Go to Fast Forward
Go to
Technology Post
Stat in the Hat
Whether you need a quick number to back up an argument, a footnote for a term paper or just some phenomenally uninteresting cocktail-party conversation material, there's nothing like a government statistic.Conveniently, the Feds spawn said statistics at a prodigious rate — but, inconveniently, scatter them across thousands of different Web sites. Enter FedStats, a gateway to all this infobabble.
The FedStats site is half A to Z directory (actually, A to W, minus K and Q) of information, half search engine. The former is more useful, as entering anything but super-specific terms in the search engine will drown you in data.
But, oh, what data! Did you know that this great land of ours was blessed by $916,232,000 in chickens in 1995? That D.C., at $34,932, boasted the nation's highest per capita personal income in 1996? That 19.9 percent of Mexican-American men had high serum cholesterol levels between 1988 and 1991? You get the picture.
To top off the fun with numbers, the über stat-geek bible, the Statistical Abstract of the United States, is only a click away from FedStats (although you'll need Adobe's free Acrobat software to view it).
— Rob Pegoraro (rob@twp.com)
