Global Suicide Rates

I’m a bit of a geek. I’ve been looking for some nice software that can draw world maps and display all kinds of fun bits of data. And today I found it, which was a day late for my birthday, but I’m counting it as a birthday present anyway.

In fact, this is two bits of software. I doubt any of my regular readers are going to be very interested, but for the record, these are a python library and script called world map tool and a java library and set of scripts called batik, which can convert SVG files to PNG. I don’t do java, so I’m just using the script bit of it.

I also wrote a quick and dirty bit of python to test it out, but it’s better left unseen. It doesn’t do anything very spectacular anyway – just generates a .css file to style the map based on data.

At least the data I used to test it out is characteristic of my blog – this is a selection of suicide rates from around the world as seen on Wikipedia and originally collected by the UN.

Click on this small version for the really big version. Countries without any data are grey; the redder a country is, the higher the suicide rate there. Not all the data is to be trusted as some countries are likely to significantly under-report.