NOTE 2009: This is very old, and I doubt it is anything you want ... there must be better ways, if anyone wishes to access such information these days.

Here’s a little bit of MovableType business, well worth its High Intensity Time Wasting status! I was browsing the MovableType Help Forums, and came across this thread. Sam wanted, as it turned out, to have a counter on his site that would retrieve the current world population, and then be able to use it in something like this:

So, being a bit of a narcissist myself, I thought I would benefit from being regularly reminded of my actual ordinariness, and thus I threw together some World Population code to enable the above demo. The first thing is a MovableType world census plugin which enables a <$MTworldPop$> tag that scrapes a government website for the current world population. Then there is some javascript for updating the population and doing some simple calcualtions.

Read more if you want to take a look at the code and play with this wonderfully frivolous distraction. Maybe you can even put it to some serious use besides the war on narcissism!