Month: January 2008

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The world’s population explosion

Graph showing dates when the world population reached 1 billion, 2 billion etc

Yeah I just said that it’s the wrong sort of day for numerical analysis. However I stumbled across these numbers and had to draw a graph immediately.

The world’s population reached 1 billion people in 1804. The second billion was added by 1927. And so it goes. In 1999 we hit 6 billion, and current estimates are that we’ll hit 7 billion in 2013.

You all know the drill from here…

A small proportion (us Australians, Americans, Europeans, Japanese and some others) chew up the vast majority of the world’s resources and are dumping our shit everywhere. We know we need to stop. But those other billions reckon they’ve had the rough end of the pineapple for too long and now it’s their turn.

And we’re surprised when they get stroppy about it.

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Heath Ledger spikes my website, Day 4

Traffic Graph for 2008-01-27 showing traffic continuing to decline

Hmmm… I predicted yesterday that traffic would increase again across the weekend, but it hasn’t so far. Saturday’s traffic was actually the lowest of the four days since I started The Heath Ledger Experiment.

No theories yet. Let’s look again tomorrow and see what happens with the Sunday traffic (which will include hits from Saturday in the US, thanks to the Earth being round). A sunny Sunday isn’t right for numerical analysis.

As before, the figure for the last day only includes traffic from midnight to about 4am. And the number in the top-left corner of the graph isn’t relevant, as it’s “hits” — which includes all the pieces on a page as well as the page itself.

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Great Australian Dreaming 1

Photograph: Great Australian Dreaming 1

As my Australia Day tribute, I’ll completely contradict what I said in my post about Australian of the Year and give you a photograph. A photograph of rural Australia.

Actually, this picture was taken only a short way out of Melbourne as ’Pong and I were about land at Tullamarine. The date is 17 December 2002, and the drought is in full effect. For me, these colour tones say “Australia” more than anything else.