Population Pyramids of the World in SVG using Raphaël.js

This project has been inspired by a Hacks/Hackers meeting in Brussels. After the meeting, I looked after interesting data sets and found out that it was not easy to find population pyramids for every country in the world, while the needed data was available on one UN website.

There a lots of interesting points to see in there :

- one can easily spot the future public retirement plans problem in Europe (with more and more elderly people ). See here for example : http://populationpyramid.net/?country=Belgium&year=2050

- I am still wondering what is happening in countries like Qatar in 2010 (http://populationpyramid.net/?country=Qatar&year=2010) How come there are so many more men than women ?

- Near 1950 in Europe, you can spot the "dent" made by WW2 in the population, plus the baby boom. Example : http://populationpyramid.net/?country=France&year=1950

- It is already interesting to compare the shape of the pyramid for countries like Afghanistan in 2010 (http://populationpyramid.net/?country=Afghanistan&year=2...) VS the US in 2010 (http://populationpyramid.net/?country=United_States_of_Ameri...). One can easily see the difference in development, to say the least.

And so on...

Please label the axes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_pyramid It typically consists of two back-to-back bar graphs, with the population plotted on the X-axis and age on the Y-axis, one showing the number of males and one showing females in a particular population in five-year age groups (also called cohorts). Males are conventionally shown on the left and females on the right, and they may be measured by raw number or as a percentage of the total population.

http://xkcd.com/833/

kb

Hey, would it be possible to get these with absolute scale, not only the relative percentage? It will be interesting to see processes such as "baby-boom" over time.