Akkam’s RazorI don't do personal that often, which is why I've never become a D-tier internet celebrity.

This Scientific American article highlights the oft-observed (from space) link between nighttime illumination and prosperous economies (which the usual comparison being the Western world versus North Korea.

Since that time, satellite imagery of nighttime lights has proved useful as a piecemeal method to measure development upon our planet. Static snapshots can reveal stark disparities, like the brightly glowing prosperity of South Korea beneath the darkness of the impoverished, totalitarian north. Gradual changes can be discerned, too, like when the intensity of Soviet-bloc countries’ nighttime lights slowly increased after the USSR’s fall. All such observations to date have been quite crude, constrained by the fact that most of the data comes from one low-resolution source, the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP), an aging network of satellites formerly operated by the US Air Force but now controlled by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).  Read more...