#132 - Data & Maps — The Vagabond Blog

Data are great. I mean I really love large amounts of information about things. No. I am not a fan of the data gathering that companies or governments do because they abuse it. But I believe that large amounts of data, properly gathered, anonymized, could be key to solving many problems. Plus it is cool to look at when properly presented.

Apropos of nothing in particular and before you look at the maps … I’m listening to audible book called Humble Pi (Pi as in the ratio between the circumference of a circle to its diameter). Really excellent book about how the world makes mistakes using numbers in mathematics in general. And he has an entire chapter devoted to Excel. Which I find quite amusing because Excel is one of my favorite bits of software. However, as he points out so very correctly, Excel is not a database program. And using it as such has led to a large variety of errors that have crept into huge amounts of data all over the world. And he is quite right. Excel is not a database program. And, I have, generally when I need to, used a database program for applications that are quite database specific. For example, keeping track of a bunch of different companies that have properties and different boards of directors, etc. is not something that suitable for putting into a Excel spreadsheet. Anything that uses addresses and telephone numbers, or rich data (pictures, etc.) is probably not the best thing to use an Excel spreadsheet, because some of those fields can, if not properly formatted, be changed automatically by Excel into completely different values. Anybody here ever put telephone number into a cell in Excel and see a change into something rather strange? Anyway, that was a digression. But I does love my data. 😊

Not a long post this … I just found some maps where data has been converted into really excellent graphical format and I thought I’d share them with you.