“little facts”

Which is quite amazing, I must say. Always thought the English colony would have English at the top, by far.

Check the US Census press release where this was reported for definitions and more context.

Considering several friends have bantered—semi-seriously—about starting an online Mexican porn ring, alluding of shocking wind-fall profits, and considering that last year “about 13% of website visits in America were pornographic in nature.. while search engines account for about 7% of site visits,” (Economist, Devices and Desires), it is quite a shock to find in the same article 2002 estimates of the (admittedly hard to track) online porn industry measuring it at only a billion dollars. Shockingly little, I’d dispassionately say.

Here 2 examples—a graph and a paragraph—from a typical article (about the paper industry’s dire prospects, of all things) in this week’s edition of The Economist.

Starting with the graph: it’s a 16-year window to worldwide newsprint production that drives home the article’s main point with eloquence: North America’s newsprint production (a fifth, you will notice, of the world’s; used to be a fourth) is slowly but decisively dwindling; production in the rest of the world, on the other hand, is increasing, albeit not in a hurry.

It’s full of conventions too, but they’re so well thought that you never need to be consciously aware of them as a reader: Take the upper-left red patch, a gentle way to guide your eyes to the graph’s title and instructions. The source always goes at the bottom, smaller-typed, and the y-axis is always labeled at the right, which I find more natural than the common left convention (it makes you look at the graph first, notice its pattern). The x-axis is usually the time axis, its gridlines usually obviated for clarity’s sake, and its labels, usually years, presented in a simple format that marks millennia only when needed. And graphs are always in this blue scheme—a convention to avoid color misinformation that still allows for meaningful distinctions between color shades: darker blue for the main variable under discussion, the foreground; lighter, fading blue(s) for the background variable(s).

As for the paragraph, it’s brimming with fascinating facts about the world. Did you know who the world’ biggest pulp-an-paper company was and that it was located in Tennessee (WP)—of all places? Did you know it also happened to be the largest private landowner in America? (A paper company! The largest private landowner in America!) Did you know it recently sold, because of restructuring, 90% of its forestland, 5.7m acres—an area larger than Massachusetts? Did you know it sold them for $6.6 billions? (Surprisingly cheap, considering it’s an area big enough for many a country.) Did you know most buyers were financial investors but 5% were conservation groups? (A wonderful example of how trade allocates resources, peacefully and quietly, to those who care about them.) Now you know.

My winners, so far this year, of the Keep the Web Weird prize.

• Susan Stepney’s Homepage. Swim around her factoids or her myriad book reviews—sci-fi and non-fiction being the two categories. And boy does she read good nonfiction. Check her rated non-fiction index for a good glimpse of it and notice how her book reviews tend to grow organically into full-fledged bibliographies [example].

• Luis Pabon’s Entropía blog (in Spanish). If you can only read one thing from him, let it be El hombre que hablaba al reves (The man who spoke the wrong way round)—it’s positively brilliant. Positively.

  There’s also a letter to his future self; oblique strategies; an elegant fable: El pez que se bebió el océano (The fish who drank the ocean); obscure calendar erudition: La abreviatura de los miércoles (Wednesday’s abbreviation); original music; a scanning of a (terrifying) dictation from a Spain under Franco: Libertad Dictada (Dictated Freedom); a reflection sparked by GTD^WP: Conocerse a sí mismo (Knowing Oneself); an absolutely amateur, yet interesting, physics experiment: Acústica de fluidos; and a beautiful, infinite poem. Even his profile is writing of the highest order.

  He has infodesign talent to spare, as he showed with his proposal in my calendar challenge, and he can sometimes use it for most amusing purposes. Like these two graphs here, perfectly illustrating why sometimes to go forward it’s better to get some distance first:

  
  

  Most intriguing is when he combines this graphic inclination with his (prodigious) verbosity to create amazing, longwinded plays with the ridiculous (think of that famous bathroom-tissue-distribution-units passage from Snow Crash^WP). There’s for instance the Messiah Project, his compendium of priorization strategies, and his “simple graphical and mathematical model for the analysis and assessment of situations according to a person’s capacity, responsibility, and will.”

  “Luis… estás como un cencerro!!!” says a legendary comment. Correctly.

Sergio (MdC), one of my best friends, went last sixmonth to Ciudad Juarez^WP for a paid internship he got through his school. He went there with a schoolmate that went for the same reason. This roommate, I learned a couple of days ago, turns out to have Gael Garcia^WP as a cousin. Gael Garcia dated (dates?) Natalie Portman^WP So You → Me → Sergio → Roommate → Gael Garcia → Natalie Portman makes for five degrees of separation. Which is a deep, marvelous fact about the world that you should ponder at length.

(Five degrees is only an upper bound^WP. You, dear reader, could be even closer to Natalie—if so, please detail in the comments. You could even be Natalie herself—if so, my cell number’s on the left. Thanks!)

Making posters has been a hobby of mine since I can remember. At high school I tried to start a series of posters on moral values but only finished one on gayness and another on licentiousness. At college, I made one on Esperanto and several for the cinema club I ran with some friends.

This one, my latest, is about the Jicama fruit^WP and it plays on a joke by Friends’s Chandler: “Cheese. It’s milk that you chew.” The funny thing is that for Jicamas it’s almost true, from the fruit’s pedia:

An impressive graph, both in execution and content, to be taken with one big grain of salt (read article for important considerations on the methodology and the difficulty of defining wealth):

Vaya que es sorprendente. Curiosamente, me entere de esto en The Economist, no se que tanta difusion se le haya dado en periodicos nacionales pero mi familia no estaba enterada.

El IFE (“the independent electoral authority”) publica aquella encuesta como la Evaluación de la gestión institucional a la luz del Proceso Federal Electoral 2005-2006 (Parametría).

” Hay varias otras gemas en esta encuesta a 2,000 personas del 8 al 12 de Septiembre del 2006, como el que 38.6% de los encuestados afirme que no participaria en futuras elecciones (aunque 76.6% esta muy o algo de acuerdo en que “La democracia puede tener problemas, pero es el mejor sistema de gobierno”) o el que la mitad (!) de los encuestados afirmo haber votado por Felipe Calderon, que los partidos politicos son considerados tanto la institucion politica mas corrupta del pais como la menos importante para el desarrollo del pais, que la principal razon (15.9%) por la que se cree que hubo fraude es la tardanza de los resultados, que 47.1% esta muy o algo de acuerdo con la frase “No me importa un gobierno NO democrático en el poder si logra mejorar mi nivel de vida”, que 43.6% cree que es mejor vivir en una “sociedad que respete derechos/libertades aunque haya desorden”, que un 40.8% esta muy en desacuerdo con las acciones de resistencia civil que promueve AMLO mientras que solo un 13% esta muy de acuerdo con ellas…

I’m sure I’ve seen the stats before, several times, but still I was disconcerted when I read this paragraph:

Four billion quarters seemed a wild guess, but four billion people? In 1981? Surely there was something wrong with the reference. But there wasn’t. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, that was the approximate number of people only 25 years ago.

More alarming still, my dad was born in 1957. World population was around 3 billion then. We’re 6.5 billion now and counting. That is, my parents’ lifetime has seen the world population double—3.5 billion new souls.

I had surely seen a similar graph several times before but somehow it never got through my thick skull. I was overjoyed to realize just to what extent the world had changed in less than 50 years. Frankly, I believe I’ve found the proof I’d been looking for that the world is getting better. Isn’t it unambiguously a good thing that 3.5 billion people have been able to be born? Yes, many will live in what are to us abysmal conditions. But there is no worst quality of life than not being able to live in the first place. Death is always an option, life is not. Most of this growth comes from the poorest classes of the poorest countries but that’s also heartening in a way. There was never before reason to counteract the “ignorance” that made them try to have as many children as they physically could—it wasn’t ignorance at the time, it was bet-splitting. Most of them died anyway.

Never have so many children had the luxury of extreme poverty, to put it bluntly.

The other number shock today was from a talk by Google’s Marissa Mayer, platonic love and Google’s VP of search products and user experience:

Again, I’ve played with such numbers before. It’s just they had never hit me so hard.