Wonk Heaven

My inner geek (err, OK, OK, I guess that's more or less indistinguishable from "me") had a borderline spiritual moment upon discovering NationMaster, which lets you compare and graph regions or customized nation sets along a positively dizzying number of different dimensions, from television sets per capita to biodiversity. It'll even generate a color coded map showing relative rankings by region along the selected dimension. All it needs now is a function to plot graphs showing correlation along multiple dimensions simulataneously. Actually, no, maybe they don't need that. I'm not sure I'd ever get anything done… (The usual big ups to Jim Henley for the link.)

Comments

[Max]

The web master on that site will have to frequently update those statistics, because, according to Ludwig, people act, people change, fortunes come, fortunes go, stats change -- continuously.

http://www.mises.org

[dragoon]

Nice ad, Max.

[D Anghelone]

"...multiple dimensions simulataneously"

Concurrent simulation of manifold dimensions. Must be your lead-in to the Wilson post.

[Rex Stetson]

That's a shame that you can't look for correlations- It's hard to believe someone would go through all the trouble of programming what is basically nothing more than a series of lists with simple graphics. There is so much potential with this!
With a program that city planners often use called GIS you can geographically arrange data such as power usage, population density, voting preferences, etc. It allows you to (in theory) plot a city view by say, racial makeup, income level, and crime occurence, and create policing strategies from your conclusions.

[Jason Ligon]

Pretty cool, even without correlations. If you could download in CSV or something, you could use your own software, I suppose.

[Madog]

How did UAE beat us and get the #1 Ecological foot print??? Are they just burning the oil as it comes out of the ground over there?