Be a sheep

You have to admit, technology makes it easier to be like everyone else. In the olden days, in remote neighborhoods, you had to go out of your way to figure out what everyone else was doing. I think in those days church was the place you'd go to see the latest trends. Now you can figure out what is popular just by going to the Interweb.

But what can you trust? Google, of course! Google is all knowing. At Defcon I learned about Google Trends, which is a site that shows you the most popular search terms. You can select specific terms to see a graph of their popularity. Graphs make everything scientific and credible... or, in this case, incredible.

I have learned about all sorts of exciting things thanks to Google Trends. For example, I learned of the death of poor Alex the Parrot, an African grey parrot. ALEX apparently is an acronym for "Avian Learning EXperiment." Alex was a genius bird, and probably was smarter than most of the people you know.

Today's hottest search term (so far, but it is early) is "hectometer." Why is that a popular search term??? I suppose people are just odd. Or some rogue botnet it popularizing the term...