Daily question: The power to know
Wed, Oct 22, 08
October 18 is Statistics Day in Japan:
So, it’s not surprising to learn that:
At 2:13 pm on Wednesday in Japan, 24,497 people are walking the dog and all of them have jobs
In fact, for those of us who live in a country that cannot even properly count its presidential election votes, the level of granularity of Japanese statistics is truly fascinating, as brought to us by Soma who lives, strangely enough, in Brooklyn, NY:
Let’s jump right into this: Japan has the absolute best census in the history of my known world. Not only does it include normal things like age, sex, and the height of each of your pets, but it also legitimizes the gossipy question of What Are You Doing Right Now? Japan slapped a bunch of people with notebooks and a sacred Numbers Mission: keep a log of what you do during the day, in fifteen minute intervals. And those people did!
Interactive visualization of the resulting stats is addictive:
What applications can you think of if the same statistically significant number of people were equipped (not with notebooks but) iPhones+GPS and the data could be visualized in real time?
