2016.10.12 edition
Presidential newspaper endorsements. Noah Veltman has collected all presidential endorsements (and non-endorsements) of 100+ major newspapers from 1980 (Reagan vs. Carter) to 2016. You can view the data as a spreadsheet, or as a formatted table.
Forest cover. The World Bank keeps statistics on total forest coverage per country and worldwide. (Between 1990 and 2015, that worldwide total declined from 41.3 million to 40.0 million square kilometers.) More than 98% of all land area in Suriname was forest in 2015, according to a related dataset — the highest proportion of any country. [h/t Tariq Khokhar + Max Galka]
Performances and exhibitions. The New York Philharmonic’s performance history dataset contains “all known concerts” — more than 20,000 of ‘em — played by the Philharmonic and the groups with which it has merged (e.g., the New York Symphony). Last month, the Museum of Modern Art published a dataset containing “all of the known exhibitions held at the museum from 1929 through 1989” — 1,788 in total. The first featured Cézanne, Gauguin, Seurat, and van Gogh. [h/t Stacy-Marie Ishmael + Miriam Posner + Chad Weinard]
Computer memory prices. John C. McCallum has collected the advertised prices of computer memory over time. In 1957, one byte of memory cost $392, or the equivalent of $411 million per megabyte; today, one metabyte costs about a third of a cent. [h/t Jorge Luis]
“Murray, I think you dropped New Zealand’s mineral exports for ‘08-‘09.” You don’t have to like Flight of the Conchords to enjoy New Zealand’s national statistics website, though it couldn’t hurt. The country publishes data on a broad range of topics, including abortion, work stoppages, the Māori census, and, of course, exports. In ‘08 and ‘09, the country exported NZD $3.5 billion and NZD $2.4 billion, respectively, of ”mineral fuels, mineral oils and products of their distillation; bituminous substances; mineral waxes.” [h/t Drew Ivan]