We had a team building event on Friday. We went to Art by Fire in Issaquah to do some glass blowing. I had a great time. The people working there were very friendly. They helped each of us make a small ornamental orb. We got to add color to the clear glass, put in the initial air bubble, expand and shape it into its final form.

We even get to keep the ornament as a momento of the great team we are building.

Take a look at the glass-blowing pictures.

The surface of the Earth constitutes 510.072 million sq km. Of this, 70.8% (361.132 million sq km) is water. The remaining 29.2% (148.94 million sq km) is land. This is around 16x the size of the United States.

Interestingly, only 13.31% of this land is arable, or 19.82 million sq km. Of this, 2,770,980 sq km (1.86% of total, 13% of arable) are irrigated.

Only 4.84% of the world speaks English as a first language. For comparison:
Mandarin: 13.7%
Spanish: 5%
Arabic: 3.2%
Hindi: 2.8%
Japanese: 2%

33% of the world is Christian. 20% Muslim, 13% Hindu. 6% Buddhist.

18% of the world cannot read, of which 11.9% of the 18% live in: India, China, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Indonesia and Egypt.

Average GDP: $10,000. 40.7% of the world is in agriculture, 20.5% in industry and 38.8% in services. Services make up 64% of the world’s wealth, agriculture 4%.

We consume 83 million barrels of oil per day, or 30 billion per year. There are 1,293 billion barrels of proven oil reserves. This means there is a 43 year supply of oil — assuming we find no more nor consume no more oil.

There are 172.8 trillion cu m of proven natural gas reserves. We are consuming 2.819 trillion per year, giving us a 61 year supply.

There are 2.1 billion cellphones in the world (1.2billion land lines).

From the CIA’s World Fact Handbook.

About 1 in 10,000 teenage men commit suicide every year. This is about 5x higher than teenage women. There was an 8% rise in the suicide rate the year after the government started putting warnings on anti-depressants about it causing suicide.

That concludes your random factoid for the day!