Carnal Reason

Is George Bush actually the antichrist? A lot of people say he is. For instance, someone snagged the valuable domain name bushisantichrist.com and built a website to prove via numerology that Bush is indeed the antichrist. But think about it. The antichrist is bound to be pretty sly. Maybe we’re being set up to think Bush is the antichrist, so the real antichrist can take us by surprise. Maybe he will even pretend to save us from Bush.

I think you know where I’m going with this, because it has probably crossed your mind. You’re not alone. Go ahead, ask it out loud. Is Obama the antichrist?

I think it’s time to look into this matter. We nee to conduct a scientific investigation. Recent breakthroughs in science have led to a consensus that consensus is the measure and criterion of truth. This is a tremendous methodological advance. The scientific investigator is spared hard thought about evidence and causation. Instead he need merely take a survey and count the results. I here embrace this new philosophy, and will use it to resolve the burning issues of the day: is George Bush the antichrist, or is it Barrack Obama? And no, Hillary is not the antichrist. She is the scarlet woman, ok?

I have devised a new statistical measure to crack this nut wide open. I call it YBOAR, the Yahoo Bush Obama Antichrist Ratio. Here’s how it works. Go to the Yahoo search engine and enter the string Obama+antichrist as illustrated below.

When the results come back, notice the upper right corner of the screen. There will be a statistic there, as illustrated.

In this case there were 3,350,000 hits on the search string. Now repeat the search, but this time with the string Bush+antichrist. The result will include another hit count. The hit ratio Obama/Bush is the statistic Carnal Reason’s crack investigative team has been tracking for some time.

This investigation would be very tedious and error-prone if conducted by hand. Fortunately, Yahoo publishes a web search API. We at the Carnal Reason Advanced Programming labs have devised an automated system to query Yahoo once an hour and write the results to a database. We harvest the straight truth, 24/7. Below are graphs of our initial findings. We hope to publish weekly updates to make sure you can follow the course of science in action. If you want to gather your own data, the scripts used to query Yahoo can be downloaded here. The raw data can be downloaded here.

Enough talk, here is the data you have been waiting for. First the raw hit counts. The x-axis measures hours since this fateful experiment began. The y-axis measures hits. Obama is in blue, Bush in red, as per convention. As an aside, I think the convention is backwards; red better describes Obama .

In the next graph we see the YBOAR statistic in black, and and a five point moving average in red.

So what does it all mean? Stay tuned.

Posted on April 1st, 2008 by pwyll
Filed under: humor, politics