Graphic: Email exchanges between countries.

A team of computer scientists at Stanford, Yahoo!, and Qatar’s Computational Research Institute created the map as part of a research paper entitled ’The Mesh of Civilizations and International Email Flows’.

The closer two countries are on the map, the more e-mail exchanges take place between them. As for the colors, they represent “Huntington’s ‘civilizations’ ”, which is a complicated sounding measure of economic and cultural similarities.