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 The (unpublished paper of mine he cited was) ‘Fuck Linguistics’ written for my SocioLinguistics class in 2003.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.

According to Robert Neuwirth, most workers in the world are off the books. I do a fair amount of freelance work off the grid (though I try to report it) and a significant amount of Sri Lankan business is cash. Indeed, this ‘informal’ system predates the formal economy, but it’s still surprising to hear “half the workers of the world — close to 1.8 billion people — were working in System D: off the books, in jobs that were neither registered nor regulated, getting paid in cash, and, most often, avoiding income taxes,” (Foreign Policy).

Just saw this interesting infographic from Nielsen. It shows rising prices and cost of living in India, but also rising spend on tasty non-essentials like chocolate. Sri Lanka sees similar rising costs with higher inflation, and people also spend more on taste rather than quantity. Other points of interest are that, despite the growth of sales outlets like fastrack and xyntra (my research is watching StarWorld), fast moving consumer good (FMCG) prices have risen by 23% and half of Indians are saying they’d wait to buy new clothes, etc.

My best guess is 2 million, or about 10%. If you look at connections along, you get about 1.3 million. Why round-up? Well, because multiple people use connections, people connect at work, and the 1.1 million Sri Lankans on Facebook hint at something more. This infographic is nothing fancy, but it shows you various measures compared to Sri Lanka’s population (about 20.6 million).

This map shows plug points (sockets) all over the world. Sri Lanka is in the worst of all worlds, whereby we have western, eastern and hybrid plugs, in seemingly random variation. Hence, we have two standard adaptors, each of which accept three kinds of plugs. It is also standard to shove pencils and keys into plug points to make stuff fit.

Firstly, the Indian government has released a cache of police and crime statistics, for which they should be commended. This is an infographic detailing complaints against the police and what happens to them. Basically, most are rejected, more are processed internally, and a fraction make it to court. Of those that make it, only a sliver ever make it out.