Hello!

Back in 2012, John and I had the bright idea to send out a survey to try and better understand what we were doing on the internet, what people wanted us to do, and who made up our audience. We’ve done it (nearly) every year since! Now, if the “Nerdfighteria Census” were a person, it would be a sixth grader.

That’s both exciting and devastating! Why does time continue to pass?! It’s getting pretty overwhelming!!!

Now…a lot of…stuff happened last year 😅 so this one is a little late, but the new census is out today!! The insight from the census is so so so valuable, so thank you to everyone who is able to fill it out!!

Hank

This Week in Stuff

• Is John done writing YA novels? Maybe. He talks more about it, and the long journey to a Turtles All the Way Down movie, with Vanity Fair.

• During a visit to their parents’ house, a Reddit user spotted a fossilized human jaw bone (we think) inside travertine stone tile and posted it to r/fossils. Folks at Architectural Digest spoke with experts about why this isn’t actually that strange.

• Two swans in Toronto, Mango and Charlotte, had to be separated because of an injury to Mango’s beak. He fully recovered, and you can watch their very sweet reunion video.

• National Geographic shared a video of daredevil Emperor Penguin chicks jumping off a 50-foot cliff. (They’re all fine.)

• A little April snowstorm resulted in the tulips in Hank’s yard wearing little snow hats. DFTBARachel had some Photoshop fun with it.

Please send us stuff you think we should feature to [email protected]

National poverty lines differ widely between countries

_{Esteban Ortiz-Ospina}

Global economic inequality is very large. We see this in the differences between average incomes across countries. In this chart, average income is plotted along the horizontal axis and measured by GDP per capita. While the average income is $1,750 in Ethiopia, in Switzerland it’s around $69,000 — this is after adjusting for differences in cost of living.

Because standards of living are so different, richer countries set their own national poverty lines much higher, to measure poverty in a way that is informative and relevant to their citizens' incomes.

The scatter plot captures this insight. As we can see, richer countries (higher GDP per capita along the horizontal axis) tend to set much higher national poverty lines (higher position along the vertical axis).

In Switzerland, a person is considered in poverty if they live on less than the equivalent of roughly $36 per day; in Ethiopia, the national poverty line is around $2 per day.

Our World in Data is a UK-based non-profit organization that publishes research and data to make progress against the world’s largest problems. You can find more of their data insights here.

MERCH DROP!!

It’s been forever since we’ve done any kind of merch drop! You can finally rep the Red Deacons or check out the “We’re Here Because…” spiral from Rachel Calderon Navarro and a poster of John’s “The Test” monologue from the first episode of Crash Course illustrated by Linda Liu.

A Forest Made by You

We asked for tree art last week. Here are a few of those submissions! Thank you to Coco, Griffin, Michaela, C, Katelyn, Theana, Avi, Victoria, and James.

This Week at Complexly

Ravens are opportunistic killers who will eat almost anything (including our trash for at least 30,000 years). They've tagged along with us to places where finding meals is not easy and this is where things get bizarre...

Some Games to Play!

Nerdy Connections (by Complexly)

SpellCheck.xyc (by Answer in Progress.)

If you post your results on social media, we’d love it if you post a link for folks to subscribe to “We’re Here” (https://werehere.beehiiv.com/subscribe)

And that’s the end of the newsletter!

Thank you for reading! We’ll see you again next Friday. In the meantime, we’d love for you to write a poem and send it to us. We can’t wait to read them!