Every time I cross the border for groceries, I notice prices creeping up, so I was curious to see what the numbers say. According to the latest Eurostat release, annual inflation in the euro area rose to 3.8% in September 2026, up from 3.2% in August and 2.2% a year ago.

The chart above shows where that increase comes from. Energy is only about 9% of the basket, yet energy prices are up 18.9% year on year and now add 1.71 percentage points to the headline rate. That is almost half of all inflation. A year ago, energy was actually pulling inflation down slightly (-0.03 points).

Take energy out and the picture is much calmer. Inflation excluding energy is 2.3%, a bit lower than the 2.5% of September 2025. Services are still the largest steady contributor at 1.52 points, but they have barely moved in a year, and food has cooled from 3.0% to 1.3%.

So is this a real inflation problem or an energy shock? For now it looks like the second. The question is how long energy stays this expensive before it starts leaking into everything else :/. The next estimate probably will paint a clearer picture.

Note: Please find an interactive version of the chart above here.

Some weeks ago, when I wrote about Noviodunum, the Roman town that became Nyon, I kept picturing how empty the shores of Lake Geneva must have been back in Roman times. Today it feels like the opposite. Switzerland now has about 9.1 million people, 2.7 times as many as in 1900, according to the About Switzerland population page from the Swiss foreign ministry.

Most of that growth comes from immigration. More than 2 million foreign nationals (raising my hand here) live in Switzerland, about 27% of residents, one of the highest shares in Europe. The flow also runs the other way: over 10% of Swiss citizens now live abroad. In recent years the population has grown about 0.8% a year, and 2025 alone added roughly 73,300 people.

All of this came to a head in June. On 14 June 2026, voters rejected the SVP’s “No to 10 million Switzerland!” initiative, which would have forced the government to act if the population passed 10 million before 2050. It failed 54.8% to 45.2%. The map was telling: French-speaking cantons and the big cities said no (Bern 83.6%, Zurich 75.9%), while rural cantons like Appenzell Innerrhoden and Schwyz said yes.

So what now? At 0.8% a year, 10 million is only about a decade away, vote or no vote. The real question isn’t whether Switzerland grows, but whether the trains, flats and schools can keep up. I guess only time will tell.

Eurostat's flash estimate for September is out, and it is not the news anyone was hoping for. Annual inflation in the euro area is expected to reach 3.8%, up from 3.2% in August and well above the 2.2% we had a year ago.

That is almost double the European Central Bank’s 2% target. As is so often the case, the culprit is energy. Energy prices are up 18.8% compared with last September, and they rose 3.9% in a single month. For perspective, a year ago energy was actually getting cheaper (−0.4%).

The good news, if there is any, is that the rest of the basket looks fairly calm. Strip out energy, food, alcohol and tobacco, and core inflation sits at 2.5%, barely up from 2.4% in August. Services are at 3.2%, food at 1.4% and industrial goods at just 1.1%.

In other words, this looks like an energy shock rather than prices running away across the board. At least for now. Let’s hope there is some agreement on the Iran war, because, not surprisingly, rising oil prices are fueling this energy-driven inflation.

Last week I was strolling through the center of Basel in torrid heat, and when I looked at the clock at the intersection of Blumenrain and Spiegelgasse, I suddenly noticed that it read 37 degrees Celsius! It was then that I realized that in all the years I have lived in or visited Basel, I had never seen such high temperatures, and looking at historical values, that figure is certainly outside the norm.

This blistering reality in Basel is far from an isolated incident; it places Switzerland right at the epicenter of a historic, continent-wide climate anomaly. Across France, Germany, Italy, and Spain, temperatures have skyrocketed to levels between 5 and 12 degrees Celsius above seasonal averages.

This extreme event is being fueled by a powerful, static high-pressure system known as a "heat dome." Acting like a giant lid, it has trapped scorching air over Western Europe while simultaneously pulling an intense plume of hot air directly from the Sahara Desert. Under a relentless, cloudless sky, the ground has baked rapidly, supercharging local temperatures.

Climate scientists looking at this record-breaking week have noted that while the wind patterns themselves are a natural summer occurrence, the sheer intensity of the heat has been massively amplified by the long-term baseline effects of global warming, turning a standard summer hot spell into an unprecedented, dangerous furnace.

A 30-day rolling average of EIA oil price data shows a clear upward trend over the past three months, aligning with the escalation of the 2026 conflict involving the United States, Israel, and Iran. Disruptions around the Strait of Hormuz have tightened global supply and increased uncertainty in energy markets.

Iran’s use of asymmetric tactics—targeting shipping routes and regional infrastructure—has amplified these effects, adding a persistent risk premium to oil prices. Unfortunately, this trend could have broader consequences, increasing costs across the global economy and putting added pressure on food supply chains.

We Europeans are among the most avid coffee drinkers in the world, with several countries ranking at the very top globally. If we’ve ever shared an office, you’ll know I’m definitely doing my part to keep the pot empty.

Interestingly, Switzerland doesn’t top the list for per capita consumption. That honor belongs to the Nordic countries, with Finland leading the way at an impressive 10.76 kg of coffee per person each year.

Luxembourg stands out statistically at 18.98 kg per capita, largely due to its large cross-border workforce, but the Nordics remain the most consistent heavy drinkers overall.

In total import volumes, however, the largest European players are:

• Germany: 449,000 tonnes annually (5.31 kg per capita)
• Italy: 363,000 tonnes annually (6.11 kg per capita)
• France: 346,000 tonnes annually (5.21 kg per capita)

With all this coffee talk, I think it’s time for another cup ☕

Every year when the health insurance renewal letters arrive, I get that familiar sinking feeling. Premiums going up again? Of course they are. I finally decided to look at the actual numbers, and yeah, the data confirms what we all suspected.

Back in 2001, the average earned premium per insured person was 1,911 CHF. Fast forward to 2024, and we’re looking at 4,234 CHF. That’s a 121% increase over 23 years, or about 3.5% annual growth. Not exactly a surprise, but seeing it spelled out still stings a little.

This year I had to switch to another provider in order to keep my premium increase manageable, and I know I’m not alone in that. Every year, comparing plans and switching providers becomes more of a necessity than a choice. I wonder if a public option could curb these rising costs.

Source: Dashboard de l’assurance-maladie

Eurostat provides an interesting dataset about how EU residents travel, including where people go, how much they spend, and how long they stay. The 2023 data show that most Europeans’ foreign trips are still made within the Union.

In 2023, Europeans made over 1.1 billion trips, spending 5.7 billion nights and €555 billion. Nearly three-quarters of these trips (73%) were domestic, though foreign travel accounted for a larger share of nights and expenditure.

Italy and Spain emerged as the top foreign destinations, while France also drew significant numbers of visitors from within the EU. Beyond the Union, the United Kingdom, Türkiye, and Switzerland were the most popular spots, with intercontinental destinations making up just 12% of foreign trips.

Overall, the data show a strong preference for familiar, nearby locations, balanced by the pull of longer journeys that contribute more heavily to tourism spending. You can read more about it here.

According to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the Doomsday Clock is now at 89 seconds to midnight, the closest ever, due to escalating global threats. Key factors include nuclear tensions from Russia’s war in Ukraine and expanding arsenals, climate change with record-breaking temperatures, biological risks like pandemics and bioweapons, AI-driven threats including autonomous weapons and disinformation, and geopolitical instability from U.S.-China tensions and Middle East conflicts. These risks highlight the urgent need for international cooperation, diplomacy, and climate action to prevent global catastrophe.

The first time I heard about this clock was five years ago, when it was already at 100 seconds to midnight. In just five years, the situation has become even more dire, with the clock moving closer to catastrophe. This alarming trend underscores the need for even more urgent intervention to address these growing threats.

On the Eurostat website, inflation data for the Eurozone and the European Union reveals a decrease compared to the peak observed nearly one year ago. Nevertheless, as reported by Euronews, the European Commission has revised its economic projections downward, noting that persistently high prices for goods and services are having a more substantial adverse effect than originally foreseen.

For 2023 and 2024, inflation in the nations using the common currency is expected to be 5.6% and 2.9%, respectively. These figures are still well above the European Central Bank's (ECB) annual target of 2%, which it aims to reach through interest rate increases.

Meteorological organizations and climate research institutions maintain historical weather data and climate records, including temperature measurements from various locations. The Climate Change Institute at the University of Maine is one of those institutions. And according to the data collected since 1976, yesterday, while the US was celebrating Independence Day, turned out to be the hottest day on record in that dataset.

Inflation in Europe has been on the rise since the start of 2021, driven by a number of factors, including the COVID-19 pandemic, the war in Ukraine, and supply chain disruptions. In October 2022, inflation in the Eurozone reached an all-time high of 10.6%. It has since declined slightly, but it is still well above the European Central Bank's target of 2%.

The chart above, generated with data provided by Eurostat, shows this trend, including the October peak and the downward trend since then.

State of JavaScript is an online survey that, since 2016, has collected and analyzed data from JS developers to detect current trends in the ecosystem and identify upcoming ones. A couple of days ago the 2022 edition was released, and the results are quite interesting.

React continues to be very strong, both in number of users and in its retention ratio (the percentage of users who would use a library again). I have been lucky to work with this library in recent years, and despite its drawbacks, I can understand why it is still quite appealing.

It is also interesting to see what happens with the other two big ones (Angular and Vue.js):

While Vue.js has similar retention levels to React, its number of users has not yet reached the same levels. Angular’s interest and retention levels are really low. This is surprising, given that it is still one of the most sought-after frameworks in the industry.

Last Friday I learned that the day before, the Swiss Federal Council had agreed to relax the COVID measures, so that the use of masks is limited to public transport and health institutions only. This morning I was reading that similar measures are being adopted in other European countries like the UK, Norway, France, Germany, and Austria.

It is true that vaccination rates have reached important levels in most of these countries, that COVID cases have decreased significantly, and that fortunately Omicron-related cases have been milder than previous variants, but in any case it feels a bit surreal to enter stores and restaurants without having to wear the mask that has been one of our essential accessories during these long months of the pandemic.

Fingers crossed that the situation continues to evolve so positively!

A couple of weeks ago, NASA issued a press release explaining that "Earth’s global average surface temperature in 2021 tied with 2018 as the sixth warmest on record, according to independent analyses done by NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration".

NASA Administrator Bill Nelson sounded the alarm in the same press release: "Eight of the top 10 warmest years on our planet occurred in the last decade ...". The news was barely covered by the mainstream media, echoing some of the points made in the brilliant recent movie "Don't Look Up" by Adam McKay.

Global warming is real, and the issue should be taken seriously by each government and each citizen of this planet.

Almost two years ago I created a dashboard to track COVID-19 cases based on data provided by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins University. When I deployed that little application, I thought it would only be useful for a couple of months.

Almost two years later, it is still useful for tracking cases in different countries and following trends at the national or global level. In the different podcasts I follow, they have mentioned in the last couple of weeks that the Omicron variant is different, in the sense that it is far more contagious, but does not affect the lungs in the same way as the previous variants did.

Last night, I was checking my dashboard, and indeed the number of cases has skyrocketed, more than with any other variant. Fortunately, the number of deaths associated with the virus has remained stable, as you can see above. Still, this huge number of cases will necessarily add stress to health care systems around the world.

Although we are all sick to death of this pandemic, we must continue to get vaccinated and take protective measures to avoid the virus as much as possible.

For the last few days I have been reading the news as the northwestern United States has experienced a strong heat wave that has broken all records in its major cities, including Seattle and Portland.

There are even reports that part of the infrastructure of those cities is literally melting due to the heat wave. The PDX airport has kept records of the highest and lowest temperatures every day since 1938 (see charts above), and looking at a graph of this data, it is clear that the temperatures of the last few days are extraordinary for that region of the country.

I have been saying it for a while on this blog: global warming is not a joke!

The number of COVID-19 cases in Switzerland increased dramatically in November, reaching more than 10,000 at the beginning of the month, which forced the cantonal and federal authorities to take strict measures to prevent contagion.

One of the main differences with respect to the wave that occurred in the spring is that the number of hospitalizations has increased significantly, as can be seen in the graph above. We hope that the measures taken by the authorities will help to control this new peak. Of course, everybody has to do their part: #wearamask.

According to the ECDC website, in many countries across the EU/EEA and the UK, an increase in COVID-19 cases is being observed following the lifting of lockdowns and the relaxation of preventive measures such as physical distancing.

This new "wave" has been reported in countries such as Spain and France, where the time series graph of confirmed cases shows a clear upward curve. I personally understand the "COVID-19 fatigue", but the virus is still there, and it's not possible to forget about it.

Both in Basel city and Zurich, it is required to wear a face mask in order to reduce COVID-19 transmission. The country flattened the curve, but as soon as it began to reopen, cases started to go up again. The cantons of Geneva, Vaud, and Zurich are the most affected, as can be seen in the graph above.

A couple of days ago Eurostat released a preliminary report on the GDP growth rate in the EU and the euro area. It's not surprising, but the COVID-19 situation and the required mitigation measures have taken a toll on the economy in Europe. The report discussed how "Seasonally adjusted GDP decreased by 12.1% in the euro area and by 11.9% in the EU, compared with the previous quarter". The graph above shows this dramatic trend.

The 2008 crisis, with the collapse of Iceland’s banking system, spread primarily to Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece, and Spain in 2009. 10 years later, most of these countries have bounced back, but unemployment is still high in countries like Greece and Spain compared to levels before the crisis started.

The US Democratic primaries are around the corner, with the first state voting next Monday. I was curious how the Google search trends in the last 7 days reflect on each of the top-tier candidates. Bernie Sanders is clearly winning in that “interest” field. It will be interesting to see what happens in the actual Iowa caucuses.

A couple of days ago I stumbled upon the headline ‘Doomsday Clock is now 100 seconds from midnight’, published by space.com. I wasn’t aware of it, but this clock is a metaphor for how close the world is to a man-made global catastrophe. It was set up in 1947 by the members of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, when nuclear weapons were considered the main threat. Today, global warming is also factored into the calculation.

Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, this time around in 2020, it’s the closest it has ever been to midnight. 2019 was the second hottest year in history, and the growing instability in the Middle East and even the possible use of AI in warfare don’t help to move the clock backwards. The picture is not a pretty one, but there is at least one more voice reminding world leaders what is at stake here.

Last summer felt really hot! There were quite a few days when most of the headlines in the news were about how the thermometer was about to break historic records in many cities. Therefore, it is not surprising that the Earth's temperature change measured by NASA during the months of June and July was the highest ever recorded.

The "record-breaking" headlines follow the same pattern year after year. I don't remember any time in my lifetime when global warming was such a clear and present danger!

In February last year, I was blogging about how mass shootings in the US were happening constantly, and 86 people had been killed at the time of the Parkland massacre (528 ended up dying that year, according to data from the massshootingtracker.org project). Unfortunately, the current year has followed a similar pattern (347 people have been killed), and as the NY Times put it: "In a country that has become nearly numb to men with guns opening fire in schools, at concerts and in churches, the back-to-back bursts of gun violence in less than 24 hours were enough to leave the public stunned and shaken..."

The shootings have taken a darker tone this time, as hate speech has been added to the motivation of these horrible events, like the ones that just happened in El Paso, TX.

The US has more than 3.7 million confirmed cases of Covid-19, making it the country with the highest number of cases in the world. Lately, the news has focused on how states that rushed to reopen as quickly as possible, such as Texas and Florida, have seen a steady and exponential increase in the total number of cases.

Next to California, which has also seen a sharp increase in the number of cases, mainly in Los Angeles County, those states are getting closer to matching the numbers of New York. It feels like a cautionary tale that "going back to normal" won't be the pre-COVID-19 normal until there is an effective vaccine or treatment in place.

Fortunately, the an mRNA vaccine trial preliminary report in the NEJM stated the vaccine induced anti–SARS-CoV-2 immune responses in all participants, and no trial-limiting safety concerns were identified. Crossing the fingers for the next phases of those promising results.

In 2018, the employment rate in the European Union was 73.2%, compared to 72.2% in 2017, as reported by Eurostat. These results show continuous growth in the region, as can be seen in the chart above. Fortunately, the dip recorded after the financial crisis of 2008 is no longer present.

On the 25th of April, Joe Biden announced he was joining the crowded Democratic primary race. The aggregate polls show an interesting trend. Even before his announcement he was leading the polls, but there was a clear bump in his numbers afterwards. It will be interesting to see what happens in the months ahead. Will those trends continue, and will the main race be between him and Bernie Sanders, or will another candidate get into the top spot? Time will tell.

I have been tracking unemployment in Ireland for some time using data from the website of Ireland's Central Statistics Office, cso.ie, and the changes are remarkable compared to the peak of unemployment in 2012. Currently, the figure stands at 5.4% for the month of March 2019.

The official FX data from the Bank of England site shows the changes related to the whole Brexit process. Yesterday it was reported that MPs have voted overwhelmingly to hold Theresa May to her commitment to give them a vote on delaying Brexit if her withdrawal agreement fails to win a majority within the next two weeks. It's interesting how every time Brexit seems to be further away... the better the British currency performs.

The charts above show party control of the US Senate and US House over time since the 19th century.

Eurostat offers an interesting dataset about air travel on the continent, including the number of passengers per country. As you can see in the chart above, the United Kingdom, Germany, and Spain had the highest number of air travelers through their airports in 2017.

Unfortunately, another day and another mass shooting in the US (in Florida this time). The massshootingtracker.org website compiles all the public data available on these types of incidents in the news, and the numbers are staggering. This year alone, 86 people have been killed and 142 wounded in these types of incidents. The charts above show how this affects every single state in that country.

Is it time now to discuss sensible gun control laws, or how many more are needed?

A couple of weeks ago an article in Business Insider stated that Apple’s iOS was losing market share in Europe's four largest markets (Great Britain, France, Italy, and Spain) as well as Japan. I hadn't checked the global mobile market in a while, and checking the StatCounter stats today shows that Android is clearly dominant on a global scale. It's true Android has some issues, including its well-known fragmentation, but I still prefer the flexibility of this OS over iOS.

Over the last couple of weeks, we have had news stories about Harvey and now Irma. Harvey caused a lot of havoc in Texas, and now Irma seems to be on the same path through the Caribbean islands and Florida. The Hurricane Research Division of the Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory tracks the number of storms per year on its website, and based on the data, it looks like the number is steadily increasing. Sigh... climate change.

Some weeks ago, when I finished work, I was about to leave the building and saw on the wall a sheet of paper with information about a Vue.js meetup here in Berlin. I had never heard about Vue.js, and the more I read, the more interested I became in this front-end JavaScript framework.

Google Trends shows that Vue.js has been the most popular framework in the last 12 months. Vue.js is self-described as "a progressive framework for building user interfaces. Unlike other monolithic frameworks, Vue is designed from the ground up to be incrementally adoptable". I gave it a go, and it's quite interesting.

The content delivery company Akamai publishes a State of the Internet report, where it's possible to get internet connection speeds and broadband adoption by country. In this dataset it is not surprising that South Korea is at the top of the chart,

followed by Norway and Sweden. Most South American and African countries are still behind.

At the end of last month Eurostat published a report on the unemployment rate in Europe. This report shows how Germany, Malta, and Czechia had the lowest rates, while Greece and Spain still have the highest. Still, it's remarkable how much it has decreased in both Spain and Ireland.

When Theresa May announced her intention to call a general election back in April, the Conservative lead over Labour in the polls was around 21%. As you can see in the graph above, this lead has been shrinking over time. It will be very interesting to see what happens in this election next month.

Eurostat offers a balance of trade dataset showing the trade surplus or deficit of each European Union member. Germany is still the country with the highest surplus, while France and the UK have the highest deficits:

Eurostat has an interesting dataset showing the percentage of the population experiencing depression in Europe. The map above shows that Hungary, Portugal, and Sweden are the countries with the highest percentage of the population experiencing depressive symptoms.

A breakdown by sex shows that Portugal is the country with the highest percentage of the female population experiencing depression.

A couple of days ago, on March 8th, it was International Women's Day. I was chatting with some family members about whether this day should exist at all (they were arguing that every day should be that day). I was checking the pay gap between men and women in European countries, and I think there is still a reason to celebrate this day.

For many years now, Google News has been my main source of information, because the algorithm stacks and orders headlines from multiple news sources quite nicely. Since Trump was inaugurated, I have had the subjective impression that his name is taking over most of the headlines (he is newsworthy, of course, but still). I did a quick n-gram check on the headline anchors, and his name is indeed taking many of the headline spots.

Data from the World Bank shows that the amount of arable land per person has been steadily decreasing since the 1960s.

The poll aggregates from RealClearPolitics show that opinion of Trump has never been more favorable than unfavorable. In fact, it has been reported that he took office as one of the most unpopular presidents in modern history. The trend shows it's going down again after a short increase following the election.

It's very unfortunate but not surprising that 2016 was the hottest year ever recorded. NASA released the consolidated reports, and the data doesn't lie. Global warming is quite real. See the average-by-season chart.

Wikipedia has a useful page with a lot of statistics about Switzerland. The chart above shows the number of live births per year. Very relevant information today.

Eurostat updated its unemployment rate figures. Iceland has one of the lowest unemployment rates in Europe (followed by Czechia and Germany), while Greece still has the highest, followed by Spain.

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The European Union EDGAR database contains useful information about CO2 emissions per country and worldwide. The graph above shows the countries with the highest CO2 emissions (USA and China) and the total emissions worldwide. It's striking to see the spike the world has experienced since 2000.

Looking at the final 2016 US presidential election results, it's remarkable how badly Trump lost in California: 8.7 million vs 4.4 million votes. It's not surprising that in the days after the election the #calexit hashtag started to trend. Clinton won the popular vote, so many Americans will feel underrepresented by the electoral college system they have in place, but nowhere is this more dramatic than in California.

Interesting dataset from Eurostat regarding personal transfer inflows and outflows across the European Union. On one hand, France has the biggest negative balance, and on the other, Poland has the biggest positive one.

This morning I was checking the GDP growth data for European nations, and I found out that last year it was particularly high in Malta, Czechia, Iceland, and Sweden... but in Ireland it was insane! An interesting article from The Irish Times explains how, despite this number being statistically correct, it's due to huge multinational companies moving assets to their Irish branches for tax reasons.

Not surprising. The Earth's temperature measured by NASA in September was the warmest ever recorded for that month. http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/tabledata_v3/GLB.Ts.txt. This follows the same pattern as every month this year. The Paris climate agreement clearly recognized the wide impact of global warming, but with the recent results of the US elections, this issue needs to be raised constantly.

Alright, the latest 4-way presidential polls still put Clinton slightly ahead. Fingers crossed the lead will hold. Yesterday the FBI director sent a letter clarifying there was nothing new in the emails from last week, so I hope US voters will be able to weigh the flaws of the Democratic nominee against the real sexist, racist, protectionist, and xenophobic positions of the Republican nominee.

I hadn't checked the mobile OS market share in a while. According to NetMarketShare, Android had 68.5% and iOS 25.8% last month. I'm curious how this will be affected by the whole Note 7 issue. Still, the growth compared with just 2 years ago is impressive.

The Halloween query data from Google Trends shows some interesting points. The countries most interested in this tradition, which originated from Celtic harvest festivals, are the US, Canada, and Ireland.

On the other hand, the search queries for Halloween always spike a week before the actual celebration (looking for costumes).

I have been using Python for many years and I recognize how powerful it is for data science with libraries like Pandas and Scikit-Learn. In a previous role, I had the opportunity to use R, but I haven't touched it in a while. I was curious to see the interest in R vs Python on Google Trends, and you can see the graph above plotted with this data source.

Last weekend I finished converting the FX calculator I developed during my career break to React.js. I have briefly touched some React code at work, but I wanted to get my hands dirty and better understand the advantages and challenges of this library.

Today I was also checking some interesting [Google Trends data](https://t.co/aCOxxTOhUo) about the most popular JavaScript frameworks in terms of search interest, and React is definitely winning the interest war.

According to Nielsen, the viewer numbers for the first presidential debate between Trump and Clinton are out, and it was the most viewed debate in the history of presidential debates (84 million viewers). The second closest was the one between Reagan and Carter in 1980.

I hadn't checked the global search engine market share in a while because Google clearly dominates in almost every country, but yesterday I heard an interesting podcast on the BBC about the power of Google, and I was curious about the position of the 2nd and 3rd players. The chart above is generated with data from StatCounter.

Alexa and SimilarWeb rank Wikipedia as the 7th and 9th most visited site on the web, so the visit statistics produced by the foundation are a good proxy for getting data on the most popular platforms on the web. The chart above shows the visits by OS family. As you can see, Windows 7 is the most popular desktop OS, but mobile operating systems (Android and iOS) are responsible for almost 40% of the visits to those sites.

According to an article published in The Guardian, the Earth is warming at a pace unprecedented in 1,000 years. I have already discussed this point three times on this blog, but I think it's worth bringing it up again, because some people are still not convinced this is a real phenomenon.

Eurostat has an interesting dataset containing the crude marriage rate for the last decades across the EU. It's quite remarkable how, even if Portugal has one of the lowest rates in the EU, it used to be one of the highest in the 70s.

The US presidential election is far from over, since there are still some weeks ahead until November, but it's comforting to see evidence in the polls that Trump's divisive campaign is not "winning" at all.

Eurostat has an interesting dataset showing the population change across Europe, including both natural change and the net migration contribution. The graph above shows how the rapid decline trend is slowly reversing, but migration is the main component of this change.

According to the Central Statistics Office of Ireland, the adjusted unemployment rate in the country during the last 2 months has been 7.8%. The trend is definitely going down. I blogged about it in January, and it was more than 8% back then.

This morning I was reading an interesting section dedicated to the US elections on the FiveThirtyEight site. It tries to predict who will win the election based on the polls and historical data. They have been very accurate in the past, so it is definitely an interesting source.

One of the articles linked on this site was a post titled "Why Obama Might Be Trump's Biggest Challenge," which discussed how President Obama is enjoying a high approval rate. The chart above is generated with the RealClearPolitics data they mentioned in the post.

Last Week Tonight discussed how the RNC's "fear" message about crime in the US was not backed by facts. The charts above, generated with FBI data, support this.

I was discussing it with a colleague a couple of days ago: Facebook's React is definitely here to stay. Look at the graphs above showing the increase in Wikipedia page views during the last year and the growing trend on Stack Overflow.

Last Monday, we were chatting at the office about how everybody was talking about this new augmented reality game: Pokémon Go. In a nutshell, this game "allows players to capture, battle, and train virtual Pokémon who appear throughout the real world". I was checking the Wikipedia trends for the Pokémon page, and its popularity had increased exponentially during the last three days.

One of the most discussed topics in the news this week was two separate incidents where Black men were shot in what appears to be an excessive use of force by the police. Unfortunately, these types of incidents have been a constant in recent years, and they have led to the creation of Black Lives Matter, "an international activist movement, originating in the African-American community, that campaigns against violence toward black people".

The Guardian has a very interesting section that tracks the total number of people killed in fatal shootings by the police in the US, both in total and per million inhabitants. Using this data, it is clear that Black people proportionally died more frequently in those incidents than any other group in 2015 (and second only to Native Americans in 2016).

If you read the numbers, you will see the movement definitely has a point.

The charts above contain unemployment data extracted from Eurostat data sources. Even if the trend is going down, it is still quite high in countries such as Spain and Greece.

Iceland's population. It's amazing how such a small country was able to go so far in the Euro Cup. Well done, Iceland!

Interesting chart about the best-selling UK music acts in history. Data from Wikipedia.

The chart above contains a breakdown per region of the Brexit vote results. In a nutshell, England and Wales voted to leave (with the exception of London), and Scotland and Northern Ireland voted to remain.

Wikipedia contains an interesting article about emigration from Colombia. It states, "Emigration from Colombia is a migratory phenomenon that has been taking place in Colombia since the early 20th century." It has been a constant phenomenon for political and economic reasons. The map and chart above show that the preferred destinations for Colombians are the USA, Venezuela, Ecuador, and Canada. The data is a bit stale, but interesting nevertheless.

Browser usage according to the Wikipedia article on browser usage and the global stats reported by W3Counter. Not surprisingly, Chrome is the most popular browser today, and fortunately, IE is in complete decline.

According to this Wikipedia article that tracks all the polls related to the British referendum on European Union membership (Brexit), it's going to be a close call, even if the Remain vote has been gaining ground in the last few days.

In last week's episode, John Oliver summarised quite nicely why [leaving the European Union](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iAgKHSNqxa8) would be such a bad deal for the United Kingdom. Fingers crossed.

According to the Pan American Health Organization, Brazil, Colombia, Venezuela, and Martinique are the countries most affected by Zika, based on the cumulative number of suspected and confirmed cases. Brazil is by far the most affected country, with more than 148k suspected cases and almost 40k confirmed cases.

Amsterdam and Copenhagen are the most bike-friendly cities in the world, based on the Copenhagenize Index.

Eurostat has a dataset with statistics on causes of death in the European Union (EU). The highest rates are in the Baltic countries of Latvia and Lithuania. Heart disease is the leading cause of death across Europe.

Some people shared an article today that uses data from a very interesting US Bureau of Labor Statistics dataset showing publishing job trends.

The data shows how information technology had a very important impact on traditional publishing jobs, particularly in the newspaper industry, during the last 25 years.

On his campaign website, in the Income Inequality section, Bernie Sanders describes how Wall Street and the billionaire class have rigged the rules to redistribute wealth and income to the wealthiest and most powerful people in this country.

The White House publishes different [data tables](https://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/Historicals/) related to collected taxes, and one of them shows the share paid by individuals and corporations as a percentage of GDP over time.

Plotting this data as a time series shows that the Vermont senator clearly has a point.

The European Union statistical office has an interesting article about the impact of demographic ageing within the European Union (EU). One of the data tables shows the breakdown of the population for ages 0-14, 15-64, and over 65. The chart above shows this breakdown by country for the 0-14 and 65+ brackets. It's interesting how Ireland is the youngest country by far.

I was reading in the news today that the Venezuelan economy is in real trouble, with inflation going through the roof and a lot of shortages even of the most basic products. It's sad that the country with one of the biggest oil reserves in the world is in such bad shape. The IMF publishes data about inflation, and even if the newest data is from 2014, you can see the upward trend.

A recent article published by The Lancet shows that obesity is becoming a bigger world health problem than being underweight. They used population-based data sources, with more than 19.2 million adult participants in 186 of 200 countries, and found that the number of obese people has increased from 105 million in 1975 to 641 million in 2014.

The World Health Organization also publishes data about obesity and overweight, and the overweight share (BMI > 25) is more than half of the population in almost all industrialized countries in the world:

This problem is particularly bad in the Pacific Islands.

The European Union statistics office publishes interesting statistics related to the acquisition of citizenship in the EU. Yesterday was the anniversary of my Irish one, so I pulled out some stats related to Ireland.

The first chart shows the increase in the number of new citizens from 2011, when the government streamlined the process of reviewing applications, cutting a very important backlog.

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The data contains additional information about the origin of the naturalised citizens both from the EU and Non-EU countries:

Living in Europe with a European passport definitely makes life way easier, so thank you very much, Ireland.

Last night, when I was reading about the EgyptAir hijacking, I was thinking that fortunately this type of incident is now very rare. I remember that when I was a kid, this was one of the clichés in the American movies of the 80s (e.g., Delta Force), but with the tough security measures in place at most airports, this doesn't happen as often.

Wikipedia has a detailed compilation of aircraft hijacking incidents, and there is definitely a decrease compared to the peak in the 70s.

Last weekend I was checking out different alternatives for holidays in the Americas, and I started to wonder what the most visited country in that region is. The US and Mexico are the most visited countries. Brazil and Argentina are the most visited in South America, and the Dominican Republic is the most visited in the Caribbean.

The following chart shows the number of visitors in millions during 2014 (light green) and 2013 (dark green).

Back in February I wrote on this blog about how the world was really warming up, and the data from February 2016 is even worse. NASA reported that this month had the biggest temperature rise recorded in modern history:

Again, the world is warming up!

Asylum is defined as the protection granted by a nation to someone who has left their native country as a political refugee, mainly for fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion. Due to the raging conflict in Syria, there has been a sharp increase in the number of refugees coming to Europe.

The latest quarterly data report by Eurostat demonstrates this upward trend. Germany and Sweden are the countries that have welcomed the highest number of asylum seekers.

I hadn't checked the operating system market share for desktop and mobile in a while. Based on data from StatCounter, the usual suspects dominate: Windows and Android lead in each sector, respectively.

Last December I had a slight problem with my ear and unfortunately I wasn't able to fly for a little while. I was glad there was an amazing train system in Europe, so I had an alternative to travel to and from Berlin. Here is a chart with the percentage of train transportation by country in Europe, coming from a dataset published by the European statistics office (Eurostat):

I have been lucky enough to use the trains in all those countries.

Yesterday I finished the week with a couple of nice glasses of wine 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. 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:

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 Economist recently published an interesting graph of the most violent cities in the world (in terms of homicide rates) in their daily chart section. It includes an analysis of the Venezuelan economy in turmoil and, according to a Mexican report, “Venezuela’s capital Caracas had the highest murder rate in the world last year”.

Wikipedia also offers a page compiling a list of cities by murder rate. Unfortunately, most of the top 50 cities on this list are located in South America (and many of those in Brazil!). Take a look at the following chart and map:

Last night I was reading a headline in Business Insider about how Bernie Sanders just melted away a 30-point Hillary Clinton lead in a new poll related to the US presidential elections. Wikipedia has a useful article that tracks the different polls for both parties. The results of those polls are reported here on that page: Democratic Primaries.

It's true that the last poll conducted by Quinnipiac University shows a preference of: Clinton: 44% and Sanders: 42%, and with a 4.5% margin of error, they are virtually tied. There is even a newer one conducted by "Reuters/Ipsos" showing a similar trend: Clinton: 48% and Sanders: 45% (with a 5% margin of error).

It's fascinating to see how this candidate, without any of the infamous [super PACs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_action_committee#Super_PACs) behind him, has been able to attract so much attention and has become a real contender in the US 2016 presidential elections.

This morning I read in the news that the “Average 30-year mortgage rate falls for a fifth straight week” (3.72%). I checked whether the data was available to verify this headline. Fortunately, the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis offers this data set on their website. It's called MORTGAGE30US, and the data goes back to 1971.

Looking at the data, it’s true that the 30-year mortgage rate has been falling over the last couple of weeks. However, it's not the lowest point on the graph. In fact, last year around the same time, it was even lower (3.59%):

Following my post yesterday, I kept digging into the data published by the Statistical Office of Berlin-Brandenburg. I wanted to discover where most of the "Foreign" Europeans living in Berlin come from. Since the European Union agreement allows the free movement of people across member states, I was expecting that the number 1 slot would be taken by a country within the EU borders. Actually, it’s Turkey that has the most immigrants living in Berlin, with almost 100k people:

Now the second and third positions are from countries in the European Union: Poland and Italy. This is followed by one of the newcomers in the union: Bulgaria.

The Statistical Office of Berlin-Brandenburg publishes some very interesting reports including: Einwohnerinnen und Einwohner im Land Berlin (Residents in the State of Berlin, 31 December 2014). One of the remarkable sections of this document is about the country of origin of the foreign residents living in Berlin. It offers a breakdown by continents, regions, and countries, so I was curious about the top countries in South America:

I'm not surprised to discover Brazil (3948 people) is #1 on the list, but I wasn't expecting that Colombia (1527) was going to be the second one in that region. Interesting.

Yesterday I was reading the news about Apple. On Tuesday, they reported the financial results of their fiscal first quarter. One conclusion from this event is that even with record profits, iPhone sales rose by less than 1 percent from a year earlier.

I was checking the Mobile & Tablet operating systems market share data published by netmarketshare.net and this downward trend is clear:

I never owned an iPhone. I really like the quality of the hardware and software produced by this company (In fact, I'm writing this post on a MacBook Air), but I don't like the closed, restricted ecosystem associated with their business model. It's refreshing to see so many different Android devices on the market.

The website of Ireland’s Central Statistics Office, cso.ie, has some interesting data tables that can be downloaded, so yesterday I decided to pull out the unemployment data and plot it.

I was curious because when I arrived in the country, the economy was doing really well, but I saw changes during the 2008 crisis. I thought it would be interesting to see what happened in the last few years. Even if the unemployment level hasn't yet reached the levels of 2005, I think the trend is definitely positive.