GapMinder: World Stats

GapMinder is an online time-waster (that might sometimes be considered a useful tool) that helps visualize many different statistics from different countries into a single neat graph. In this photo, I'm comparing the Sulfur emissions per person (y axis) to the % of self-employment (x axis) to CO2 emissions (size of bubble) in different countries. It's cool to mess around with, especially the effect of time on the numbers (you can scroll through the years to compare).

2010 World Cup is lowest scoring competition ever

"2010 is indisputably the lowest scoring World Cup in history."

 From: http://footballpolemics.wordpress.com/ via: http://www.marginalrevolution.com/

Name statistics

NICHOLAS is the #64 most common male first name

0.275% of males in the US are named NICHOLAS.

Around 336875 US males are named NICHOLAS!

CHRIS is the #96 most common male first name

0.197% of males in the US are named CHRIS.

Around 241325 US males are named CHRIS!

source: namestatistics.com

Olympic medals per capita

Everyone counts Olympic medals by country, but I think it should be done per capita (that is, we should take into account the population of the country, by dividing the number of medals won by the total population). Here's the most-medaled 20 countries expressed on the basis of medals per million people.
By this measure, Canada did better than China, the United States, or the Russian Federation (the top three countries by number of medals)....but Jamaica comes out far and away the best.

An even better measure might be medal winners per capita: that is, we shouldn't count multiple medal winners more than once. However, that would be a pain to calculate. It is also not clear how to deal appropriately with team sports, where you get a lot of medalists but only one medal counted.

Medal count came from here. Populations came from here.

Update: It has been pointed out to me that the Bahamas actually has a higher per capita medal count than Jamaica, which I missed because they actually had very few medals. They got 2 medals, but got them from a population of just 331,000, for a medal per million score of 6.04.

A commentator pointed out this nice website that graphs medals per million citizens, among other relations.