Welcome to the home of Noah Brier. I'm the co-founder of Variance and general internet tinkerer. Most of my writing these days is happening over at Why is this interesting?, a daily email full of interesting stuff. This site has been around since 2004. Feel free to get in touch. Good places to get started are my Framework of the Day posts or my favorite books and podcasts. Get in touch.

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The Gapminder World

If everyone else has seen this, sorry, but The Gapminder World is an amazing visualization of international statistics. The program lets you program the x and y axes (as well as color and size) to correlate to different statistics (like per capita income, birth rate, life expectancy or percentage of women in the work force). What you get is an amazing look at how the world has changed and a really cool way to surface historical insights. Apparently Google bought it last year and you can watch Hans Rosling, the director, talk about it at TED.

January 26, 2008