1967-1976 - rock music's miracle decade?

Henrik Franzon is a 34 year-old Swedish statistician who's spent the last ten years crunching lists, and in particular those weird quantifications of the unquantifiable, critics' lists. Franzon has taken all the music critics' lists he can find, fed them into his computer, and come up with a website called Acclaimed Music, a list of lists which lays out "the 3000 most recommended albums and songs of all time".
From 1957-1966 there are 10 albums that reach the Top 100 most acclaimed. The artists who make them are Miles Davis, James Brown, Bob Dylan, The Beatles, Otis Redding, John Coltrane and The Beach Boys.
1967-1976 is the miracle decade -- 48 albums that reach the top 100 are produced. I won't mention them all, but they're made by people like the Velvet Underground, The Beatles and various Beatles solo projects, The Doors, Neil Young, The Rolling Stones, David Bowie, Joni Mitchell, Pink Floyd, Stevie Wonder, and so on.
1977-1986 produces 18 albums that reach the Top 100 most-acclaimed. Punk has shaken things up; the critically-acclaimed albums are from The Sex Pistols, Television, The Clash, Elvis Costello. There's a Cold Wave -- Bowie, Kraftwerk, Joy Division. Then there's 80s stuff like Michael Jackson, REM, Prince, The Jesus and Mary Chain and The Smiths.
You might expect it all to be downhill after this, but surprisingly the 1987-1996 decade does a little better than the one before it, with 20 albums considered vital by critics. Big names: Prince, U2, REM and Guns n Roses, Public Enemy and De La Soul reprazenting for rap, Sonic Youth, The Pixies and Nirvana bringing grunge, Massive Attack and Portishead inventing Trip Hop, Primal Scream and My Bloody Valentine and Oasis doing the Creation label proud, and Beck innovating in California. Surprisingly, this decade's diversity yields more classics than punk's energy did.
But from there the decline is rapid. In the pathetic bathos of 1997-2006 just three albums can match the classics of the past, say the critics. Even worse, it's all distinctly retro. We get Radiohead retreading prog, and The Strokes and The White Stripes going "back to basics" with primal garage guitar rock.
From Click Opera

Arms and the Man

According to the 2007 Small Arms Survey report by the Geneva-based Graduate Institute of International Studies:
The United States has 90 guns for every 100 citizens, making it the most heavily armed society in the world.
U.S. citizens own 270 million of the world's 875 million known firearms. About 4.5 million of the 8 million new guns manufactured worldwide each year are purchased in the United States.
India had the world's second-largest civilian gun arsenal, with an estimated 46 million firearms outside law enforcement and the military, though this represented just four guns per 100 people there.
China, ranked third with 40 million privately held guns, had 3 firearms per 100 people.
Germany, France, Pakistan, Mexico, Brazil and Russia were next in the ranking of country's overall civilian gun arsenals.
On a per-capita basis, Yemen had the second most heavily armed citizenry behind the United States, with 61 guns per 100 people, followed by Finland with 56, Switzerland with 46, Iraq with 39 and Serbia with 38.
France, Canada, Sweden, Austria and Germany were next, each with about 30 guns per 100 people, while many poorer countries often associated with violence ranked much lower. Nigeria, for instance, had just one gun per 100 people.
The report, which relied on government data, surveys and media reports to estimate the size of world arsenals, estimated there were 650 million civilian firearms worldwide, and 225 million held by law enforcement and military forces.
Five years ago, the Small Arms Survey had estimated there were a total of 640 million firearms globally.
Only about 12 percent of civilian weapons are thought to be registered with authorities.