europe

I have just written a new article attempting to answer the question: Who were the best and worst Kings and regent Queens of France in history? As usual your feedback is welcome.

Which of these two decade checks off more of what you would consider a Golden Era for the West? I consider the 70s and onwards as a definite decline in western culture but struggle between those two...

Taking exception to the letter written by European Union envoys in Pakistan, asking Islamabad to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Prime Minister Imran Khan, while slamming the regional bloc, asked where the same countries were when New Delhi broke international law in Kashmir. “EU...

Credit goes to Dan Davis just sharing his video, found some of the information interesting...

What do you need to know before buying a house or an apartment in Europe, either as a residence or as an investment? The purchasing process and the taxes and fees pertaining to it vary a lot between countries. In countries like Belgium, France and Italy, it is compulsory to pass through a public...

I have made four new maps showing the number of American fast food chains per capita in each European country and compared to the United States, India, China and Japan. McDonald's are the most popular in Northern and Western Europe, except in Iceland where the chain withdrew completely from...

I want to bring yet again the topic of Basque particularism. This is by no means a new topic, it is well known in a good chunk of fields like historiography, linguistics... Lets start with Basques being linguistically isolated with the rest of Europe. Speaking a language that doesn't come...

I recently finished reading Alberto Angela's I tre giorni di Pompei (The [last] three days of Pompeii), in which he mentions that mozzarella didn't exist at the time, but was invented in the 5th century, at the end of the Roman empire. Wikipedia disagrees and says that the earliest buffalo milk...

I have spent most of the last week calculating the the average values for the K12b admixtures for most of the ancient genomes tested to date. I thank Jovialis for providing me the genomes converted in the right format to run the K12b on Admixture-Studio. You will find the table in the page...

I have made a new map of the Southwest Asian admixture from Dodecad K12b. I had made the same map based on the K12 calculator many years ago, but the some people tend to confuse the two as they have the same name. Both are similar in the Middle East and North Africa, but vary quite a lot in...

I had not made maps of Dodecad admixture for several years. As K12b is so popular at the moment I thought I'd finally get round to making a map of the North European admixture (which I renamed Northeast European). You will find the analysis and percentages of this admixture in ancient samples here.

This map shows the percentage of the population who says that abortion should be legal in all or most cases (2015-17). It is based on the data from the Pew Research, except for Turkey, India, China and Japan, which are from the Ipsos survey for 2017. No data was available for Muslim countries...

I was having a look at the population projections for 2100 in Our World in Data and thought it would be easier to visualise with a map. Countries in green will see their population grow, while those in orange and red will contract. Of course such projections are very difficult to make and other...

I have created 9 new maps based on the EU Commission's Eurobarometer poll results for Autumn 2019. I will compare them with other maps I made earlier. Democracy This map shows the percentage of the population that is satisfied with the way democracy works in their country at the moment (well...

I noticed that there wasn't any good map showing the percentage of Muslims in Europe by region (and not just by country), so I searched for the data and made one. Brussels had the highest percentage of Muslims (25%) of any non-Muslim country in Europe, followed by Marseille and Birmingham (both...

These two maps show the percentage of foreign-born residents by country in Europe and by state in the United States. In Europe, countries with the highest share of foreigners are Luxembourg (47%) and Switzerland (30%). They also happen to be the richest countries, so it's no surprise that they...

The United Nations has recently released its E-Government Survey 2020 in which they assess the availability of e-government platforms and digital services for citizens. I have made a map using their E-Government Development Index (EGDI). The index comprises three components: the OnlineServices...

Using data from Wikipedia for 2018, I have created maps of life expectancy by US State. I first compared overall male vs female life expectancy, as it did for Europe (also for 2018). I used the same colour scale for all maps so that the differences are immediately apparent. Let's first compare...

I have been re-reading Bill Bryson's Notes from a Big Country. Bill Bryson is an American (from Iowa) who moved to the UK. After 20 years of living in England with his English wife (and 4 kids) he moved with his family to New Hampshire for a few years. This book is a collection of articles he...

I have added new vehicle maps of Europe. I wanted to see if there was a correlation between road fatalities and the quality of roads or number of speeding fines per capita. There doesn't seem to be much correlation. Road fatalities correlate best with the Human Development Index. I suppose that...