Boycy was asking me if Christianity or Islam was bigger (it’s Christianity). Looking it up, I was shocked at what’s number 3. Irreligion. What?

The Wiki page on Sri Lanka’s 14th Parliament doesn’t just list the party MPs are in, it lists what party they were elected under as well. There are so many crossovers, largely because the opposition is so deeply fractured. Traditionally, the UNP (despite also being involved in the 1983 riots) is the UNITED NATIONAL Party, ie, at election time, most minority parties come under their umbrella. Under seemingly permanent bad leadership, however, these parties have left the tent.

In Asian or Sri Lankan cooking, we put a lot of diverse ingredients into a dish. Salt, chili, curry leaves, coconut milk, onions, garlic, green chili. That’s just the base for many Sri Lankan recipes, before you start adding distinctive stuff. In western food, by contrast, the base is less, and less diverse. This seems apparent anecdotally, and also now scientifically. A chemical study has shown that Asian dishes incorporate more diverse flavors than western ones.

As a bit of a data geek, I found this hilarious. This graph from Businessweek shows examples where correlation (two trends that look similar) is not causation (trend A did not cause trend B). I’ve included the funniest one above, but there’s more.

Consider this an info-layout. This shows the size of India’s Internet population, how many are on mobile, Facebook, and a map showing electrification for color.

As a follow up to a report on declining suicides in general, this is how Sri Lankans kill themselves. Sadly, pesticide and insecticide dominate. Why do they kill themselves? Basically, their family or spouse drive them to it. As the report says “Harrasment by the husband & family disputes” is the number one (reported reason) for suicides in Sri Lanka.

xkcd writes a highly intelligent web-comic, but I didn’t know he had this in him. This expansive infographic shows all the money in the world, broken down from dollars to trillion, full of inside jokes like the inflation adjusted value of 50 Cent. It’s huge and requires using the map at bottom right to get around, but it’s very very interesting.

I was looking thru my logs and I found that a paper I wrote in University was cited in the Cardoza Law Review. One word, but still. The paper is called ‘Fuck’ and it’s by Christopher M. Fairman, Associate Professor of Linguistics, Ohio State University. The (unpublished paper of mine he cited was) ‘Fuck Linguistics’ written for my SocioLinguistics class in 2003.

According to the Economist, there are 1.6 million Indian migrants in Sri Lanka, making us the third destination behind the US and Malaysia. I’m pretty sure this is wrong. I think they’re referring to historical migrants but even then, Indian Tamils make up less than a million people (860,000, or 4.6%). That’s 2001 data, but I don’t think they’ve, like, doubled since then, nor do I think there has been more recent migration.

There were almost a billion tourists in 2010 (940 million). Where did they go? This infographic shows what it would look like if every tourist took the same plane, seated by destination.