Recently in The Numbers Category

Population and GDP are two of the most interesting and important numbers to look at. One's importance as a nation is generally related to how much money you make (GDP) or how many people you have (population). (Of course Israel and Iraq doing follow this logic.)

As an American, it is interesting to consider the populations of those other 14 countries and how out of balance GDP and population are.

(Note: These graphs are from a really excellent piece of visualization software called Tableau.)

I first saw this image on Gavin's blog and it is just the kind of thing I wanted to put in The Numbers. A visualization of the Federal budget.

When people talk about "the budget", the numbers are so large they lose perspective. Is $150M a day on Iraq a lot of money? What about $200B on Iraq in total? Well $200B is half the total yearly Defense budget and over 1/4 the total discretionary budget. So yes, it is a lot. As is the increasing amount we are spending to pay the interest on our $8 TRILLION dollar federal debt.

Spend 5 minutes with this poster and see if you like the things we are spending "your tax dollars" on.

The poster is from Deviant Art and it was made by mibl

I have been a making a number of changes to the site this past month. One of the new features that I am most excited about personally is "the numbers."

In conversations it is easy to lose perspective. Is problemA or problemB more important? One way to answer that is to look at the numbers. ProblemA affects a billion people while problemB affects 1,000 very vocal people. In this light, problemA is the bigger issue.

My goal with the numbers is to create a little note-pad of statistics and facts on areas of interest. Im thinking something like a collection of mini-white papers.

I hope to get my first few posts out this week and we will see how it goes.