Unlike Columbus Day, I actually like Thanksgiving. Celebrating the symbolic meeting between Pilgrims and Indians, when despite their differences, they came together at the same table and shared their cultures is a great lesson for everyone. Plus, we all have a lot to be thankful for, and what better way to celebrate than to eat a giant meal, lounge around lazily, and gamble on football?

But since everyone has the whole weekend off anyways, we should consider naming Friday as an official holiday as well. Maybe something a little more historically all-encompassing? I’m thinking of a name along the lines of Remember How We Eventually Killed All Those Indians? Day. You know, something to really bring the lesson full circle.

Anyways, here are the Nine Most Annoying Conversations You’ll be Having on Thanksgiving. Enjoy.

From Drudge:

“Flu Trends” uses search terms that people put into the web giant to figure out where influenza is heating up, and will notify the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in real time!

GOOGLE, continuing to work closely with government, claims it would keep individual user data confidential: “GOOGLE FLU TRENDS can never be used to identify individual users because we rely on anonymized, aggregated counts of how often certain search queries occur each week.”

Drudge paints a 1984-esque picture of the whole project. Not surprisingly, the first news article the pops up on Google is much more flattering:

Google has applied its massive data-collecting power for the first time to prediction of the spread of disease, with the launch of a site that claims to be able to raise the alarm over flu outbreaks up to two weeks in advance of existing public services.

Google Flu Trends takes the general search tracking technology pioneered by Google Trends and applies it specifically to influenza. The firm’s engineers claim to have devised a way of analysing millions of individual searches related to the disease that in tests proved to correlate closely with the actual incidence of illness. That gives them the potential ability to predict rises in flu cases – information that could be used by health professionals to warn the public or plan their responses.

The ability to speed up the response of health services could prove invaluable in the event of a vicious outbreak, or the emergence of a virulent strain.

The results of Google’s comparisons with official health statistics will be published in the science journal Nature.

Google hopes to extend the service to other countries, and may in time include other illnesses.

So is this “just the beginning,” as Eric Schmit, CEO of Google proclaims? Or the beginning of the end?

Either way, don’t ask Google Suggests.

from The Onion:

The stock market may be down the day after the election, but I have never seen more smiling people on the subway in my life. Usually my morning ride is filled with looks of murderous rage or hostile indifference. Most of the miserables heading to work at 9 am look like they will either snap into a rampage or breakdown crying if they so much as have to move over to share their seat. I’m not even getting any scowls when I hit people with my backpack or spill coffee on them anymore. Weird.