Animated Data on Youtube is surprisingly exciting

I love data, statistics, facts and figures. Even more so when they are presented in easy to understand formats like pie charts, graphs, and bar charts. You learn but in a really easy and eye-friendly way. I like that. Being something of a cool nerd, I chart quite a lot of my own life and fill out a daily Excel sheet with things like – steps walked, weight, beer intake, gaming, words written, and so on. That way I can make my own charts and prove that beer and gaming have no affect on productivity. And it is irrefutable because it is there in pure data form. It’s science.

One thing that does dent productivity is Facebook and Youtube. I am not on FB all that much because I am too self absorbed to care about other people and don’t feel the need to share my quite staggeringly brilliant life – even if I have cycled 20k or my child has done something/anything or I had an aesthetically pleasing lunch. This is partly because I don’t have a bicycle or children and find food pictures incredibly dull, but mostly because I can’t be bothered. Especially when most data indicates that FB leads to depression. I am already having a mid-life crisis, I don’t need to add to it.

But the other day on Facebook I saw a Youtube clip showing the best-selling artists of the last 50 years presented per quarter (of each year) in a live format. It is strangely gripping and exciting and confirms that Led Zeppelin rules (briefly), the Beatles, Elvis and Michael Jackson were popular and that top selling music is goddam awful from late 90s onward. Check it out:

There are quite a few of these and if you aren’t careful, you can lose a few hours watching little bars go up and down as you root for your favourite. This next one is quite cool as it charts the rise of the largest cities. Obviously data on this is hard to quantify but it is really interesting and essentially starts by revealing which civilisations were doing pretty well at various points in history. For some reason they decided to continue onward to 2100, by which point things start to get decidedly dystopian:

If you have absolutely nothing better to do then there are tons of these on channels such as Data is Beautiful and Animated Stats. You are probably better off reading a book though – these are great…. ahem.

I will end with something that presents data in the form of maps. It is a very cool history of the world and the civilisations, empires and people that led to our political make-up today. It starts with Egypt, for quite a while, then gets more exciting. At one point, there is a ‘Holy shit, Mongols!’ moment. This is longish at 16:35 long but it is the history of the world. Best watched on a large screen or things can get a tad confusing.

That is enough glorious data for now. Ok, just one more…