Stats and Stripes

Notify Edward Tufte! Alert Global Voices! This is too cool!

The Portuguese magazine Grande Reportagem has an

interesting project called Meet the World, which takes countries’ flags

as uses them as area graphs to illustrate statistics about the country

represented by that flag.

For example, in China, the ratio of red

to yellow in its flag is the same as the ratio of its working

14-year-olds to its 14-year-olds in school…

Click the photo to see all the flags in the set.

…the ratio of blue to white in Somalia’s flag is equal to the ratio

of women who have been genitally mutilated to those who haven’t…

Click the photo to see all the flags in the set.

…and the red:white:blue ratio in the United States is equal to the

ratio of those in favour of the war in Iraq to those opposed to those

who haven’t the foggiest where Iraq is (here’s a hint: go to Saudi

Arabia, hang a left).

Click the photo to see all the flags in the set.

Be sure to visit the Meet the World page

and see the whole set of eight flags (Angola, Brazil, Burkina Faso,

China, Columbia, European Union, Somalia, United States) and the explanation behind the project.