Currently there is a heat wave named Lucifer that's bringing scorching hot temperatures to southern and central Europe. Maybe that's the reason why Eurostat published statistics some days ago about the largest producers of ice cream on the continent. It's not surprising that the "gelato" country is at the top of the list, but I was surprised to learn that Germany was second in the rankings.

Yesterday was World No Tobacco Day, an event established by the member states of the World Health Organization (WHO) in 1987. This day serves as a good reminder of global tobacco consumption. The dataset available on Wikipedia shows that China is the biggest consumer in the world. Unfortunately, consumption is on the rise in developing nations.

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.

Eurostat has an interesting dataset with the time spent exercising per country in Europe. It's not surprising that the countries where people exercise 2.5h or more are the Scandinavian ones: Iceland, Norway, Denmark, Finland, and Sweden. Way to go, Scandinavia!

Wikipedia provides an article containing a list of the top 100 sites in the world in terms of traffic, using Alexa and SimilarWeb as sources. The chart above shows the count of site types based on that list, and search engines are the top category by far. Now, it's interesting to see that this is due to the massive popularity of Google around the world: its localized versions in many countries make it into the top 100 list:

The USA is indeed a country of immigrants. In 2013, 41M people out of a total population of 316M were foreign-born, coming from all over the world. The top countries of origin on that list are Mexico, China, India, the Philippines, and Vietnam, but it's a true multinational and multicultural society that should be embraced!

I knew Colombia was one of the top flower exporters in the world, but a couple of days ago, with all the flowers going around for St. Valentine's Day, I wondered who the top exporter overall was. Not surprisingly, it's the Netherlands, with a whopping ~40% share of world exports.