The Joy of Stats is spreading.
You can watch a history of the modern world, in less than five minutes.
I'm surprised by how many people have sent links to this YouTube preview of The Joy of Stats.
Somehow, with nothing more than animated bubble charts, Hans Rosling has become quite famous.
This four-minute clip shows Rosling presenting world development in the context of income versus lifespan. Rosling uses Gapminder, the software he and others had developed, to show multiply varying statistics as animations.
The material is more or less the same as his TedTalks; but this time around, the motion chart isn't projected on a screen. The data is CGI'd into the air where Rosling can pluck and grasp at points as he highlights the significance of specific points in history.
Until you’ve seen Hans Rosling in action you can have no idea just how moving a bunch of blue bubbles moving down a screen can be.
The BBC writes that:
Despite its light and witty touch, the film nonetheless has a serious message – without statistics we are cast adrift on an ocean of confusion, but armed with stats we can take control of our lives, hold our rulers to account and see the world as it really is. What’s more, Hans concludes, we can now collect and analyse such huge quantities of data and at such speeds that scientific method itself seems to be changing.
"I kid you not, statistics is now the sexiest subject on the planet" says Hans Rosling, presenter of The Joy of Stats.
