344
14. money 526
15. sports 512
16. celebrity 461
17. possessions 376
18. clothes 111
19. politics 105

The image is a Wordle.

Track What People Are Giving Up for Lent in Real Time

Wednesday, February 22nd, 2012

See the top 100 things people are giving up for Lent on Twitter, continually updated for the next few days.

Look for the usual post-mortem later this week.

Re-visualizing Cross References (Interactively)

Tuesday, February 7th, 2012

Visit an interactive visualization of Bible cross references.
Browse this grid interactively.

This visualization is arranged by book, showing cross-reference sources on the y-axis and targets on the x-axis. Within each square, the first verse in the book or section is at the top, and the last verse is at the bottom. Here’s what a detail of a square looks like:

Cross references between Genesis and Daniel

Genesis 1 is at the top left; Genesis 50 is at the bottom left. Daniel 1 is at the top right; Daniel 12 is at the bottom right. The most-striking cross references between these two books, to me, involve Joseph’s interpretation of dreams in Genesis 40-41 and similar stories in Daniel.

Also see a previous cross reference visualization.