Through Jeremy Thorpe’s excellent visualization experiments blog blprnt, I found the Guardian Data Store, a repository of Google Spreadsheets full of fascinating data. They’ve got a smattering of subjects available, from world population totals to pop music charts, and in many cases the data is broken down into subcategories of very useful fine grain and fidelity. In most cases the data is focused on European and American stats, but they have a lot of fun global data.

It’s worth taking a browse through the data just for kicks. I learned that the population of Canada is expected to rise above 44,000,000 before 2050, and that France has 300 nuclear warheads in their arsenal.

What’s really fantastic though, is that using the Google Docs API (or by exporting the data to a spreadsheet) you can mine any of this data for other applications – I’m excited to have all this raw data to manipulate and chart out. Big nerdy fun! Here’s a graph of the 30-day average measured size of the ozone hole (plotted out in Excel… yuck):