somewhat interesting figures

Often I read things in the morning which spur me to go about three hops deep into the internets in search of a few more bits of information.  The following is an example.

I think I read this on wikipedia somewhere:

There are something like 1.1 million US$millionaire households in canada. [http://www.barclayswealth.com/files/volume5.pdf].

Then I wondered how many people in Canada there were:

The population of Canada is something like 33million [http://www.statcan.gc.ca/edu/clock-horloge/edu06f_0001-eng.htm].

Then I wondered how big the Canadian population was:

The Canadian household has mean size something like 2.5 [http://www40.statcan.gc.ca/l01/cst01/famil53a-eng.htm].

Then I thought about doing the (incorrect) simple calculation to determine the ”average” number of Canadians living in households with an excess of 1.1 US$million in assets.

Then I thought about what it would take to do the correct calculation, obtaining the full tabulated sets of income census data …

… and then I stopped (or maybe my coffee high ran out).

This probably fits into the realm of coffee-fueled-geek-wet-dreams but it does seem like there is a need to move toward a browser specifically for data.  There must be applications that people use in specific fields but is there something attempting to be useful and consistent across fields?  I’m sure someone’s already written about this or is working on it but I’ve just started thinking about it and haven’t found anything.

An ideal application would allow one to browse data sets and pull them into a common form and do quick, fun calculations.  As is stands one would have to navigate various governement and instituational sites, transfer data via copy paste and then do something with it in your setting of choice.  Maybe there is a better way.  I need to find some data trufflers and see what they typically do.  Avoiding, the copy and pasting of various sorts of data is probably a pipe dream … but there must be some sort of free and public interface to each of the governement stats sites? No?  I’m pretty ignorant of all this stuff so I’m going to have a look around and maybe post anything I find.  I can imagine that these ideas are the basis of some theses from the various information sciences.