Statistics Canada should spam the feds with this TED talk.

Good lord, this presentation is remarkable.  He’s a very likable and articulate speaker for one.  But the sheer amount of data, the communicative ability of the graphics, the generation of interesting hypotheses about world trends over decades…

Best of all, it’s all a more or less a pretty veil for the actual message: that publicly funded data is incredibly important (oh okay, it’s  also a plug for the insane data visualization software). 

(Thanks for the link, Tony!)