illuminating science

Perhaps this isn’t of interest to the non-Aussies out there (and possible not even to the Aussies!) and it doesn’t have an awful lot to do with physics, but I the Australian Bureau of Statistics has some interesting facts about Australia online. For instance, there’s the marriage and divorce rates (did you know that 33% of marriages in Australia end in divorce after an average of 8 years?) Much more interesting, however, is the apopulation clock which displays a real time estimate of Australia’s population! Roughly every 2 minutes a person is born, roughly every 4 minutes a person dies, but there’s also a net gain of one international migrant every 4 minutes - so on average, the population goes up by one every two minutes. Neat, hey? It also means that if Australia was suddenly isolated (no-one in, no-one out) then we would still have an increasing population (at least for now - that may change as the aging population begins to, well, die off.)

But most horrifying of all, is that Google undersells our population by 400,000. Gah!