Shape of the world

Britain's Daily Mail has an interesting piece that looks at the shape of the world, when countries are blow up or shrunk according to how they rank in a variety of criteria such as HIV prevalence, house prices, toy exports/imports or ... alcohol consumption:

“The average Western European drinks over a third more alcohol than the average person in any other area on earth. In some places there is practically no alcohol consumption, which is why many Middle Eastern countries are not visible on this map.

Ugandans drink the most alcohol per adult, closely followed by Luxembourg, the Czech Republic and Ireland.

The map shows the proportion of worldwide alcohol drunk in 2001. It does not take population density into account, so some countries, such as Australia, are unexpectedly shrivelled, while Britain is particularly bloated even though we not in the top ten. ”

I'm not (currently) fond of drinking to excess myself, but I am a tad miffed we didn't do better. Still, they are very interesting maps, and well worth taking a peek at.