The statistics of the war are stupefying, but they are more graspable, and more shocking, when seen not as a conglomeration of data but as an extended sequence of individuals.
Staff members at the institutes are continually looking for new ways to make displays for the fallen, he said, ranging from billboards with a hundred of their pictures, to wallet cards the size of baseball cards, with the vital statistics of each war dead.
Last month, researchers in London announced that they had identified a key gene in the development of skin cancer using gene-chip technology.And now the bad newsDespite the many bits of good news from the front, the broad statistics of the war on cancer still make bleak reading.
They have recently been touting the achievements, or at least the statistics, of their war on poverty.But the Clarences suggests that tackling "social exclusion" will be difficult if not impossible in some cases, and that the ex-industrial heartlands of the North-East (which has the highest unemployment rate of any region in Britain) suffer their own peculiar hardships.
He said it was important to go past the staggering statistics of the war and remember "the tragedy of each single death, of every life shattered".
The statistics of the Syrian war will always be in dispute – both sides will minimise their losses while they are fighting and exaggerate the number of their "martyrs" once the conflict is over; nor will we ever know the true number of the civilian dead, nor the exact identity of their killers.
But it's one thing to read statistics of the Civil War dead, and something else to look at a single black dress and mourning bonnet donated to the museum in 1924 by the granddaughter of the Berlin, Conn., woman who wore them in the 1860s.
While her husband is one of at least 30,000 disappeared in the country, she is now one of approximately 6 million displaced, another one of the ugly statistics of Colombia's war.
His Web site includes links to Tolkien-inspired maps and random self-help reflections (the page for "How to Overcome Procrastination" is listed as "Under Construction"), along with links to carefully annotated compilations of war statistics.
