Star Trek, suicide and Bush voters

I originally heard about StateStats from Fred Wilson, of A VC fame. It sounded interesting. To quote the site:

This tool shows you how popular a Google search query is in each U.S. state, giving a ranking like the one you see in the left column. It then compares this ranking with other ways of ranking states, like average income or population density, using Spearman’s rank correlation.

I first tried out things like different bands I like listening to, a comedian, and a couple of the site’s suggested searches (like yoga).

The most surprising search I made was, of all things, Star Trek. The popularity of searches in states for “star trek” correlates positively to the suicide rate of states!?! Not as strongly, it correlates to the order of states that Voted for Bush in the 2004 presidential election. See the screenshot below:

Even the search “depression” doesn’t correlate as strongly to suicide rates:

I would like to point out a key point the site makes about this data:

Be careful drawing conclusions from this data. For example, the fact that walmart shows a moderate correlation with “Obesity” does not imply that people who search for “walmart” are obese! It only means that states with a high obesity rate tend to have a high rate of users searching for walmart, and vice versa. You should not infer causality from this tool.

But enough of a morbid tone. As I mentioned above, you can see how the popularity of things like up-and-coming bands is concentrated geographically. Check out the chart for the band MGMT:

(This is where I plug that my better half, LondonAnnie, graduated from Wesleyan University. The home of MGMT, Bill Belichick of the Patriots and Eric Mangini of the Jets. For a couple of years LondonAnnie helped Eric put on his family foundation’s football camp for under-privledged kids; it’s been going on since 2002!)

Finally, perhaps it’s yoga that’s really splitting the country?