Free For All Friday - Awesome Graphs And Stats

As a matter of fact ....

I love data, statistics and graphs. It's a guilty pleasure of mine. For me, it's so cool how fascinating data collected from so many sources can be presented in such a simple and concise manner.

To demonstrate this, I thought I'd share my three interesting graphs I found from Reddit's subreddit 'data is beautiful.' It certainly is ...

1) Percent of Americans, Canadians and British who think issues are morally acceptable

As a British guy living in Canada, I can't help but feel slightly proud of my two homes acceptance of other peoples life choices including contraception, divorce and gay people. It's not as high as I would have liked but it's still on the right side of the margin.

Although the US falls worryingly short at times, it still looks like the majority of people share my views on the majority of the issues, except when it comes to the death penalty. I'm pretty stunned that almost 60% of Americans are pro-death penalty. I'd love to find out the reasons behind why the average American supports this police as I've only ever been brought up with and surrounded by people all over Europe who are firmly against it.

2) Migration Flow In And Out Of London

This one hits close to home. Over the past couple of years I've become increasingly aware of the so called 'Londocentric' industries within the UK. Basically, if you grow up in the UK and want to take your career or passion to the highest level: you have to move to London. Of course, there are exceptions to this and ways of working around it with enough determination, but I for one have seen half a dozen or more friends move to the big smoke in order to further their careers. 

This graphs shows this perfectly. People flood to London from all areas of the country, with just a couple of exceptions: the south coast. I think the red that shows migration out of London pertains to the exodus of pensioners and the elderly moving to the coastal areas of the south-east for their retirement.  

3) Vocabulary vs Age

I sometimes worry that I've hit my linguistic peak. This chart eases that a bit for me. At 23 years old, I should acquire about 6 or 7 thousand more words over the next 20 years of my life. At 43, the graph seems to plateau a bit. I guess once you hit middle age, there are either no more words to learn or just no use for them!

What surprised me about this graph is that by age 13, the average speaker has a vocabulary of 20,000 words. Since then, I've only acquired 5,000 or so more. If you don't believe me, I just used the word 'acquired' twice in as many paragraphs. My own proof for you there.

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If these have sparked your interest in cool data and graphs, there are tonnes more to enjoy over at the 'data is beautiful' sub reddit.