More great data visualisation stuff. Imagine taking a map of the world, and having each country as a balloon. Then, inflate or deflate the balloon until the relative areas of the countries represent some statistic about them. You get a wonderful graphical representation of that data set which is much easier to understand than a long column of figures.

Here’s the base site – some researchers at the University of Sheffield. Some pictures that I found particularly interesting were:

• Compare Net emigration with Net immigration to see where people are moving from to.
• Aircraft departures shows who is fuelling the greenhouse effect.
• Container ports is interesting just because it’s surprising.
• Compare Alcohol and Cigarettes Exports to Imports to see who makes money from slowly killing other people.
• Computers exports shows you where your PC probably came from.

They are issuing new pictures regularly. There is some source code available for a related program implementing the same algorithm; however, there’s no licence to modify. :-|