vision of humanity

A bit of news that was recently in the top lists of digg and drudgereport... New Zealand is the most peaceful country in the world according to the Vision of Humanity index. Australia's not doing too bad at 19th. The United States was 83rd (out of 144, 61th from the bottom), right between Kazakhstan and Bolivia.

B- history student here, all I remembered of Bolivia was that La Paz was the highest capital (did a report on it in 3rd grade) and it was a narco-state (no report on that one). Some quick googling turned up some neat pictures of Bolivia though. Check this out:


And La Paz's skyline:


The Salar de Uyuni, the world's largest salt flat:


Will have to put that on the places to go...

Off topic, but in case you were ever wondering, here's the difference between Australia and New Zealand's flags. First Australia:



And then New Zealand:


Australia's flag has the commonwealth star on the left (6 points for the 6 states and the territories). Then on the right is the Southern Cross (only seen from the southern hemisphere). New Zealand only has four stars because it marks the four directions of the compass.