Fattening of the world and good use of the alpha channel

In the spirit of Gapminder, Washington Post created an interactive scatterplot viewer that’s using alpha channel to tell apart overlapping fat dots better than sorting-by-circle-size Gapminder is using:

fat.png

Good news: the rate of fattening of the USA appears to be slowing down. Maybe because of high gas prices? But what’s happening with Oceania?