Here’s a preview of the new site that was leaked to us. Click the image for a larger version.

                    

There’s one easy way to tell – with Google. We searched for the names of six movie stars on Google, to see how many results were found when their names were combined with two masculine and two feminine words. In addition, we performed the same searches with Sarah Jessica Parker, as a control point.

What’s with Dolph Lundgren and Kittens?

Anyway, to take account of different popularities (this isn’t a popularity contest, but a masculinity contest), we calculated a ‘manliness ratio’, by dividing the total number of manly search results by the total number of feminine search results.

Those results are fairly conclusive. Dolph Lundgren, because of his apparent kitten obsession, is less manly than Sarah Jessica Parker. And who would have thought that Chuck Norris would be out-done by Seagal and Damme!?

Source Data

                    

We took the data from VGChartz list of 7891 top-selling video games, and analyzed not only the most common words, but also the most common first words of video games – there is, of course, some correlation.

Eerily, if you take the most common seven words in video games titles, and put them in order of popularity, it actually creates a fairly good game title: The Super NBA Dragon Star World Final. I bet that would be a global hit.

The most used/popular/common words in video game titles

and…

The most used/popular/common FIRST words of video game titles

                    

Our revelations reveal that, contrary to popular belief, brown seems to be more common than yellow. In another shock, “green and tufty, often teal” only makes a single appearance.

Source Data (via Infochimps)

                    

From this analysis, we see that a cliched title for a love movie would be “It’s Romance Night for Girl and Man Love”, for sci-fi “Space Man and the Star Time Alien”, and for adult… well, let’s not get into that. I was initially happy to see the word ‘love’ in the adult top 10 words. “That’s nice”, I thought. But then I realised that ‘love’ in this context is a synonym for ‘really enjoy’ (e.g. “Girls that Love Big Graphs” – I made that up, but you get the idea), rather than the more romantic meaning.

                    

We took the list of best-selling video game consoles, and plotted the number of buttons on the controller/joystick from each console against the year it was released. The number of buttons does not include d-pads, clickable analog sticks or switches, but does include all other buttons, shoulder buttons and triggers.

As is clearly evident, apart from a spike in the early 1980s when a few of the consoles had hideously ugly telephone-style controllers, the trend from the mid 1980s to date shows a gradual increase in the number of buttons; even the ‘family friendly’ Wii controller has eight of the damn things on it.

When will the madness end?

Source data

                    

According to the results, a fairly cliched band name would be “Billy, The Orchestra, And His Band”, who would probably release an album called “The OST of Me and My Love In“. Almost certainly, their first single from the album would be called “The Love of Me in You“.

Tracking word use in song titles by decade (from 1950s to 2000s), it’s fairly depressing to note that both Love and Heart experienced their worst decade in the 2000s. English language lovers will be pleased to hear that the same recent decade saw record highs for Wanna and Ya.

                    

I’ve created a fairly poor automatic thingy (that’s the technical term) that tries to convert any online photo to a ‘pop art’ style image. Enter a URL for a JPEG photo into the box below, and see for yourself. Yes, I know, it’s fairly naff. But I don’t care!

                    

As it turns out, the Hoff and Johnson excitement seems to peak at around 6pm UTC, with Tom Selleck managing to hold out for another hour before climaxing at 7pm.

Source Data (total tweet numbers, per hour, from 1-4 June 2010 inclusive)

                    

As expected, Hong Kong is the runaway winner, with Donkey Kong and King Kong in equal second. I was initially afraid of what I might find when I first started searching for the lesser known entries (‘Black Kong’, ‘Large Kong’), but luckily most of these are either dog toys or Donkey Kong characters. Phew.

Source Data (from the Google Keyword Tool)