When Laura moved in, the only decorations she brought for the walls were maps. She was a bit worried I would think it was weird to have a bunch of maps on the walls, until she arrived and saw that my room was full of maps too.

There are a total of eleven maps decorating our apartment. We love them and consult them regularly to settle geographical trivia disputes. That said, I have a new toy that I wanted to share.

NationMaster is an amazing site for national statistics. You can compare all sorts of serious (coal reserves) and fun (roller coasters per capita) stats. It’s like the Economist’s Pocket World in Figures book but ten times as cool or the CIA World Factbook in a searchable database.

Some of our favorite facts:

• People trust Swedes! Swedish companies are the world’s least-likely to be perceived as paying bribes.
• The average person in the United Kingdom drinks as much tea as 23 Italians.
• Kazakhstan is the world’s largest landlocked country.
• The average woman in New Zealand doesn’t give birth until she is nearly 30 years old.
• Nepal’s flag is the only one in the world that isn’t square or rectangular.
• Want to go to the United States? Try going to Albania first. Albania has more U.S visa lottery winners per capita than anywhere else in the world.
• The fourteen unhappiest countries are all in Eastern Europe.
• No winter olympic medals have ever been won by African or South American countries.
• More than a third of the world’s airports are in the United States of America.

Man, facts are great. Can’t get enough? Head over to StateMaster to find, you guessed it, statistics about the United States.