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Colors, letters, numbers: only when skillfully placed they create a beautiful picture, clear text, and coherent calculations. There is great art in mixing everything up and creating clear graphics. I recently took a course where I learned how to quickly create histograms, columns or pie charts from simple numbers using a program from the Berlin company Datawrapper – in addition to Blick, this ingenious program is used by Der Spiegel and the New York Times. Service.

“To understand what is really happening in our world, the next step is to place the numbers in the appropriate historical and international context,” writes renowned Czech-Canadian naturalist Vaclav Smil (80) in his book, published in German. book. In it, he tells more than 70 short stories about people, countries and the environment, each breaking down hard numbers on one aspect and making them understandable.

“How many people did it take to build the great pyramids?”; “How far can China go?”; “Which is worse for the environment – ​​your car or your mobile phone?” This is the title of three very different chapters in which Professor Emeritus of Environmental Sciences at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada, introduces us to a fascinating question. travel through time and space takes with it and compares all measurable quantities, such as weight, time or distance, with each other.

Some questions are more difficult to quantify, such as the question “What makes people happy?” And yet, since 2012, there has been an annual “World Happiness Report”, which the media reports “with a hint of admiration for the eternally happy Scandinavians” (Smil). Switzerland is always in the top ten. But Smil points out the lack of a comparable measure because “some of the supposedly happiest countries have relatively high suicide rates.”

And he wonders why Mexico is ahead of France and Argentina is ahead of Japan. Smil recognizes a pattern: “The second country mentioned is wealthier,” while the first mentioned is “former Spanish colonies and therefore predominantly Catholic countries.” His conclusion: If you don’t make the top 10, you should convert to Catholicism and learn Spanish.

Smil is also concerned about the explosion of data: there were 11,000 books around 1,500, 4.5 million videos were watched on YouTube in the US alone in 2018, 18 million weather data were queried and three quadrillion bytes were retrieved from the Internet – per minute. ! “Once we get to the point where every person on earth is generating more than 50 trillion bytes of information per year,” says Smil, “is there still any real chance of using that data in a meaningful way?”

Source: Blick