323: Stats to the max with Hans

Dr Hans Rosling, medical doctor, statistician ans sword swallower

Let's look at something amazing : watch this video before reading the rest of the blog – in fact, just watch the video; I haven't decided what I am about to write, but I can guarantee it can't possibly be as interesting, exciting or optimistic as this video:

Hans Rosling is someone I know nothing about, so here is a link to his wikipedia page (edit it with whatever made up facts you feel are appropriate), and here is a link to his website Gapminder Univeiling the beauty of statistics for a fact based world : lastly here is his twitter where you can read such world changing nuggets as Lunch with EU com.for dev. A. Piebalgs Thursday. Now I've finished being flippant about his tweets I'm going to have a proper look at Gapminder ; whatever it is it looks fascinating.

I'm educated formally in the in the Arts/Humanities, and that makes me by definition a lazy, twattish dreamer with a distorted view of reality. It is exactly for that reason that books like The Ancestor's Tale Dawkins, Why Does E=MC2 Cox/Forshaw, What's Left Cohen, Cosmos Sagan, etcetera etc &c are among my favourites ; they help to keep me grounded reminding me of the way the world really works free from conspiracy, biased interpretation, assumption and personal preference. That is science : the systematic accumulation of facts using experimental data and that to strip away the nonsense from the actual ; scientific method. In other words it's the important stuff, whereas arts and humanities are trivial (however all the above are lots of fun fun fun).

Gapminder for a fact-based view of the world – what more could anyone ask for (oh yeah, ghosts and gods and celebrities and conspiracies)? Rosling's raison d'être is to present statistics using cutting edge visual tools and provide unique insights into the works of the world. He turns quintuplillions and squillions of tedious factual numbers into beautiful dancing displays and clearly exposes the meaning behind them.

My internet is going funny at the moment so I can't get onto gapminder.org and explore it properly – is omeone leeching my internet or is the housemate rinsing the downloads – but later I'll get my geek on to the max with stat' stats and all that. I recommend you do the same ; then maybe we'll have something to talk about.

OK, got gapminder desktop now and it's a little package of graphs - incredible living graphs showing the last 200 years of history.  I'm just going to publish this post and go back to playing with my toy.