Tuesday Map: Murder and traffic deaths shape countries

Worldmapper is a cool Web site that resizes countries on world maps based on a variety of health and other statistics. It recently added 118 maps to its collection. Below is a new map in which countries are puffed up or shriveled down based on the absolute number of people murdered there in 2002. Colombia, Nigeria, and the Philippines are huge, while Australia looks like a deflated balloon (which makes sense since a relatively small number of Aussies are living on such a large piece of land).

Many people may fear getting murdered, but being on the roads is actually more dangerous in many parts of the world. Murder caused 1.0 percent of deaths worldwide in 2002, but road accidents—the subject of the map below—caused 2.1 percent of deaths that year. In India, riding in a motor vehicle can be a near-death experience, and China doesn't look like a very safe place for road travel either.