[thewebcount]

I know what you mean! One of the things I loved about the TV show “Connections” was how it followed one thread to get you from some seemingly random starting point to whatever the final thing was. It would be interesting to see some of these threads plotted together.

The other thing that makes this tricky is that any given event or phenomenon may not happen everywhere all at once. Just think of the popularity of a pop song, for example. It might have started in New York, and spread westward as more radio stations started playing it. Then it kind of died out in New York just around the time it was picking up steam in LA, or whatever. When you read about these things they often make it sound like one day someone played the song on the radio and then it was on every radio in the country simultaneously for the next 10 weeks before falling off the charts. But of course, that’s not how it actually happens. So it can definitely be hard to contextualize some of this stuff. And getting an accurate picture can be hard because we may not have all the details.