Fantastic developments!
Back in November, I watched a bunch of videos from TED, and I’ve been raving to my friends about the first one ever since. It’s by Hans Rosling, who displayed a really neat way to represent statistics and other large sets of data in a simple, intuitive, and basically useful way. Well, it turns out I wasn’t the only one who was impressed: his software, GapMinder, was acquired by Google earlier this week! It would be really cool if we could all use this to look at more pieces of data more easily. You can already play around with a demo. Sweet!
I’ve already learned stuff from it: I had not heard of Comoros or Seychelles before playing with it today. They’re both countries north of Madagascar, apparently. Also, GDP and rate of economic growth don’t appear to be correlated, which surprised me. People in Luxembourg make a lot of money.
Oh, and by the way: it turns out there’s a Firefox plugin to support GPG in GMail. I might start using GMail full-time if this turns out to be easy to use.