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 Service

Both sites show a decline in the total volume of 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 measure of a language's popularity is the number of questions asked about it. Stack Overflow features questions and answers on a wide range of programming languages and compiles a list of the most popular tags, with a breakdown by total, today, and this week.

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

Last Sunday it was really warm here in Berlin. I was able to get on my bike and do a nice ride to the northern part of the city. Nevertheless, I remembered some data I read back in January about how the world is really warming up:

This winter has been really mild in Berlin.

The US Bureau of Labor Statistics published the unemployment figures for January, and the rate is low: 4.9%. It’s one of the lowest unemployment rates since the financial crisis of 2008. The rate is half of what it was at the peak in October 2009:

Even though this is very good news for the American people, the increase in wages is still sluggish. In the last quarter of 2015, the rate was 1.9%. It was around 3% before the crisis hit hard.

If I were American, I would ask the presidential candidates these questions. Next page