click here for What We Learned from 5 million Books by Harvard researchers Jean-Baptiste Michel and Erez Lieberman Aiden

Culturomics is a form of computational lexicology that studies human behavior and cultural trends through the quantitative analysis of digitized texts– presented here by 

The guys are charming and funny and the results of their research, in charts, are revelatory– in the possibiliities they illumine. Play with the tool at ngrams.googlelabs.com. V awesome.