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Today's Topics
Hello and welcome to the first Chartr newsletter of 2020 - we hope to see you every Wednesday & Friday this year.
Today we're charting about:
- Tensions between Iran and the US have escalated dramatically - is this all about oil again?
- What's the latest diet craze that people will be trying this year?
- We put into context just how enormous the Australian bushfires have been.
The numbers behind the numbers:
3 charts, 828 words, 4 mins 45 seconds to read.
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Iran Strikes Back
Iran has now retaliated for the killing of general Qasem Soleimani, launching 22 missiles at 2 US assets in Iraq. Here are the other numbers we know so far:
- There have been 0 casualties reported from the missile strikes, although this could change.
- There are approximately 6000 American and 400 British troops in Iraq.
- There were more than 170 casualties in a plane crash in Iran, including 63 Canadians. This incident has so far been reported to be totally unrelated to the Iran-US tensions, and instead has been blamed on an engine failure.
What happens from here is hard to predict, but the ball appears to be back in the US' court. Iran's foreign minister Javad Zarif tweeted that Iran had "concluded" its self-defense and that Iran was not seeking "escalation or war".
In the wake of the attacks, the oil price has spiked to almost $70/barrel. That's a fairly typical reaction when tensions flare up in the Middle East, because markets anticipate oil supply disruptions.
Many still believe the Iraq war was fought over oil. True or not, it's hard to say the same about this confrontation so far.
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Thanks in part to the shale revolution, the US has become significantly less dependent on imported oil in the last 15 years. This data from the EIA, plotted above, shows that the US has actually become a net exporter of oil and petroleum products.
Technically speaking, a majority of those exports are in the "petroleum products" category and not necessarily raw crude oil (read in more detail here about that) - but it's still been a remarkable transformation.
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New Year, Same Resolutions
Every year millions of people resolve themselves to change something about their life. The majority of those people usually decide it should be something to do with their health. The most popular New Year's resolutions are: eating better, exercising more or losing weight.
It's no surprise then that people around this time of year are looking for new diets, regimes or shortcuts to get in better shape. We've crunched the numbers and think that intermittent fasting (IF) is probably one of the fastest growing diet regimes out there. 5 years ago there were 620 people who followed the IF subreddit (kind of like a forum for those not familiar with reddit). Today there are over 500,000.
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IF is pretty simple. You allocate yourself a specific time of day in which you allow yourself to eat - typically 6 or 8 hours - and then during the rest of the day you consume nothing but fluids (mostly water).
Most who do IF seem to have their eating period from midday to 6pm or 8pm, which basically just means skipping breakfast and having a big lunch and dinner.
It's popularity has increased significantly as multiple celebrities, including Jennifer Aniston recently, have come out and said that they do IF.
So does it work?
General consensus seems to be that it does - but that it's hard and you probably won't see much (if any) progress if you eat really unhealthy foods during your eating window. A scientific study from Germany last year stated that: "Intermittent fasting helps lose weight and promotes health. However, it is not superior to conventional calorie restriction diets". Might be worth a shot.
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The bushfires in Australia have devastated towns and livelihoods not only in the state of New South Wales, but across the entire country, with footage that looks like it's from an apocalyptic movie, rather than the real world.
To get a sense of just how big these fires have been we've mapped the total burned area (which is around 14 million acres) onto the Eastern US. The results are pretty staggering; the bushfires could theoretically have entirely burned through the cities of Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington - not to mention pretty much everything in between.
What about the animals?
On top of the human impact the broader ecological fallout has been immense. The latest estimates from the University of Sydney is that approximately 800 million animals have been killed as a result of the fires.
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Data Snacks
1) A 20-year-old model has raised $1m for the Australian bushfires... by selling nude pictures of herself for $10 a pop.
2) Remember HTC? The phone company that briefly competed alongside Samsung, Apple and Huawei? Well in 2019 they booked just $333m of revenue, down 87% on their haul from 2017.
3) Ricky Gervais hosted the Golden Globes for the 5th time, and shock, he was controversial once again. Watch it here if you want to be offended / amused.
4) SpaceX launched 60 more mini-satellites into space on Monday, as part of its plan to build a huge web of satellites to create a global broadband network.
5) A man in the UK has been jailed for life after being found guilty of 136 instances of rape, making him the most prolific rapist in British legal history.
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