Eurostat published some very interesting stats regarding the mobile internet connectivity of EU citizens in the Information Society section of the Eurostat regional yearbook. The map above shows the countries with the largest and smallest percentage of users browsing the internet through mobile devices in cities. It was not surprising to see the Nordic countries at the top of the list, but I wasn't aware Italy was at the bottom.

Here is a bar chart with the countries sorted by percentage:

Yesterday I had the opportunity to visit Neuschwanstein Castle in Bavaria, and I learned about the interesting history behind it. The palace was commissioned by Ludwig II of Bavaria as a refuge from his constitutional monarchy duties, in order to revive his romantic dreams of medieval kings. The guide described how the king was deemed insane, arrested, and died mysteriously. My GF and I were discussing yesterday that, insane or not, he certainly brought good fortune to this region of Germany!

Eurostat has a very interesting article and dataset about tourism in the different European cities. The chart above shows the most visited European cities in terms of millions of nights spent by tourists, next to that figure relative to the local population.

15 years ago today I was working from home when I got a call from my ex: "Are you watching TV? It seems there was an explosion at the WTC in NYC". I turned on the small TV set I had in my room and saw the footage on CNN showing one of the Twin Towers in flames. Many of the fatalities in that attack were foreigners, as you can see in the map above.

This morning I was reading in the news that North Korea conducted a fifth nuclear test. It's pretty scary to think this nation could launch a nuclear attack. There is an organization called ICAN that leads an international campaign to abolish nuclear weapons. They track the arsenals maintained by the different nuclear powers.

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