Plotting whitehouse.gov secession petitions
It may not be obvious from the map, but there are petitions for secession from all 50 states. Maybe all these states should band together and call themselves a united country or something. Wait, what?
Plotting whitehouse.gov secession petitions
It may not be obvious from the map, but there are petitions for secession from all 50 states. Maybe all these states should band together and call themselves a united country or something. Wait, what?
The U.S. suffers from staggering economic inequality — as staggering, in some places, as Nigeria, El Salvador and the Dominican Republic. Richard Florida ran the numbers and compared cities in the U.S. to highly unequal foreign countries. That colorful map might look pretty, but its implications for U.S. income inequality are not.
Interactive: Mapping the census
In Virginia, the hispanic population is skyrocketing and the white population is dwindling. In the Maryland suburbs, diversity is growing. These stories and many more come from the census data that is displayed in this map. Use it to reveal your own stories. Type in your city or zip code below to get started.
Regional variations the generic name for streams in the US. “River” and “creek” are shown in gray.
This Map Shows Where All The Trees Are In The US
NASA’s Earth Observatory just released a map illustrating where all the trees are in America. The map was created over six years by Josef Kellndorfer and Wayne Walker of the Woods Hole Research Center (WHRC) in collaboration with the U.S. Forest Service and U.S. Geological Survey. The dark swaths of green represent parts of the country with the greatest concentration of biomass. You can see dense tree cover in the Pacific Northwest as well as New England, which has been reforested after intensive logging in the 18th and 19th centuries.
The spread of newspapers across the U.S. See the Rural West Initiative at Stanford University for a larger and more interactive version of these maps.
The New York Times has updated its interactive timeline of tornadoes and notes that, with the deaths from yesterday’s outbreak in Joplin, Missouri, 2011 is the deadliest year since 1953. Curious to see where tornadoes occur the most (realizing, of course, that this is information that I could easily find elsewhere), I combined all the years into the single map above. Blue dots represent tornado touchdowns, and yellow circles represent deaths.
An interesting observation from playing the timeline is that there is a large, step-wise increase in the number of touchdowns starting in 1996. Compare the number and spread of tornadoes since 1996 to the previous 45 years:
Except for 2011, the number of deaths for each year in this recent period is not significantly different from that of the previous years. Is the higher reported incidence of touchdowns due to better reporting, or have there really been more tornadoes in the last 15 years?
A map of yesterday’s storms, from the National Weather Service.
A world map of video game villains, compiled from first-person shooter (FPS) titles released since the year 2000. The Cold War is so 20th Century—today’s games are populated by bad guys from all around the world.
I have no idea how the titles were chosen or if they’re representative of FPS games in general, but what’s up with the map? Did China resurrect Genghis Khan (who’s a Mongol, but anyway) and conquer Central Asia all over again? While we’re at it, it appears that Colombia has invaded Peru and India has taken over a chunk of Pakistan. Man, this could be the start of World War III right here.
