Fun with Numbers

Well, it has been something of a slow news cycle. Apparently no one is interested in making much international or political news in the dead of winter (or Australian summer). Strikes in Lebanon and Guinea, State of the Union address by President Bush, it's all pretty much more of the same.

But the CIA has just put out their 2007 World Factbook. Understandably, their information is somewhat flawed and often at odds with other information and intelligence agencies (no I will not get into any political discussions here). With the Factbook this is largely due to them relying on local censuses and official statistics to fill out their information on every independent state and dependency. But their information is still a very useful rough guide, and seems to immediately and directly flow into Wikipedia. And of course once wikified, information is gospel truth.

So here is one of my latest graphics, showing the population and religion of every African country. This was just something I was thinking about, and slapped together. For the record, the population total for that continent is somewhere around 909,000,000 to put things in pespective.

Obviously it is a little difficult to read this graphic...it looks much better as a spreadsheet than as a cut-and-pasted picture, for that I apologize. The countries are in alpabetical order. This is a work in progress - welcome to the internet, ladies and gentlemen.

Anyway, one reason why I say that this is a work in progress is because this graph has been a little lesson for myself in using OpenOffice, a suite of open-source programs offered by Sun Microsystems. OpenOffice operates more or less like Microsoft Office, but the coding is open source and it is offered to all for free. I recommend everyone give it a try.