Often enough, I’ll see things like “U.S. Apologized for” in news articles. And every once in awhile, I’ll see a different country mentioned. Obviously, this sort of thing is a metonym, but the curiosity got the better of me. How many other countries apologize for things?

So, I set out to anger Google and search through an entire list of countries that apologized for things. Many Google captcha laters, I came up with a list of results for “___ apologized/es for.”  When you plot this list against the GDP, it starts looking interesting.

Now, before you can conclude that China and Japan are the honey badgers of apologies, this little dataset is not scientific.  Or, it is insofar that you must understand its limitations.  Google estimates and limits its results, countries vary in web presence, and not everyone writes in English in their internet spheres.

Instead of a literal number of apologies, this charticle shows English language presence on the internet and, to some extent, maturity of their public diplomacy efforts.

Data: Sample was taken in December of 2011.  GDP is in millions. Countries making a ton of money are boldfaced.

Was reading about Datawrapper when I ran into this snippet:

“It is based on a study by Rippla that found half of news articles shared on Twitter are BBC News stories…”

Quite frankly, that ratio doesn’t sound right. But science aside, my immediate response came in a Borat voice.

But is it not a problem that the twitter have a smaller character limit than website?
The government scientist Dr. Yamuka has proved it is size of squirrel.

Though I’m not a child and not apparently autistic, I recently took an autism researcher’s test on the empathizing / systemizing quotient. Was slightly surprised by the results.

I was under the impression that I’d be more balanced. This might explain some quirks, anyhow.

Some quirks I exhibit (from the ’06 review):

This system quotient has to be weighed in with how many dysfunctional symptoms I exhibit in real life. I’ll only acknowledge two here – my friendships suffer as they drain me and frustrate friends, and – my work suffers as I’m not a finisher.  Mere portion of one of my projects has not been updated for a year – yet is the biggest traffic driver for me.  However, the project has gone nowhere now that I am confident I mastered its inner workings.

Read for yourself:

• Article: The systemizing quotient: an investigation of adults with Asperger syndrome or high-functioning autism, and normal sex differences (2003)
• Review article: “The hyper-systemizing, assortative mating theory of autism” (2006)
• Online test: http://eqsq.com/

This chart shows world’s fattest, biggest meat eaters. Or does it? Sadly, USA is fighting for #5 place.

In more precise words, it’s the obesity (BMI) index compared against the worldwide meat per-capita consumption ratio as averaged from 2002-2007.  Since the available data is sporadic, only these select countries are shown. Interesting to note that the Slovak Republic is ahead of Czech Republic.  Is this an indicator of a foodway-cultural divide – or – difference in available data?

Now, don’t read too much into it.

Shown here are ratios, meaning that even normal obesity/meat consumption ranges look extreme. Here are the extremes, explained:

France has a fairly low obesity index but a fairly high meat consumption rate.

Turkey has the lowest recorded meat per capita consumption rate. However, its obesity rates are “normal,” producing a higher calculated ratio between the two.

Credits:

• http://www.oecd.org/document/16/0,2340,en_2649_34631_2085200_1_1_1_1,00.html
• http://faostat.fao.org/site/291/default.aspx
• http://chartsbin.com/view/bhy
• http://www.pdviz.com/current-worldwide-annual-meat-consumption-per
  

* Inspired by pdviz and my growing kangaroo pouch as I chow down my late lunch.

Not sure what triggered the “Be Naughty on Facebook” ad, but, the girl in the video was drinking a red concoction of some kind.

Wine from water perhaps?

A coworker of mine was testing integration with a search engine – and while poking around with it, I discovered this little gem:

It’s a lesson in using the ellipsis, I think.