Monday, April 28, 2008

Where will you get stabbed? Google fun!

Today for giggles I googled “Stabbed in X” with X being a city where I would expect a lot of stabbings.

These are the results I got:

LA 22

Dublin 24

Limerick 30

New York 64

London 98

This is interesting. Does this mean that LA is the least violent city? Seems unlikely. Why not google “Violence in X”, this gave a whole different set of results:

Limerick 38

Dublin 91

New York 16,000

Los Angeles 35,500

London 64,900

Wow, stay the fuck out of London! But this has now shot LA far above New York… So what kind of violence do they mean? Shootings perhaps?

Results for “Shot in X” (Note: a large chunk of the response for “Shot in New York” mean film shootings. I don’t think any of “Shot in Limerick” responses meant that, so expect the results to be fairly skewed):

Limerick 45

Dublin 17,900

New York 76,400

London 96,300

Los Angeles 115,000

So there you have it: Limerick is probably a lot safer than I would have normally given it credit for. Although if you took a per-head populace count against the number of stabbings you might understand how it earned the nickname ‘Stab City’.

So google, violence, numbers and massive scientific errors. Fun eh?

-ANkh

P.S. This could be given more of a scientific grounding by using Foxrock, Beverly Hills, San Francisco or Milton Keynes at a control. But seeing as every city is a different size we’re way to far from science to make such an effort worthwhile.

Just some fun with interesting numbers. I recommend you try it out with the city you live in! Does local violence go unreported? Do alarmist newspaper columnists predict chaos? Is somebody making a movie?

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