Juan Convers

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

Fortunatelly 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 suprises 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 a really cool Freakonomics podcast episode titled How needs handwriting . Stephen Dubner discussed the pros and cons of handwriting, its origins and the emphasis is still given in the high school system. Quite interesting.

I started to think that I use hand writing 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 hand written letter.

I'm 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](http://www.postalheritage.org.uk/explore/history/statistics/)
• [US Postal Services](https://about.usps.com/who-we-are/postal-facts/decade-of-facts-and-figures.htm)

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

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

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

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

One interesting measurement of popularity of a language are 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 on how popular are the different programming languages.

Last sunday it was really warm here in Berlin. I was able to get on my bike and do a nice ride to the north 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.

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