Following og last post, here’s a video showing the Icelandic Krona vs the Danish one for the past 30 years.
Archive for Animations
The Constant Fall of the Icelandic Krona
There has been an interesting discussion in Iceland in the past days about our National Currency, the Icelandic Krona. This has to do with a recent claim, e.g. by the Nobel prize winner Krugman, that the post-crunch super-devaluation of the krona has in fact helped us keeping the unemployment levels lower than in countries like Ireland.
Of course this comes at a price. The Krona has essentially been “protected” by different types of currency restrictions for most of its lifespan. This is not exactly a healthy environment for businesses to flourish. As this fine article by Þórlindur Kjartansson (in Icelandic) points out, the Krona has lost 99.95% of its value with respect to the Danish Krona since the two separated. Keeping Danish cash in your drawer amounts to 11% interest rate a year in Icelandic Kroner.
Here’s a short history of the Icelandic Krona for the past 30 years.
The Icelandic Krona agains the Danish Krona. 1980-2011. PaBaMapa: CC-BY-SA.
The data comes from the Central Bank of Iceland. See: http://www.sedlabanki.is/?PageID=37
Now here’s a small applet showing the collapse of the Krona through the years:
[Click on the applet window to reset the graphics.]
Category: Animations, Politics /
The Urbanization of Iceland
Iceland is not unique when it comes down to urbanization, what is interesting though is to see that most of the flux has been towards a single city, Reykjavik. 300 years ago, there where virtually no cities in the country, a century ago the country was still one with a very strong rural population. Throughout the last century we have however seen a steady and strong influx of people from countryside to the capital, whereas other areas have lost their share og the overall population.
Now, if we let the area of each circle represent the population of each region in 1911, then this is what we get:
Iceland in 1911
The raw data goes like this:
Capital Area:15469
Reykjanes:2541
West Iceland:10351
Western Fjords:13169
North-West: 9103
North-East: 11911
East: 9617
South: 13500.
A Century later, the situation is quite different:
Iceland in 2011
Here we have stacked up the circles, giving the years with positive growth a blue color, and the ones with population decrease a red one. The corresponding numbers can be found in the the following Excel sheet: popice_pbmp.
Finally, here is a video showing the entire animation.
The underlying map can be found on wikimedia commons. The data is taken and compiled from hagstofa.is, the Statistical Office of Iceland.
The Voter-Turnout in the Polish Parliamentary Elections of 2011
This is short video showing how (frequently) the voters in the Polish elections of 2011 voted. The darker the area, the more people voted.
This is based on data from the Polish Electoral Commission. You can see that the people in the cities generally vote more than folks from the countryside. Also, looking at the time-series throughout the day you can tell that the traditionally conservative south-east voted rather early whereas the city dwellers took more time.
The colors are relative in each frame, which explains the lightening of some areas as the day passes by. The maps where taken from the official electoral site pkw.gov.pl (with permission, although I’m not sure I needed one). The video was mostly done using GIMP.
Travelling the Ring Road
It is a duty of every inhabitant of Iceland to travel the ring road every once in a while. If you are not planning to do that during your next visit, you are excused, as long as you watch this cute little video.
Map data CCBYSA 2011 OpenStreetMap.org contributors.
