9/11 and Search Trends

I don't think anyone will ever come to terms with 9/11. On that day, my wife was home with our first child who was only 2 months old. I couldn't stay at work. I had to get home to see them. The normal road I took home was blocked, though, since it went directly past NSA headquarters. It seemed to take an eternity just to get home.

The next day, it was surreal to not see or hear a single airplane. We live about 30 miles from BWI airport and usually hear aircraft and see many contrails. The absence of air traffic was striking. When I did hear the loud roar of a jet engine, I raced outside to see what caused the noise. F-16 fighter jets were patrolling the skies. I waved to a pilot as he banked into a turn.

Looking at today's top Google searches (by fetching the hourly feed and searching for any keywords with "11" in them), many people are remembering 9/11:

$ curl -s http://www.google.com/trends/hottrends/atom/hourly \
|grep hottrends\?q= |awk -F q= '{print $2}' \
|awk -F \& '{print $1}' |grep 11 |sed 's/\+/ /g'
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Somber day. Strange to recollect. Sigh.

Tags: 9 11, september 11 2001, remembering 9/11, september 11th