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Curzon
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Curzon

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May 8th, 2005

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The CIA World Factbook Rocks

The CIA World Factbook is available in its [near] entirety online, and I for one am incredibly grateful to our intelligence services for providing this as a free service. The Factbooks has long been the indispensible resource for concise information on demographic, economic, and political information for every country on the planet. Our tax dollars at work—in way where I’m actually proud of what’s being done.

Here’s just a sampling of just some questions to which the factbook answers:

> What is Peru’s per capita GDP?
> What are the political parties in South Korea?
> With what countries does Uganda have territorial disputes?
> What are Burma’s primary natural resources?
> What are the religions of Kazakhstan?
> What constitutes Croatia’s economy, explained in one paragraph?
> What is the unemployment rate in East Timor?
> What percentage of Pakistan is Baluchi?
> How much arable land does Japan have?
> What is the HIV/AIDS prevalence rate in Mongolia?
> What percentage of Yemen’s adult population is literate?
> What are the languages of Chad?
> Who is the US ambassador to Finland?
> What percentage of GDP does Canada spend on its military?
> What is the annual oil consumption of the Dominican Republic?

Isn’t it grand? All that and more is available at the CIA World Factbook.

Comments to this entry

Dusty
May 8, 2005
9:27 am
It's been a some time since I played with International Futures (IFs) program since I downloaded it. It's a huge program and my old computer is slow with it. But it has loads of data for all the countries. (There's a couple of bugs; I got it hot off the presses.) I never did get around to comparing whether IFs data is more comprehensive than the CIA Factbook data.

You're right, though, the Factbook is great. I just wish people would use standard parameters. It irritated me when fact checking, e.g., UN starving/malnourished children data, that the UN used 0-12 years while the CIA data does population counts for different brackets. (I think CIA brackets, like 0-14, are standard.)
Plunge
May 8, 2005
1:40 pm
I can see the battle now, CIA WorldFact Book in one corner, Wikipedia in the other.
Nathan
May 8, 2005
7:01 pm
If we're talking languages though, let's not forget the best place to get a truly comprehensive list of Chad's languages (check out the US list -- who knew we had so many Icelandic speakers?).
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