Google Insights: Mayan calendar

This is the graph generated when you look up who has been looking up the phrase 'mayan calendar' over the years. For me, the important thing is that the search records go back to the year 2004. All of six long years ago...

I'm a bit of a cynical person. The thing is that it bothers me how eager people are to adopt end-of-the-world scenarios. The reasons why I didn't include the year 2012 in this search are (a) it is a year, and not everyone googling it is necessarily googling end-of-the-world scenarios, and (b) it's a movie too. A movie about the silly quasi-prophecy, sure, but moviegoers can't be blamed for having a mere interest in the tired disaster-movie genre (I saw the movie 2012. I didn't understand a word of it). So I chose the phrase 'Mayan calendar', which no one would ever google except as regards the so-called ancient prophecy that didn't seem to exist until a year or two ago. A search confirms it: that's a real j-curve rise from precisely zero. Clearly just a few years back, no one had ever heard of this silly nonsense. And I can predict, looking into the future, that this curve will continue to grow until 2012 itself before fading away when the world fails to conform to Mayan predictions and end.

People intrigued by all this nonsense include: Indians, Filipinos, Americans and Canadians. Nobody in Central or South America. Hm.