Obviously the price of housing in Iceland has rocketed up in the past decade, but that does not necessarily say much in an inflation-stricken economy like ours. Here’s a chart where the housing prices have been corrected with respect to Inflation.

You can clearly see the boom years 2005-2008, and the fall afterwards. It is however interesting to see how that it took the prices almost 2 years to fell to their old levels. In fact this effect was largely due inflation, not decrease in actual price tags on houses. Perhaps the idea of “not losing too much on your investment” did have some effect.

The data comes from hagstofa.is and skra.is.

Current (November 2011) EU positions in the Icelandic Parliament PaBaMapa CC-BY-SA 3.0.

Iceland is currently engaged in accession talks with the EU. However, in fact only a minority of the Members of the Icelandic Parliament, Alþingi, support actual membership. The above picture show the current standings in these matter, based on a) votes in the parliament b) official party programs and c) most recent statements by the MPs in question.

Iceland voted on beginning accession talks two and a half years ago with 33 votes to 28, with 2 abstentions. (There are 63 seats in the Icelandic Parliament). Since then Lilja Mósesdóttir who voted in favor of the talks has withdrawn her support, Þorgerður Katrín who abstained has stated that she wants to finish the talks and two MPs from the movement who voted against the talks, now favor finishing them.

A part of the Left-Green Movement voted to begin the accession talks despite opposing membership as a part of a coalition deal with the Social Democrats (Alliance). Some of them have since reitarated this position. Thus, for the moment there seems to be a majority in the parliament for continuing with the talks (35-28), but not for actually joining the EU.

Where People called "Pawel" live in Reykjavik. PaBaMapa CC-BY-SA 3.0.

There are quite a few Poles in Reykjavik. There’s a general feeling that they are not evenly distributed along the city. Looking up my first name in the Icelandic Phone Book one can see that most live in the centre (post codes 101 and 105) as well as in the Breiðholt district. Interestingly enough, there a whole neighbourhoods, most notably Grafarvogur and Fossvogur with no Pawels listed.

Pawel is in fact a very convenient name to choose for this purpose, since it is one of the most common names as well as being unique to the Polish language.

The map data is taken from OpenStreetMap.

If you group the results of football matches by goal difference the seem to be following a bell-type of distribution which is slightly skewed in favor of the home team. The following applet allows you to check on how each of the Teams in the Premiership fared agains another one in the seasons 1993-2011. (These are Premiership matches only, not FA Cup, Champions League etc.)

Blue are home team victories. Red are visitors’ victories. The small number in the corner of each rectangle represents the number of games.

The data comes from http://www.football-data.co.uk/.

PaBaMapa. CC-BY-SA 3.0.

If you have read the book Freakonomics, there’s a claim there that people on the whole are rather more conservative when it comes down to picking a name for a boy, whereas they get more experimental with girls.

Here in Iceland there is, in fact, a special committee, Mannanafnanefnd, which has to approve all “new” names. Based on the list of available decisions on the committee’s website, we can see that there is in fact no “Gender Gap” when it comes down to innovative naming in Iceland. Out of around three hundred applications to register a new name in the last three years 49% were applications for new boys names.

In the previous post, we showed the current migration trends involving Iceland. It is interesting to see how much the situation has changed in the last four years. This is how the situation looked in 2006.

Net migration in/out of Iceland in 2006. PaBaMapa CC-BY-SA 3.0. Map by OpenStreetMap and Contributors CC-BY-SA 3.0.