flu trends 2012

Seem like everyone around you is getting sick and that there is a lot of flu around this year? Well, you are probably correct. Just pulled the pic below from Google's Flu Trends, and as you can see, this year is not only substantially worse than other years but it is earlier in the year too (apart from the good 'ol swine flu year!). Sadly, it does not appear to be on the down slope just yet, either. As you can see, almost the whole country is currently classified as 'intense'. Good times! I joined the party this year as did most of my family it seems!

Alright, so after this post I will stop with the sociology (most kind of likely that is). I got to thinking that the last post about bundled beliefs and values may not have made a ton of sense to everyone. Then I got to thinking more about how everyone loves a good graph. That could just be me because I like to get my nerd on from time to time, but who knows.

Below is a graph that kind of helps to illustrate how political view points and religious views mix. The graph show conservative, moderate, and liberal political views as they are impacted by increasingly literal interpretations of the Bible. These lines are predicting increasingly levels of people thinking that one must do religious good deeds (as discussed in the last post, grouping 'have faith in God' with 'serve in the military'). So, as one has more literal views of the Bible, they are also more likely to think that one must do these 'religious' good deeds in order to be considered a good person.

The biggest change is really for the conservatives as they get more literal interpretations of the Bible. While both the moderates and the liberals do not change in how many religious good deeds they think a person needs to do as they see the Bible more literally, the conservatives have a large increase in how many religious good deeds they think a person must do.

That totally got longer than I intended it to. My bad.

From A Step Beyond