Surprisingly, BMI Baby tops the charts for “hidden charges”, with Ryanair and EasyJet coming in a close second and third. The results for “stranded” aren’t as you might expect. It seems that Lufthansa had a well reported strike which left thousands stranded. I doubt the unions are very strong at Ryanair… I guess you want to try the phrase “I was stranded”, that should reflect customer opinion better.

Now let’s try “unreliable” vs “reliable”:

Lufthansa seem to be most often reported as reliable on the web, with Air France most unreliable. KLM are second highest in reliability and unreliability. That’s quite impressive.

Now how about not getting your bags at the carousel?

Alitalia seem to be best at losing your bags!

To mark the passing of the King of Pop, I have introduced a new category for the X-axis: “famous dead people”. By this I mean famous people who died a bit too soon.

Recently deceased Michael Jackson won’t be remembered for his musical talents, at least in comparison to Buddy Holly and Elvis Presley.

Surprisingly, the People’s Princess didn’t score highly for pretty or dumb, instead the honours go to Buddy and Michael:

Finally, let’s get even more topical and bring Wimbledon into the frame (I guess that should be ‘court’). Let’s compare Mr Jackson and Andy Murray’s personal characteristics:

You’ll need to click on the image to get vaguely legible X-axis labels:

So what do we get (on 26 June 2009)? MJ is polite but not courageous and Murray is confident but not very reliable.

Bioinformatics has by far the largest amount of “open access” chatter. In purple you can see the relatively flat distribution of “journal” as a control. As a bioinformaticist myself this seems to make sense, as the leading figures in the open access movement come from this field. However, other communities (physics, computer science) have been operating an informal open access model for a lot longer (preprint servers and/or widespread preprint availability).

That suggests that being pregnant and starting school are the most stressful events, but wait, let’s try it with “stressful” too, just as a sanity check:

Phew they are pretty much the same.

But pregnancy and babies are not all doom and gloom, let’s try some more positive terms:

What a relief – pregnancy, marriage and childbirth are the most joyous events. Now let’s go crazy (as every true Compare Stuffer should do). Let’s also zero the y-axis before I forget.

Not surprisingly, people seem to complain a lot about being ripped off for wedding-related services – also moving house comes high. Bullying at school is no surprise either. That wasn’t really very crazy, let’s see which kinds of music are most associated with these life events:

Classical music for childbirth perhaps? Heavy metal to numb the pain of marriage (only kidding!).

Country and western triggers divorce while reggae eases childbirth? I’m only guessing. Some deeper examination of the results is needed.

What about all the hype around SARS and avian flu?

The Wikipedia page for sleeping sickness mentions a decline in incidence, and Compare Stuff shows that too:

Malaria seems to be very slightly on the decline, but remember this is a decline in the amount of coverage on the web, not the number of people being infected!

That’s why it’s a good idea to use Compare Stuff to look at the trends of words and phrases that are not likely to follow fashions and whims. Here are the first two phrases that came to mind, and they make a really pretty plot:

I really wouldn’t expect to see a global increase in bad coughs over the period of a few years (around 2005) but maybe this is related to something? Any suggestions? Go on, it would make my day to get a comment!

And finally, this brings us to a brand new x-axis selection – South Asian countries – which should work well because English is widely spoken in those parts:

Here’s the trend linked above, showing Jeremy Clarkson’s meteoric rise vs. Germaine Greer’s steadier web-presence growth:

Here’s one that unfortunately shows the general decline in society:

I was hoping for something more optimistic!

The new x-axis choice helps put events in around 2001 (e.g. 9/11) in context:

Here we see the result of Bush’s administration desperately wanting to link Iraq with 9/11.