On Beeb 2 at the moment. Being recorded for later but it looks interesting.

If you haven’t seen Prof Hans Rosling doing and explaining statistics, he’s really worth a watch. His 3D animations are fantastic.

This World – The Truth About Population (Programme Website).

“Because a house without a bicycle is not a home” 😀

A nice bit about the family getting a bike and how it impacted on the whole family goes to show how important a bike is to many people in the world and what it gives them and the opportunities it opens up.

But the tyre logos weren’t lined up with valves!

Is it time to invest in the elderly care industry?

Is it time to invest in the elderly care industry?

Not unless you want to lose a lot of money….

There’s a big demand, but no one is prepared to pay what it really costs!

Is it time to invest in Soylent Green, cabbage flavour?

The thing I took away from it is how much difference there can be between well conveyed stats and just stats on their own. He (and whoever he works with) does a brilliant job of making the stats clear and understandable.

11 Billion people though 😯

I know that his message was positive overall but I’m not sure I entirely share his faith in people (as groups rather than individuals) to do the right thing for everyone overall.

yup, his faith in people is pretty hit.
on the whole most people are okay but it only take a few to screw up the whole thing.
4 billion in the africa…im putting my money in weapons companies

Yeah, very interesting presentation I thought.

I do have some questions though:
1) If the population is effectively static (in Europe/Americas) then surely this has an effect on the economy – I think I’m right in saying that one of the biggest factors in economic growth is population growth isn’t it?

2) As demonstrated by last week’s programme (the Japanese birth rate), the reduction of children per couple from 6 down to the current 2 might overshoot and drop further (thereby dropping the overall population of the earth) and that means economic catastrophy doesn’t it?

(Stealth edit for clarity, sorry)

According to the Hans Rosling derived test question 2 on the BBC’s Ignorance Quiz here, Petropavlovsk (Eastern Russia) is in the continent of Europe, so I’d take anything he said with a pinch of salt.