Statistics are good.

I found the coolest thing on Ravelry today. Google has a trends lab search engine that allows you to figure out how many times people search for certain words. You can type in more than one word and the comparative statistics will be calculated for you almost instantly! One creative Raveler demonstrated by searching for knitting and poison.

This is what resulted:



The y-axis is number of times the word was used for a search.
The red line is poison.
The blue line is knitting.
The letters indicate important events that may have caused the spikes in the graph.

A. Poison Ricin Found in Sen. Frist's Office Albany Democrat Herald - Feb 3 2004
B. Dioxin expert says poison causes widespread damage KVOA.com - Dec 11 2004
C. Yushchenko's poison level extreme NorthJersey.com - Dec 16 2004
D. Photos show 'poison' toll on ex-spy in Huddersfield.co.uk - Nov 20 2006
E. MOSCOW Two American women are hospitalized in serious condition in Russia after ingesting the deadly poison thallium. WBAY - Mar 7 2007
F. Testing reveals melamine in recalled pet food, but not rat poison: FDA CJOB - Mar 30 2007

So, basically, when we're thinking about knitting we really don't have time to think about poisoning anyone. I suppose you could also swing this to say that knitting maintains civility and prevents us all from killing the people we know.

Also, these are the regions where the most knitting hits came from:

Regions
1. New Zealand
2. United States (note the US was the only region that had more poison hits than knitting)
3. Australia
4. Canada
5. United Kingdom
6. Ireland
7. India
8. Germany

Yay! New Zealand is in the lead, and even Australia is ahead of Canada. New Zealand has a much smaller population than Canada and Australia is most likely similar. I'm so glad to see where they turned up on the list because I plan on doing a whole lot of knitting in those countries later this year.