[identity profile] dd-b.livejournal.com 2011-02-25 08:59 pm (UTC)(link)
I started with one somewhat like that, but in my version several of the terms set the scale high enough ("weightless", I think) that you couldn't distinguish the others down on the bottom, so I dropped them. I think you have the same terms there, so I'm not sure why you're getting different results. Well, the green one is mostly lost, and it actually makes a clear departure from the baseline at a larger scale.

[identity profile] dd-b.livejournal.com 2011-02-25 09:02 pm (UTC)(link)
tellus, terra, sol 3, sol III; interesting to see that apparently Doc Smith wasn't the only person using "Tellus".

[identity profile] mmcirvin.livejournal.com 2011-02-25 09:09 pm (UTC)(link)
By modern informal naming conventions for extrasolar planets, Earth is presumably Sol b. Unless for discovery one needs realization that it really is a planet, in which case it's probably Sol g.

[identity profile] mmcirvin.livejournal.com 2011-02-26 02:23 am (UTC)(link)
The letters are assigned in order of discovery, starting with b. a is presumably the parent star, by analogy with the capital-letter designations for multiple stars, but nobody ever uses a.

[identity profile] ffutures.livejournal.com 2011-02-25 09:34 pm (UTC)(link)
monorail, light railway, maglev, tram

[identity profile] ffutures.livejournal.com 2011-02-25 09:39 pm (UTC)(link)
A REALLY odd one

antigravity, Dean drive, spindizzy, Bussard ramjet

Not at all the graph I expected to see!

[identity profile] whl.livejournal.com 2011-02-25 11:40 pm (UTC)(link)
"Dean drive" can be a street, or a character action. Inertialess was interesting, though.

[identity profile] mmcirvin.livejournal.com 2011-02-26 02:26 am (UTC)(link)
That looks to me like it's just noisy because the terms are really quite uncommon in the corpus.

[identity profile] mihai-lado.livejournal.com 2011-02-26 02:55 am (UTC)(link)
I was surprised by the spike in 'nanotechnology' around 1900.
ext_63737: Posing at Zeusaphone concert, 2008 (Erichsen WSH portrait)

[identity profile] beamjockey.livejournal.com 2011-03-01 04:46 pm (UTC)(link)
Everybody is surprised by this, the first time they play with the tool.

In some library catalogues, dates have been set to 1900 by default for some books. Google Books, which gets its metadata from the libraries (as well as other sources) has inherited this glitch.

Another thing: for a bound journal, sometimes the founding date of the journal is used, and it may not correspond to the date of the passage your search finds.

[identity profile] le-trombone.livejournal.com 2011-03-01 07:19 am (UTC)(link)
When it was first announced, I checked out "multiverse".

Then I said to myself, "Thought so."

[identity profile] le-trombone.livejournal.com 2011-03-01 06:31 pm (UTC)(link)
The claim was that "multiverse" was coined by Michael Moorcock, a claim that I was always skeptical of.

Note that the graph starts to hover above 0.00000200% after 1920, and stays in that range for the next 75 years, after which it starts to zoom upwards.
ext_63737: Posing at Zeusaphone concert, 2008 (animated)

[identity profile] beamjockey.livejournal.com 2011-03-03 07:35 pm (UTC)(link)
Apparently William James was fond of the word, and lots of people cite him.
ext_63737: Posing at Zeusaphone concert, 2008 (Default)

[identity profile] beamjockey.livejournal.com 2011-03-04 09:00 pm (UTC)(link)
I wonder whether Google will allow me to hotlink to their graphs.

Google Ngram chart of sounds like science fiction, sound like science fiction