Sins of preference around the country

Too much time on their hands? Professional geographers who want to stand out in a crowd? A fancy party trick? I won't try to answer those questions, only say that their efforts have mapped sinfulness across the country. They figured out how to quantify the Seven Deadly Sins within a population and colored the map by county accordingly. In case you don't remember those sins they are (with the method of quantifying it):

* Greed -- compare average income with number of residents below the poverty line.
* Envy -- thefts per capita.
* Wrath -- violent crimes per capita.
* Lust -- sexually transmitted diseases per capita.
* Gluttony -- fast food restaurants per capita.
* Sloth -- compare expenditures in entertainment and recreation with unemployment rate.
* Pride -- the combination of all the above.

The data is mapped two ways. The first shows the value of a sin with more sinful counties in darker colors. The second shows average counties in pale yellow, higher than average in red and below average in blue. The map for Pride (the combination) shows a red swath from eastern Texas, across the South, to New York City, another swath across California, and blotches in Washington state, southern Michigan, and around Kansas City (among others). There is also a blue swath covering most of West Virginia, Kentucky, Illinois (outside of Chicago), Iowa, Nebraska, half of Kansas and South Dakota, and all of North Dakota.

Most gay blogs show the map for Lust, noting the bright red blotch covering the South.

The shape of our world

When I last mentioned cartograms -- those maps that are distorted so that size on the map shows something like population instead of area -- I got an enthusiastic (private) reply. NPR recently did a feature on Mark Newman, the guy at the University of Michigan who is part of the team that makes these cartograms. As part of that NPR feature they gave out the webpage that has more maps -- close to 600 of them on a wide variety of subjects. I've been looking at the population based maps. When we think of the year 1 AD we know there is civilization around the Mediterranean Sea but I didn't realize the population of what is now India and China was much larger. Look at the cartograms for then 1900s and we see that is still true. Have fun wasting time.

Mapping the election

Look at a map of which states went for Obama and which for McCain and it doesn't quite make sense that Obama won. The same guy who made the Atlas of the Real World (which I mentioned before) has added his map stretching to resize the states by population and electoral votes, then does it by counties. The last few images also shade counties by their percentage of Dem and GOP votes. For the mathematically inclined among us here is an FAQ, including an explanation of how the maps were created (I understand the basic concept and some of the titles of the equations are familiar -- I'll leave it at that). The author studies complex systems.

Looking at our world

Photographer Yann Arthus-Bertrand has been photographing our world from the sky since 1994. In 2009 there will be an exhibit titled Earth From Above in NYC of 150 of his photos, enlarged to 4 ft. by 6 ft. Here is a website of 38 of them. Stunning!


Another look at the world, this time through maps. Daniel Dorling, Mark Newman, and Anna Barford have created The Atlas of the Real World, a book of maps in which the space a country takes up on the map reflects a particular value, such as the number of tourists who come to a country (France is huge), mopeds per person (India wins out), or housing prices (Japan, USA, and Western Europe are tops). Yes, this highly distorts what the map usually looks like but in a fascinating way. Here's a collection of 18 of the maps.