Last Sunday I was reading the breaking news about a cliff that had collapsed into the sea on New Zealand’s South Island following a severe magnitude 5.9 earthquake that happened near Christchurch. I remembered when I visited New Zealand last year that I heard the nickname of this country is the "Shaky Isles" for its constant seismic activity. The two islands that compose this country lie on the margin of two colliding tectonic plates, making them earthquake prone.

The usgs.gov website has an interesting section with statistics about Earthquakes worldwide. Please find the following heatmap table with the data they published there:

There were two particularly deadly years: 2004 when a [tsunami hit many countries in the Indian Ocean](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Indian_Ocean_earthquake_and_tsunami), and 2010 when a huge earthquake happened in Léogâne, Haiti.

Yesterday I finished the week with a couple of nice wine glasses from Portugal. This morning when I woke up and looked at the bottle, I started to ask myself what the top countries in the world in terms of wine production are. I thought about France? Italy? Spain?

Fortunately, Wikipedia has an article with data coming from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), sorting the countries by their volume of wine production for the year 2013 in metric tonnes.

There are no surprises in the Top 3 positions (they are indeed France, Italy and Spain), but it's interesting how China has climbed to the 6th position, above Argentina and Australia:

Yesterday evening I was listening to a really cool Freakonomics podcast episode titled Who Needs Handwriting?. Stephen Dubner discussed the pros and cons of handwriting, its origins, and the emphasis it still receives in the high school system. Quite interesting.

I started to think that I use handwriting at work to draw schemas about the different pieces of a project or task that I need to accomplish, but it definitely has been a while since the last time I wrote a proper handwritten letter.

I wanted to check if there was data about postal volume, because I guess the decline in handwriting has an impact on these numbers. I found two interesting sources:

• UK Postal Museum
• US Postal Services

Both sites show a decline in the number of total mail sent. The decline is particularly dramatic after 2005:

Last night I was walking around the neighbourhood while listening to a very interesting podcast from NPR, explaining how and when CEOs’ compensation packages exploded. You can get it here. What they discussed in a nutshell was that companies tried to match their CEOs' compensation with performance (fair enough) using stock options, but the companies didn’t realize the exact value of those offers.

The Economic Policy Institute published an article last year about how CEOs make [300 times the salary of an average worker](http://jco.im/300-times).

It is hard to assess what the most popular programming languages are because there are multiple ways to measure them, but none of them are perfect (i.e., repositories, lines of code, occurrences in job offers, etc.). For example, if you work with embedded systems, C is very popular, but if you work on the web, the story is very different.

One interesting measurement of popularity of a language is the questions related to the language. Stack Overflow features questions and answers on a wide range of programming languages and compiles a list of the most popular tags with total, today, and this week breakdown.

This data is a nice proxy for how popular the different programming languages are.

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