The Greatest Paper Map of the United States You’ll Ever See

Where the trees are (National map)

(Source: sandypoint)

The U.S. electric grid is a complex network of independently owned and operated power plants and transmission lines. Aging infrastructure, combined with a rise in domestic electricity consumption, has forced experts to critically examine the status and health of the nation’s electrical systems.

New Hampshire Primary 2012 Results: Election Reporting By County (MAP, REAL-TIME DATA)

Where Do Hybrid, Electric Cars Sell Best?

While hybrid and electric cars are becoming more popular throughout the U.S., it isn’t a secret that buyers in some areas are more keen to buy a hybrid or electric car than others.

Now NPR has published an interactive map detailing just where electric and hybrid cars have proved popular this year, and which states have yet to embrace both technologies.

Using sales data from Edmunds.com, NPR’s Sara Carothers and Alyson Hurt produced as part of a mini series looking into the recent regulations mandating all automakers meet a fleet-wide Corporate Average Fuel Economy of 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025.

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It’s fair to say that our discussion about the big lie touched a nerve.

The big lie of the financial crisis, of course, is that troubling technique used to try to change the narrative history and shift blame from the bad ideas and terrible policies that created it.

Based on the scores of comments, people are clearly interested in understanding the causes of the economic disaster.

I want to move beyond what I call “the squishy narrative” — an imprecise, sloppy way to think about the world — toward a more rigorous form of analysis. Unlike other disciplines, economics looks at actual consequences in terms of real dollars. So let’s follow the money and see what the data reveal about the causes of the collapse.

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The iPhone Credit Card Machine, Goes Mainstream

I first saw Square’s product when Gizmodo’s Mat Honan whipped one out at a dinner in San Francisco to help us split a check. Here’s how it worked: he ran my credit card through a tiny plastic doohickey (technical term) that attached to his phone. We entered the amount I owed for the pizza, inflated by the price of a couple Belgian beers, and voila, I’d paid him with a credit card.  It was a subtly impressive demonstration of the alternative payment system’s appeal to the tech-savvy. The whole thing was slick and easy, and Square’s pricing — a flat 2.75 percent of transactions — seemed a small enough price to pay for the convenience of the service.

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New Animated Map of Earthquake Tweets

Green dots are tweets about earthquakes. Gray dots are tweets about other topics. Each frame is one second (total of 12 minutes). Thanks to Natural Earthfor the land, water, and boundary shape data and the Twitter Streaming API for the tweet.

Neat little graphic.

If this isn’t enough for you, like you really need to dig deep into the speed of seismic waves and tweet waves, there’s a complete geographical/physics/numbery analysis over at Dot Physics: “Tweetwaves vs. Seismic Waves”.

It was directly inspired by a comic at xkcd, so we can all rejoice about that.

(Source: jeffmiller, via jtotheizzoe)

How hot was the month of July in 2011? So hot that just by plotting the location of each daily heat record that was broken, a nearly complete image of the contiguous United States is visible. Almost 9,000 daily records were broken or tied last month, including 2,755 highest maximum temperatures and 6,171 highest minimum temperatures (i.e., nighttime records). It should be noted that the tally of records collected so far is not complete – more are expected to come in as station data from across the U.S. is mailed to the National Climatic Data Center. The statistics reported here only include weather stations with real-time electronic reporting, which accounts for about two-thirds of the locations. Final numbers should be available later in August.

This image plots how many times a heat record was broken or tied in a given location. Some cities reached daily high temperatures 19 out of the 31 days in the month. The largest concentration of these records occur in the southern Plains, Midwest, and Northeast U.S., which were gripped by a series of heat waves pushing heat indices well into the 100’s (Fahrenheit) for many days at a time.

Temperature records are based on historical data from NCDC’s Cooperative Summary of the Day data set and the preliminary reports from the Cooperative Observers and National Weather Service stations around the country. All stations have at least 30 years of data upon which these records are based.

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United States of Obesity: Fattest States Ranking - 2011

Live: http://chartsbin.com/view/562

When you think of it, borders are paradoxical. They connect what they aim to divide. A borderline marks, with guillotine-like precision, where two territories separate; but no matter how far they expand in either direction, those territories resemble each other closest at their common boundary.

Borders can be impenetrable or irrelevant, and possess any degree of permeability in between: highly militarised, annoyingly bureaucratic, or merely symbolic. In any of those degrees, borders retain an iconic status. They’re humankind’s answer to the shorelines and mountain ranges of geology.

Without borders, a map is blind. With those lines, cartography is armed with a elementary tool for basic triage: here from there, us from them.

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Sun, water, waves, wind… no this isn’t the beginning to an episode of Captain Planet or a tour of power plants in Orbit City courtesy of George Jetson, but real sources of energy that are being harnessed and used to greater or lesser extent today. While it’s true that we still heavily rely on fossil fuels, renewable energy is on the rise, now accounting for almost 10 percent of US electricity generation. This number is only expected to increase, in part due to rising demand for renewable electricity from individual states in the absence of a national mandate. For many reasons, including a goal of encouraging economic development and the growth of the clean tech sector, many states have taken it upon themselves to increase their use of renewable energy by implementing policies known as Renewable Portfolio Standards (RPS).

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Beautiful! iPhone tracking data for 880 individuals in Europe during April 2011

I rarely break with my “brand” by posting maps of areas outside the U.S., but I just can’t wait for this to be done in America.  Please, someone do it soon!

New Yorkers have no sense of geography, which is fair, considering the world revolves around their city. As a New Yorker myself, I attempted to draw the map of the United States. As far as I know, it’s 100% accurate.

Flickr and Twitter mapped together:

Blue dots represent tweets with location and orange dots are Flickr photos. White dots are locations with both.

Not surprisingly, you see a lot of white dots at city centers. That’s an artifact of population density and Flickr and Twitter users. What’s more interesting though are the areas outside of the city dominated by blue and orange. For example, in the North America map above, the east is dominated by blue, whereas the west seems to be more orange.

What compels people to tweet over taking a picture and vice versa? Or are we just seeing a Twitter scrape that happened in the early morning, before the west coast woke up?

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