We all know how hard it is to communicate dry statistics to somebody and I guess its not me alone who has a hard time to grasp relations between big numbers (finance crisis anyone?) – but this nice little widget is just fantastic. It amazes me every time how much creativity people have and create wonderful, entertaining and in this case even educating things. Based on multiple officially available statistics the guys from poodwaddle.com created a world clock which shows the growth and decline rates of almost everything. Some of them are more accurate than others, while almost all of them display interpolated values, of course. Its still a big joy to watch these things and some numbers really get you thinking…
Month: April 2009
Useful Gotcha #27
If you get this error ssl_error_rx_record_too_long when browsing an SSL-secured virtual host and wonder what the heck is going on (hey, it worked the day before), ensure that you’ve noticed that your admins have changed the IP address of the machine and that you have to adapt the IP-based VHost configuration accordingly… not that this SSL error wouldn’t have said that in first place!
Election day
Germany’s next election day lies still quite a bit in the future (sometime in September), but the discussion about “Politikverdrossenheit” (disenchanted with politics) has already started in the media. Today I was proven right (German, automated translation) that my “Politikverdrossenheit” is actually not based on a lack of interest on these topics or a general misunderstanding, but more on a disillusionment of what is going on “up there” and what a single individuum can actually do in this country. Of course there is always something what can be done, after all I wouldn’t be active in the David vs Goliath challenge the Working Group against Data Retention faces, but still, big moves or radical political changes (for good, not for bad) just don’t seem to be possible here.
While I don’t envy the US americans for their past eight years of Bush and all the other problems they have, I’m certainly envious of them about their current president Obama. I wonder if somebody like Obama would even get as high in the political triangle in one of the countries of the “old world” – I’m sure that there are a lot of good, political driven people here as well which could do a similar good job, but I doubt they’d ever get the chance to “run for chancellor”…