My friend Gary Howe emailed me a link to this amazing website called WallStats. The guy who runs the site produces a poster called Death and Taxes that graphically illustrates the federal budget. So he produced lots of other graphics depicting interesting statistics, such as the ones below showing different ways of understanding how much beer we drink in America. Here is a teaser sampler – click through to his site to see much more.
Here in the USA Sea World just stopped giving away free beer….. Bah…
So is drinking beer bad or good? Also, the top picture is *very* misleading. In terms of per capita beer consumption, the US isn’t even in the top 10. China isn’t even in the top 30.
Orlando – sorry to hear that!
Josh – I find these visual representations of statistics useful for getting a comparative sense of the magnitude of big numbers like these, not for advocating one thing over another. In other words, I’m not trying to suggest that beer is “good or bad.” The top chart depicts total consumption, not per capita consumption.
My first comment was made slightly tongue in cheek which doesn’t come across so well in the comments of a blog. My actual thought sequence when seeing the second and third images was:
Nice! We can end the war in Iraq and give everyone free beer!
Wait! Should we stop drinking beer and feed 43 million people?!
Perhaps I should have used my associative logic skills and determined that we could end the war in Iraq and then feed 43 million people.
In any case, I’m not sure that way the facts are presented here is value neutral. I would imagine that most people would interpret the bottom image as advocating less beer consumption.
Josh – ten-four, indeed a drawback of short online written communications, tone just gets lost. I like your rationale above: 43 m. people starving, we can solve it by giving up beer or war. Which would you choose?!
Chris
[...] beer. I now know I’m not alone. In fact, I seriously underestimated how unalone I was. Beeractivist points us to Wallstats.com and this little beauty of a post to help those of us that perfer to [...]
Hi, great blogging. Want to get cash for blogging? Check out: http://bit.ly/PaidWriting
Amazing site
great content, fun to read.. Keep up the good work ^_^
hi!,I like your writing so a lot! percentage we be in contact more approximately your article on AOL? I need an expert in this area to unravel my problem. May be that is you! Taking a look forward to see you.