Worldmapper: The world as you've never seen it before

Worldmapper: dozens of world maps, with country sizes adjusted for various factors to give you an instant idea of how countries compare on things like population, car ownership, fruit exports, etc.

Here's one for net immigration:

How much do venture-backed CEO's get paid?

from VentureWire

"Northern California continues to lead with the nation's highest paid start-ups CEOs, with median compensation hitting $275,000. Not far behind is the Northwest, where compensation jumped to $250,000 from $200,000. In the Northeast compensation dropped to $253,000 from $275,000 last year and the South saw a decline to $240,000 from $246,000. "

Pretty good pay for running a company that doesn't earn a thing. Senior execs at a company like Microsoft wouldn't be eager to jump ship over money like that, but it does raise the bar.

Book summaries on line

Business Book Review: is another one of those book summary services, similar to the GetAbstract one I get a work.


Today's WSJ [subscription required] has a summary of the summarizers. Curiously, they don't mention GetAbstract. They also don't mention my favorite new site of all: Safaribooksonline, which gives you the full text online to zillions of (mostly technical) books.

Where are the world's ships right now?

Ship locations is a site that tracks, in real time, the location of all the world's commercial ships. It lets you immediately see a map of, say, all the ships about to dock at the Port of Seattle.

For example, the Queen Mary 2 is currently near the tip of South America.

SketchUp Home

Google just bought SketchUp, a company that makes a simple CAD-like drawing program. It normally sells for $495 so I'll wait to see if Google decides to make a free version, like they did with Google Earth.

My 6-year-old boy would love this software. We just watched the demo video and he was really salivating over the possibilities of drawing simple buildings and then watching them come to life inside the computer.

Pictures of the Prophet

Oh no! After all the fuss over the cartoons, somebody noticed that there are several paintings of the Prophet in several major US and European museums.

FREAKONOMICS on baby test scores by race

Cheers to FREAKONOMICS BLOG » New evidence on racial test score gaps for stepping into a controversial, but vital question at the heart of genetics. We know that test scores vary by race among adults, and that a statistically significant variance shows up early. Is environment responsible; is it innate? Even if you insist that "IQ" is not a relevant measure, please explain why there would be a difference. If it's upbringing, then the younger you are, the lower the difference, right?

So they studied a large data set of cognitive tests given to 8-12 month old babies and published a paper last month with the results. Answer: they couldn't find a difference between black and white babies, but they did see very slightly lower scores for Asians.