Shortly after Christian Dior premiered his spring/summer collection in 1947, the editor of Harper’s Bazaar approached the designer, shocked, and said, “Why, Mr Dior, it’s such a new look.” The name stuck. As the above graph - which shows the number of dresses by different 20th-century designers on display at the V&A - indicates, Mr Dior’s influence on the fashion world is unparalleled. A total of 29 Dior dresses, spanning 33 years, are on show in the museum’s esteemed textile and dress collection, an achievement challenged only by Yves Saint Laurent, who has 26. (Even Chanel, covering twice the number of years, only manages 14.) Having your dress displayed by the V&A is, of course, the equivalent of being inducted into the fashion hall of fame. “The piece must be virtuosic - made to the highest standards of design quality, and show an exceptional degree of craftsmanship,” says Eleri Lynn, a curator at the museum.

Among the more famous pieces to be immortalised by the V&A are Yves Saint Laurent’s black trouser suit - “Le Smoking” - from 1966 and all nine inches of Vivienne Westwood’s “Super-elevated Ghillie” platform heels, which were too high even for Naomi Campbell: she tottered and fell while wearing them on the catwalk in 1993.

PS A big thank you to the data team at the V&A, who helped us source the data for this piece. After a splendid overhaul, the museum’s entire collection is now fully searchable via this brilliant digital archive (which was built on Django).

The 3.5km outer wall encloses a space that The Guinness Book of Records recognises by some margin as the world’s largest building. Clinching third place - we skipped Airbus’s factory in Toulouse - is the Aerium, just south of Berlin: a 5.5 million cubic metre edifice originally designed as an airship hangar, but which now houses a most unlikely tropical paradise. Underneath its 107 metre-high dome can be found a rainforest with 50,000 plants, a giant lagoon more than 1sq km in area (and heated year round to a cosy 25C) and a hot-air balloon riding facility.

It easily eclipses the Vehicle Assembly Building where Nasa builds its rockets. But our favourite big building fact still concerns the home-grown O2 arena, and is this: were we to take this deceptively large dome, turn it on its head, and set the full might of Niagara Falls to gush into it, at peak flow, it would take 12.5 minutes to fill.

This is the graph the record industry doesn’t want you to see.

It shows the fate of the three main pillars of music industry revenue - recorded music, live music, and PRS revenues (royalties collected on behalf of artists when their music is played in public) over the last 5 years.

We’ve broken each category into two sub-categories so that, for any chunk of revenue - recorded music sales, for instance - you can see the percentage that goes to the artist, and the percentage that goes elsewhere. (In the case of recorded music, the lion’s share of revenue goes to the record label; in the case of live, the promoter takes a cut etc.)

Hopefully, this analysis - and there’s more on the nuts and bolts of our method below - sheds some factual light on the claims and counter-claims that are paranoically sweeping across the music industry establishment, not least that put forward by the singer Lily Allen in this paper recently - and the BPI - that artists are losing out as a result of the fall in sales of recorded of music.

The most immediate revelation, of course, is that at some point next year revenues from gigs payable to artists will for the first time overtake revenues accrued by labels from sales of recorded music.

Why live revenues have grown so stridently is beyond the scope of this article, but our data - compiled from a PRS for Music report and the BPI - make two things clear: one, that the growth in live revenue shows no signs of slowing and two, that live is by far and away the most lucrative section of industry revenue for artists themselves, because they retain such a big percentage of the money from ticket sales.

(It’s often claimed that live revenues are only/mostly benefitting so-called ‘heritage acts’. Unfortunately, the data doesn’t shed any light on this because live revenues are not broken down by type of act, gig size or ticket price.)

An even more striking thing, perhaps, emerges in this second graph, namely that revenues accrued by artists themselves have in fact risen over the past 5 years, despite the fall in record sales. (All the blue bars in the chart above represent revenues that go directly to artists. As you can see, the ‘blue total’ has risen noticeably.) This is mostly because of live revenues, but also because of the growing amount collected by the PRS on behalf of artists, which accounts for a much bigger chunk of industry revenues than most people realise.

(PRS revenues in fact break down into 4 categories - Broadcast and Online, Public Performance, Mechanical, International. You can explore this in more detail in this spreadsheet, which contains all our data.)

It’s interesting too that, overall, industry revenues have grown in the period - though admittedly not by much - which arguably adds strength to the notion that, when the BPI releases its annual report claiming how much ‘the music industry’ has suffered from the growth in illegal file-sharing, what it perhaps should be saying is how much the record labels have suffered.

For other people in the industry, not least artists, the future arguably holds more promise.

A couple of notes about our methods: the data, as pointed out, comes from the PRS and the BPI. We are grateful to the PRS in particular for helping us with a model to work out what percentage of a particular chunk of industry revenue was likely to be returned to artists. In the case of recorded music, we used an average 90/10 per cent split between labels/artists. In the case of live we used a 90/10 split between artists/promoters.

We hit one major snag. The PRS report gives a figure for annual live music revenues but it does not indicate what percentage of that goes to venues. (Before doing the split for live music revenues between artist and promoter, you first need to take out the percentage that goes to the venue.) We asked several big concert promoters and venue managers - AEG Europe, Carling Academy, and the PRS itself - what percentage of gig revenue one could reasonably assume, on average, went to the venue, and none would make an estimate. The closest we came to an answer was a remark from a senior industry source said ‘only a small percentage of live goes to venues’. That’s the best we had to work with.

We’ve therefore done the above calculations on the assumption that 10 per cent of live revenues go to the venue, but in these two graphs, we show how the situation would change if that figure rose to 20 per cent.

We would welcome any feedback on a more accurate figure to use for the venue’s share of live revenues, and any more general feedback on our methods.

The TV industry may long have been trying to fight off the predatory might of YouTube and other web-based distractions, but there was always one trump card it held up its sleeve: it was a damn sight nicer watching video on that big black box in the corner of the room. No longer.

As the above graph - which plots screen size (the number of inches from corner to corner) against display resolution (the number of pixels on the screen) - shows, computer screens now easily compete with TVs on size. As for picture quality, see the horizontal line showing 1920 x 1080? That’s the most advanced form of HDTV currently available.

Now look at the extent to which the new Apple iMac exceeds that level. That means that, as well as easily handling HDTV, the iMac can also better display photographs from the highest quality digital cameras - which are much too detailed for most screens.

Add to this that the vast majority of the BBC’s and, as of two weeks ago, Channel 4’s content is online, and you have the makings of a genuine living room revolution. There’s just the small matter of price.

At 27 inches, the iMac may be nearly as big as the current, top-selling 32in TVs, but the £1,349 price tag means it’s £1,000 more expensive, too.

Larger graph

Over the course of its 97-year history, the British Board of Film Classification has classified 65, 770 films. Here’s our attempt to condense that vast and intriguing history into a single page. (”The gradual retreat of British prudishness”, you might call it.)

Each vertical “slice” shows one year’s worth of films, so you see, for instance, that as late as the mid-Twenties, as many as 50 per cent of films were being rejected as too immoral. Among the 43 grounds for deletion outlined in the BBFC’s early charter were: “situations accentuating delicate marital relations”; “subjects dealing with India, in which British officers are seen in an odious light”; and “the effects of vitriol throwing”, dousing one’s enemy in acid evidently having become a popular means of exacting revenge among ex-lovers.

The first “restricted” classification, X, didn’t come until 1951, and the era of the BBFC requesting cuts to films - almost all of the Sixties Bond films were cut for having too much sexual innuendo - didn’t start to ebb away until the Eighties.

The odd challenge has still flared up, though. Scandal, a 1989 account of the Profumo affair, narrowly got away with an 18 despite a shot of an erect penis in the background of an orgy scene. The member was deemed to be sufficiently obscured.

Many thanks to the BBFC and their wonderfully resourceful site. We’ve popped all the data in a spreadsheet in case you’d like to play with it.

Over 40, and still not delivered your “great idea”? You may be too late. A sample of the 100 greatest inventions of the 20th century, as compiled by a patent expert at the British Library, suggests that it is in their thirties that men (and it is invariably men) are struck by inspiration. Curiously, happenstance can be just as much the mother of invention as necessity.

Consider the American engineer Percy Spencer, who, trying to help the British develop radar, walked past a magnetron one day with a chocolate bar in his pocket, found it had melted, and conceived of the microwave. Art Fry, an adhesives expert in Minnesota - and keen chorister - was frustrated that the scraps of paper he used as bookmarks in his hymnal would always fall out. One day, a colleague made some weak glue by mistake, and thus was born the Post-it Note.

There is, evidently, an under-representation of women - though it’s not for want of involvement in the process. In 1906, Bess Cary, the soon-to-be fiancée of a little-known American inventor, wanted an ice cream while picknicking on an island in Lake Okauchee. Her beloved was dispatched two miles to fetch one in a rowing boat - and he promptly had the idea for an outboard motor.

The search, it seems, may be at an end. Two months ago, we compared the cost of several high-value objects - the Gherkin, a Trident nuclear missile, truffles, etc - by their weight, and discovered that diamonds, at £34,450,000 per kg, comfortably held off Raphael’s Madonna of the Pinks as the world’s most expensive stuff.

So lively was the discussion about what other things we might have included in our list that we decided to do a second round and found, to our amazement, an item more than 100 times as expensive as the world’s most precious stone.

The Treskilling Yellow is a fantastically rare stamp dating from the first issue of postage stamps in Sweden in 1855. It is all the more prized because it was issued in error - a printing malfunction caused a small number of the first 3-skilling banco stamps, which were supposed to be blue, to come out yellowy orange. The only one known still to exist has changed hands seven times since, most recently in 1996 for 2.5 million Swiss francs. (To its great advantage in our calculations, it weighs just 250mg.)

Not even a 1787 bottle of Château Lafite, once owned by Thomas Jefferson, and which sold for $156,450 (around £96,000) at auction in 1985, comes close.

International Computers' predictions for Britain's digital development

Hindsight can be very unfair.

The above graph - from a 1968 article in The Times - shows the predictions made by one UK computer company about when the nation would hit certain milestones along the way to its bright, digital future.

There are, predictably enough, a few clangers. International Computers Limited (ICL) foresaw a ‘national data bank with central record of the whole population’ as being in place by, at the very latest, the late 80s. (The current Labour Government first proposed the National ID card scheme in 2001; the Conservatives have said they will ditch the scheme if they are voted in next year.)

Cheques, too, are still with us. (They might not be as prevalent as they were, but we’re by no means ‘chequeless’, as ICL said we would be by 2002.) The country’s first searchable database of patents, meanwhile, only came into existence in 1998 - some 10-15 years after predicted.

There’s one stunning projection, though - showing ICL to be as perspicacious as one could have hoped to be in 1968.

At no. 7, they write: ‘1 in 100 homes with terminal to information service computer’. You could happily substitute ‘terminal to information service computer’ with ‘internet’ there.

This service, they said, would be in 1 per cent of homes by the late Nineties, which is pretty much spot on. (Ofcom’s latest report suggests 73 per cent of British households use the internet in some form or other.)

As for ‘Computer control of London underground’, who knows what they meant exactly. Last time we used the tube, though, there were still drivers.

In the Eighties, when his country was at war with Iraq, Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, spoke of wanting to create an army “20 million strong”, and implored Iran’s women to reproduce. A decade later, officials realised it may not be wise to have an apparently infinite flow of people into the country’s labour market, and began preaching family planning instead.

Iran has had one of the fastest demographic transitions of any nation in history, reducing its fertility rate to what is called “replacement level”: 2.1 children per woman. India, too, slowed what was a worrying trajectory. It now has a fertility rate of below three.

Uganda has not been as fortunate. Its vehemently “pro-natalist” President, Yoweri Musevini, and a lack of support for contraception, mean it has the youngest age structure of any country. There is an average 7 children per woman in Uganda, and 77 per cent of the population is under 30.

Of course, things can go too far the other way. Japan has a worryingly low fertility rate: a product, population experts say, of government policies that don’t support child-rearing. “Much of this comes down to what we would think of as work/life balance issues,” says Elizabeth Leahy Madsen, a research associate at Population Action International. “Many East Asian countries have no generous policies on maternity and paternity leave, so parents more carefully factor in the projected economic costs of bringing up children.”

Immigration, too, can cause a significant skew. Just look at the United Arab Emirates, and the effect that floods of migrant workers - from east and west - have had on the new powerhouses of Abu Dhabi and Dubai.

“The visual cue for smell is very strong, and when you take that away, things can smell different. The ‘pleasantness’ of molecules also changes depending on their concentration. One, indole, for instance, is redolent of flowers in small doses, but, as it gains in intensity, starts to smell like gym socks.”