And a good animation must bump that ratio out at least another order of magnitude, right? Take a look at this chart produced by Gapminder:
Gapminder is a non-profit venture for development and provision of free software that visualise human development. This is done in collaboration with universities, UN organisations, public agencies and non-governmental organisations. Gapminder is a Foundation registered at Stockholm county administration board (Länstyrelsen) (reg. nr. 802424-7721). It was founded by Ola Rosling, Anna Rosling Rönnlund and Hans Rosling on 25 February 2005, in Stockholm. Gapminder Foundation will advance software development that have been done earlier by the non-profit company Gapminder Ltd. Funding has been and is mainly by grants from Sida for the Trendalyzer project. Being a producer of global public goods Gapminder benefit from free and creative inputs from pilot-testers and other end-users in many institutions and organisations.
(from their About page).
This is something Andrew Sullivan blogged about shortly before leaving for his wedding, and I didn’t see anyone else pick up on it. Sullivan was highlighting the most striking part of the graph: the impact of HIV/AIDS on Africa, a dramatic boomarang of regression. What I found fascinating about it was how the graph also shows the tragedies of individual nations.
After clicking “Play” a couple of times to let the visuals sink in, slow the animation down to its lowest level and you’ll see the impact of China’s Great Leap Forward, Cambodia’s , Rwanda’s civil war and genocide, and UN sanctions against Iraq. You can see the disintegration of the Soviet Union play itself out, and see the Chinese start to get their economic act together.
It’s interesting how you start off in 1960 with a more-or-less continuous curve of life expectancies and infant mortality; it isn’t until the mid 1990’s that you get this breakup of that curve into five clusters. It’s a fascinating tool…
Posted by protected static as geek, politics at 6:45 AM UTC
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Just returned from a weekend on the coast with some friends. “Coast” is probably misleading for those for whom the word conjures up images of surf and sand. Rather, this was a far more typical Puget Sound inlet beach: our waves were provided by boat wakes and harmonic resonance; our sand was still in the extra-coarse stage, being composed largely of pea gravel-sized agate pebbles and oyster shells and the fragments thereof). Still, the house was quite nice, and the company was great.
There was much splashing on the beach, and squirt gun firefights to be had. There were tons of interesting critters on the beach – the inlet was really a large tidepool, with seastars and mollusks galore. Oh yeah, there was one *very* cranky heron, a very friendly elderly golden retriever named Diogi (Dee-oh-gee – D.O.G. Get it? Never mind.), and otters of some kind or other (we found their tracks in the mud).
On Sunday, as we were finishing tidying up to leave, a garter snake was foolish enough to try and sun itself just below our patio. I tried to catch him to show him to the kids (just thinking of the kids, I was – really), but I lost him when I tried to get a better grip on him. Still, my idiocy courage enthusiasm inspired our friends’ son to go for it. Sadly, I was in the shower when he finally caught the snake. Quite proud of himself, he was… And the damn-fool snake kept coming back to the same spot! Subsequent attempts at catching the snake were, however, less successful.
The final critter of the weekend was the lizard of the title… You know how there are things you *never* imagined saying as a parent? Yeah, “Don’t lick the lizard!” definitely goes into that category… At least the response we got back was “We aren’t licking him. We’re sniffing him.”
Sniffing. Allrighty then.
Posted by protected static as random at 10:00 AM UTC
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Firing up Google earlier this morning, I noticed a headline about a ’semi-submarine’ carrying 5 tons of coke being seized by US Customs somewhere in the Eastern Pacific. The article above linked to another one about a similar seizure carried out last year, and it was in that article that something caught my eye – the ethnicity of the 4-man crew: “two Colombians, one Guatemalan, and one Sri Lankan.”
Sri Lankan? Yup. It actually makes some sense: the Tamil Tigers have a moderately effective navy (for an irregular force), and have made fairly extensive use of suicide boat attacks in their war for Tamil autonomy. I wonder if they’re selling their naval expertise to the drug cartels?
There was no word on the ethnicity of the most recently-seized crew. I may have to google it and see if I can find anything… Nope, still no news on the nationalities of the crew.
Posted by protected static as politics at 10:27 AM UTC
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Well, I’m mostly recovered from last week… The Boy and I set off by ourselves to brave the backwaters of coastal Rhode Island (No cell coverage! A fifteen minute drive to get to the nearest WiFi hotspot!). My parents rented a house near the beach, and my sister flew out from Utah with her daughter (who is almost exactly one year younger than The Boy). Family friction was kept to a minimum, given that my folks only spent a couple of nights there – my sister and I had the house to ourselves most of the week. We bought a week-long pass to park at the town beach, and were there almost every day.
All-in-all, it was mostly enjoyable… My sister is under a lot of stress, and it was showing (her husband is on his 6th deployment – I don’t remember if all 6 have been to Iraq, but at least 5 have). It’s distressing to me how much toxic crap she’s swallowed about the war (and its opponents), but not surprising. All I know is that she’s done. Done with the war, done with the Air Force, done. We’ll see…
Oh, and not too surprisingly, The Boy conked out on The Neverending Story. He’s made it through over 75% of the way on his own, and is mired in the bleakest part of the story – and it gets pretty bleak. The hero makes all kinds of bad decisions, and each one pushes him into a narrowing spiral of worse choices. It’s been ages since I read the book, and I remember that Things Come Out Okay in the end, but I don’t think The Boy has the emotional resources to get through it on his own. We’ll probably return to it as bedtime reading to get him through the darkest parts…
The unfortunate result of having him bail on The Neverending Story was that we were quite bookless for part of the trip. Fortunately, we found a neat little bookstore nearby and picked up The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan (thanks, Kristina!). Even with our spending a fair amount of time on the beach, he plowed through that one in a couple of days (yikes!). A good find, to be sure…
And yeah – it’s good to be back. I’m personally a little anxious about school starting in a couple of weeks, but hey… *shrug* what’cha’ gonna do?
Posted by protected static as random at 9:47 AM UTC
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We’ve been able to convince The Boy to try The Neverending Story instead of rereading the corpus of Tolkien. If you only know Ende’s story from the 1984 movie, it’s quite different; the movie, while pretty faithful to the novel, is really only the first half of the story. The second half is a lot… darker. It’ll be interesting to see how The Boy handles it.
And as a bonus, he’s plowing on through it on his own…
Posted by protected static as random at 7:18 AM UTC
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So after 18+ months, we’ve finally finished The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Not too bad for something achieved largely in 15 – 20 minute chunks, with the occasional time out for less-intense stories. Also, The Return of the King took a lot longer than it otherwise might have – for the last few months, The Boy has been wanting to read on his own for bedtime, so he’d read his own stuff for a week or so and then come back for a couple of nights of being read to, then another week on his own, and so on…
So now that we’ve finished, what does he want to do? Why, he wants to start over again. With The Hobbit.
Oy.
At least this time it should go a lot faster… He’s reading The Hobbit on his own.
Posted by protected static as random at 2:55 PM UTC
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