Nine Chinas

Patrick Chovanec, an associate professor of business-type stuff at Tsinghua University in Beijing, has a map of what he calls the Nine Nations of China up at The Atlantic:



Chovanec, inspired by Joel Garreau's Nine Nations of North America, sees China as "a mosaic of several distinct regions, each with its own resources, dynamics, and historical character," and notes that "taken individually, these 'nations' would account for eight of the 20 most populous countries in the world." The nine regions are:

The Frontier (colored salmonish on the map): Population a mere 86 million. It's China's outback, or more pertinently, its Empty Quarter. Lots of wild landscapes, ethnic minorities, and exploitable resources - a milieu Americans might find faintly familiar!

The Refuge (contemplative purple): Pop. 110 million. An agricultural breadbasket consisting of the provinces of Sichuan and Chongqing, it's remote but close to self-sufficient; sheltered by high mountains, the be-pandaed region sounds like a Chinese pastoral idyll, albeit one that's now lurching somewhat gawkily into industrialization and increasing integration with the rest of China and the world.

Shangri-La (ethereal light blue): Pop. 132 million. Purported home of the legendary paradise on earth, Shangri-La is, naturally, beset by environmental degradation, drug cultivation (an historic producer of opium and, more recently, the far deadlier tobacco), and poverty: it's the poorest of the nine regions. It's also comprised of about 30% non-Han minorities.

The Yellow Land (a very yellowy yellow): Pop. 359 million. A massively fertile land watered by the Yellow River, this region has more people than the United States. It has also served as the center of Chinese political power since roughly forever; it's the real belly of the whatnot.

The Crossroads (sullen dark blue): Pop. 226 million. So named because of its geographical centrality, and because it has historically stood between regions that compete for its resources; the region's never risen to a position of dominance within China, despite its placement on the Yangtze and main transportation corridors of the country.

The Back Door (debauched orange): Pop. 112 million. Once known as Yueh, this region in the south of China was a sort of Wild South for northern elites: a place of exile, full of jungles, gambling, smuggling, shadowy secret societies, and monkey-eating. Anchored by Hong Kong, it's boomed on the back of massive exports of late; presumably becoming less awesome.

The Straits (green like money): Pop. a paltry 59 million. Formed by Fujian on the mainland and the ever-ambiguous Taiwan, the region has been primarily a sea-faring one for centuries; its colonies throughout southeast Asia still remain tied together in many ways. The Asian tiger-dom of Taiwan has driven this to become the wealthiest of China's regions, though its political future is anyone's guess.

The Metropolis (tawdry pink): Pop. 147 million. The area around Shanghai and the mouth of the Yangtze has been the one region to seize preeminence from the Yellow Land at various points in Chinese history. After a period of neglect during the years of High Communism in China, Shanghai has led the country towards what seems to be its ever more urbane, cosmopolitan, and capitalistic future.

The Rust Belt (industrial alienation gray): Pop. 109 million. This is Manchuria, the locus of a certain prickliness between Russia and Japan a century ago. Japan held the region from 1931 until World War II; it went quickly to the Communists, and it became a stronghold of the socialist state. The reform era, though, hasn't been kind to the region; parts are almost as bad off as Michigan, if you can believe it. Pastimes include grain alcohol, decline.

Chovanec's got much more in his capsule descriptions, not to mention his blog.

The Decline and Fall of Assorted Empires

A visualization of four European empires over the course of the 19th and 20th Centuries:



The bubbles respresent "the evolution of the top 4 maritime empires of the XIX and XX centuries by [areal] extent"; hence Britain's loss of Canada looks like a more significant bursting of the imperial bubble than its loss of India, even though India is obviously a far more important place than Canada.

Via Andrew Sullivan and 3quarksdaily.

Support for US Health Care Reform in Three Dimensions

A nice map repetition from a New York Times op-ed shows support for health care reform along axes of income and age:



The accompanying opinion piece is by Nate Silver, Andrew Gelman, and Daniel Lee. Say the authors:

Using a statistical method called multilevel regression and post-stratification, we ... mapped opinion on health care, breaking down voters by age, family income and state. We’re used to thinking about red states and blue states, but the geographic variation is dwarfed by the demographic patterns: younger, lower-income Americans strongly support increased government spending on health care, while elderly and well-off Americans are much less supportive of the idea. But in general, senators seems to be less interested in what their constituents, old and young, rich and poor, might think about health care, and more interested in how they feel about President Obama.

This may actually be good news for the Democrats. Although the Annenberg surveys had shown health care subsidies to be quite popular — they had 67 percent support nationally in 2000 and 73 percent support in 2004 — that was back when they were a mere abstraction, and before voters might have been considering how to pay for them. Nowadays, President Obama enjoys higher approval ratings — in the low to mid-50s, according to most polls — than do the Democrats’ health care reform plans, which are mired in the mid-40s in most surveys. Conditions being what they are, Democrats would rather have a referendum on the president than one on the health care bill itself.

Support for Obama seems to be driving attitudes about health care reform to some extent, and not the other way around. Of course, a lot of what this has to do with is trust. As Machiavelli said, reform is hard: vested interests who benefit from the status quo will oppose it at every turn, and they tend to be well-organized, while support for reform tends to be diffuse and shallow. Whether you're going to support a large intervention in a system that, for all its shortcomings, is our system - the one most of us have grown accustomed to - will depend in large part on whether you trust the folks who are doing the reforming. And of course, if you're already a beneficiary of guaranteed government-provided health care, like everyone in the US over the age of 65, you really don't have much incentive to support reform; unless, that is, you aren't entirely self-interested, and actually care about, for instance, the ability of young people to acquire health care when they're in their 20s and don't have access to the kind of job stability that's necessary to acquire employer-based health insurance; or who can't get health care in the free market because of a pre-existing condition like asthma; or are just too poor to afford quality health care.

But of course the maps show a geographical dimension too. Support tends to be lower in Republicaan-leaning regions like the Plains and the Utah-Idaho-Wyoming triad of conservative Western states; it tends to be higher in the Northeast and Great Lakes states. (By the way, when and why did Wisconsin become more liberal than Minnesota?) What will be interesting to me is to see how support shifts once a bill is actually passed. My guess is that support will increase across the board, once there are a bunch of headlines about Obama signing "historic leegislation" and all that. On the other hand, I wouldn't put it past Congress to end up with such a watered-down bill, with so many sops to the health insurance and health care industries, that it just pisses everyone off.

El Niño Heats Up

El Niño is growing stronger:



This image, from the NASA/JPL Ocean Surface Topography Team, is based on measurements taken from a US/French satellite over ten days around November 1.

Says NASA:

El Niño is experiencing a late-fall resurgence. Recent sea-level height data from the NASA/French Space Agency Ocean Surface Topography Mission/Jason-2 oceanography satellite show that a large-scale, sustained weakening of trade winds in the western and central equatorial Pacific during October has triggered a strong, eastward-moving wave of warm water, known as a Kelvin wave. In the central and eastern equatorial Pacific, this warm wave appears as the large area of higher-than-normal sea surface heights (warmer-than-normal sea surface temperatures) between 170 degrees east and 100 degrees west longitude. A series of similar, weaker events that began in June 2009 initially triggered and has sustained the present El Niño condition.

This image... shows a red and white area in the central and eastern equatorial Pacific that is about 10 to 18 centimeters (4 to 7 inches) above normal. These regions contrast with the western equatorial Pacific, where lower-than-normal sea levels (blue and purple areas) are between 8 to 15 centimeters (3 and 6 inches) below normal. Along the equator, the red and white colors depict areas where sea surface temperatures are more than one to two degrees Celsius above normal (two to four degrees Fahrenheit).

"In the American west, where we are struggling under serious drought conditions, this late-fall charge by El Niño is a pleasant surprise, upping the odds for much-needed rain and an above-normal winter snowpack," said JPL oceanographer Bill Patzert.

Swell. More here, including a map animation.

Californiaishness

This slightly odd map ranks states according to how similar they are to California, on a 1-30 scale:



Leading the way is California - it gets a full 30, which means it's very similar to California, indeed. The next most California-like state is Rhode Island, in a bit of an upset, along with Arizona and then the other two states that border California. Coming in an impressive 5th place is Michigan, followed by Florida. New Jersey, Wisconsin, and Illinois round out the top ten most Californiaish states.

Most unlike California honors go to Wyoming.

Via Yglesias.

Parag Khanna's Crystal Ball is a Globe

Fantastic. Just came across this at the atlas(t) blog. It's the mappiest TED talk ever:



It's Parag Khanna, who has the very important-sounding title of Director of the Global Governance Initiative and Senior Research Fellow in the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation, talking about political geography. He uses lots of maps to illustrate the most salient changes that are going on in the global order today. One focus is on the expanding profile of China, which is touched with perhaps just a tinge of Sinophobia - Khanna suggests that Siberia may be a remote region of China, rather than Russia, before too long, and raises the specter of a sort of fifth column of ethnic Chinese working their way up the ladders of economic power in various foreign countries throughout East Asia.

Khanna also discusses Iraq - he's keen to let Kurdistan go indie, claiming that Iraq would still be the second largest oil producer in the world (though I think he might be forgetting about Russia, and the US as well, for that matter). He also suggests the Palestinians' problems could be solved by infrastructure development. I'm going to give him the benefit of the doubt on that one, and assume that he would make a more nuanced argument if time permitted.

Looking eastward, he sees the development of the energy resources in Central Asia and the Caucasus as leading towards a new, decidedly more carbon-oriented, Silk Road for the 21st Century. Most intriguing is his discussion of the future of Europe. He sees it as growing (which the EU has been, of course, for decades); in particular, he sees further regions of Eastern Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East moving increasingly into the orbit of what he variously calls the European "zone of peace" or the "Euro-Turkish superpower."

Khanna also raises the prospect of several new countries coming into the world in the next few years. All very interesting stuff.

The Spread of Swine Flu: Blame it on Louisiana

Nate Silver has a map based on data from Google Flu Trends that shows the timeline of the spread of swine flu around the US:



Google Flu Trends works by applying the Google Panopticon to searches that correlate with CDC data on actual flu cases, and has the benefit of being immediately responsive to trends in outbreaks of influenza (CDC data tends to lag by a week or two).

Says Silver:

This map is fascinating on a number of levels. Although the initial outbreak of H1N1 back in April was centered on Texas, California, New York, Illinois and South Carolina, the place where the flu first hit critical mass several months later was in Louisiana. It then slowly radiated its way outward to most of the neighboring states -- Maine finally hit the 5,000-point threshold just last week. There also appear to be other points from which the flu spread -- a less prominent 'epicenter', for instance, centered in Minnesota and the Dakotas. And somehow, there came to be quite a lot of flu at various points in both Alaska and Hawaii -- Hawaii's peak actually came way back in June and July, well before the one in the Deep South.

Here's something I don't begin to understand: everyone kept saying there'd be a second wave of swine flu in the fall, because the slu likes colder temperatures. Sure enough that second wave came to pass - but it looks like it actually erupted in one of the warmest regions of the country at the height of summer. That makes the opposite of sense to me.

Anyhoo, here's some good news, according to Nate: "the flu is pretty much on the decline in all states except Northern New England." Though if you're looking for a reason to feel glum, you should be informed that more people have died in the US from swine flu than died in the attacks of September 11, and most of them were fairly young.

Meanwhile, I see that Google is going global (or at least semi-global) with their flu map:



Bad times for cold places.

Because I Haven't Gotten Extremely Depressed About Global Warming in the Last Couple of Weeks...

The British government recently came out with a new interactive map, posted by The Guardian here, that shows the likely impacts of global warming, assuming our species continues our sit-on-our-asses-till-we're-all-fried approach to this looming catastrophe:



Says The Guardian:

The map was launched to coincide with the London Science Museum's new Prove it climate change exhibition by David Miliband, foreign secretary and his brother Ed Miliband, energy and climate change secretary. It comes in advance of key political talks on climate change in December in Copenhagen, where British officials will push for a new global deal to curb emissions.

The Miliband brothers said a new deal needed to be strong enough to limit global temperature rise to 2C, although many involved in the negotiations privately believe this to be impossible. A joint press release from the government and the Met Office released to promote the map says the government is aiming for an agreement that limits climate change "as far as possible to 2C".

The map presumes a global average rise of 4 degrees Celsius, a disastrous scenario which is nonetheless where we are very probably headed (as the UK Met Office says itself). That is, again, assuming that we don't take significant action to thwart such a catastrophe.

I personally consider such action highly unlikely for a number of reasons, which is really too bad, because this forecast is a terrible one. It calls for temperatures to be 6-7C warmer across most of the continental US, for instance. That's about 10-13 degrees Fahrenheit; that's like the difference between spring and summer. The "hottest days of the year could become as much as 10-12C (18-22F) warmer [!] over eastern North America," says the map; it's even worse for the Arctic, where a rise of 15C is so off-the-charts huge that's it's just impossible to predict what sort of effects it will have; beyond the prospect of a positive feedback from Arctic methane release, it's really not much fun to think about it anymore.

I will just stand up on my little digital soapbox here and make the point, not for the first time, that this dystopic future is the price we're paying for our cheeseburgers and our SUVs. It is really a profoundly, spectacularly, stupidly high price to pay for a lifestyle that, frankly, is not all that great to begin with. But no doubt this lesson will sink in... oh, right about the time that Bangladesh does.

Via The Map Room.

Bloomberg Wins, More or Less

The New York Times has an interactive block-by-block map of Tuesday's vote for mayor in New York City:



Plutocrat Michael Bloomberg beat out bureaucrat William Thompson to win a third term as mayor. He is a popular mayor, but he rammed a repeal of term limits through the city council and spent roughly nine gajillion dollars of his personal fortune on his re-election, which may have turned off some New Yorkers, and the election ended up much closer than most anyone expected - he won only 51-46. (The Times says, "[t]he results in the mayor’s race are likely to be personally bruising to Mr. Bloomberg, a man of no small ego who told the public last fall that his financial acumen made him uniquely qualified to pull the city out of a deep economic funk.") I would also like to believe that voters were squeamish about continuing to name the city's wealthiest resident as its civil leader, the sort of practice that makes it really hard to stifle the chortles when you start talking about "American democracy."

At any rate, says the Times:

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg won re-election Tuesday, but voters were less enthusiastic about him than the last time he ran in 2005. The mayor did well in high-income white areas of Manhattan and Queens, and also in election districts dominated by immigrants, like Flushing and Brighton Beach. But his vote fell sharply in black neighborhoods, especially southeast Queens, where the black middle class has been hard-hit by foreclosure.

Those big blue splotches mostly correspond to the majority African-American neighborhoods in Queens, Brooklyn, and El Bronx. Bloomberg got like 90% in the swankier districts of the Upper East Side, and Thompson did about as well in his best districts in places like Bed-Stuy and Brownsville. Bloomberg did well among Jews and white Catholics; it seems like the Hispanic vote leaned toward Thompson, though it's a bit hard for me to tell from this map.

UPDATE: Commenter Gaurav links to a New York Magazine post that compares the NYC election map to the city's white population, based on a map from the Digital Atlas of New York City (which I posted about before). Here's the distribution of the city's white population:



That's a tasty correlation! And Andrew B links to this map from the Digital Atlas showing Hispanic population. Definitely looks like they went for Thompson pretty strongly.

A Season of Storms

A beautiful animation of the entire 2008 Atlantic hurricane season:



It was produced by NOAA's National Hurricane Center and can be downloaded here.

Here's a map of all the tropical storms and hurricanes from that busy year. This year, by constrast, has been rather quiet.

Maoists in India

The New York Times has an article about the escalating fight against Maoist rebels in India. It includes this map:



Says the Times:

India’s Maoist rebels are now present in 20 states and have evolved into a potent and lethal insurgency. In the last four years, the Maoists have killed more than 900 Indian security officers, a figure almost as high as the more than 1,100 members of the coalition forces killed in Afghanistan during the same period.

If the Maoists were once dismissed as a ragtag band of outdated ideologues, Indian leaders are now preparing to deploy nearly 70,000 paramilitary officers for a prolonged counterinsurgency campaign to hunt down the guerrillas in some of the country’s most rugged, isolated terrain.

The rebels claim to represent many of India's impoerished people, especially among its indigenous tribal groups. Despite their violent tactics, they have some support among intellectuals in India, including the writer Arundhati Roy. They're not to be confused with the above-ground Communist Party, which is a force in Indian politics.

The Commitment to Development Index

The Center for Global Development has a tool that ranks rich countries' commitment to the developing world.



This Commitment to Development Index, says the CGD, "rates 22 rich countries on how much they help poor countries build prosperity, good government, and security. Each rich country gets scores in seven policy areas, which are averaged for an overall score." You can click on countries to get details on their rating in each of seven categories. As per usual, Scandinavia seems to be trying to make the rest of us look bad. For top-ranked Sweden, the rating is:



They give a lot through government programs, but little through private donations. By contrast, here's my own personal nation's rating:



We contribute all of 0.15% of our GDP to development, compared to 0.92% for Sweden. But our rate of private charitable giving ranks us 4th. I was surprised to see we actually have relatively low agricultural subsidies, which I think is more a reflection of the standard practice of high subsidization rates across the developed world, rather than a mark of particular openness in that sector of the US economy.

And what's up with the Asians? Japan and South Korea need to get on the ball.

Via the ever-linkable Matt Yglesias.

Yikes

Let's check in on the old unemployment picture, shall we?



Oh dear. Not good at all.

Via Mike Lux, the map is from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. (It can be found here (pdf). Says Lux:

If full employment is defined as four percent, then only nine counties east of the Mississippi River that fit that definition. Two counties west of the Rocky Mountains qualify; one in eastern Washington State and the other covers the North Slope of Alaska.

The bright spots of full employment can be found in the agricultural counties of the Great Plains. Montana, Wyoming, North and South Dakota, Nebraska and Kansas seem immune to the wave of persistent joblessness, at least for now.

And this is just average annual employment. Things are worse now, with unemployment having climbed to 9.8%. Nor does it count those who are underemployed or who have dropped out of the labor force altogether; if it did, the national number would stand at nearly 20%, according to Lux.

Curiously, not having a McDonalds nearby seems to correlate with low unemployment. Clearly McDonaldses cause people to lose jobs!

Where the Uninsured Are

NPR has a map of the uninsured by congressional district and by state.



On the face of it, it looks like the usual, albeit paradoxical, story: areas that vote more Democratic, and which support a broader social safety net, have less need of one, since fewer people are uninsured in those areas; whereas Republican-leaning areas, where support is presumably greater for the status quo (the maintaining of which seems to be the Republican approach to health care), tend to have more uninsured. Unfortunately, this map doesn't do a good job of letting you see urban congressional districts, so the appearance of the map could be rather unrepresentative of the country as a whole, and especially of Democratic-leaning areas (many of which are in cities).

However, you can also see uninsured numbers by state, which reveals that of the 26 states (counting DC as a state for wishful thinking purposes) where the uninsured are less than 15%, 21 were won by Obama in 2008. And of the 13 states where the uninsured are more than 20%, 10 were won by McCain. (McCain won 7 of the 12 15-20% states.) That's a rather striking correlation, no?

Meanwhile, Nate Silver uses math n' stuff to create a map that projects support for the public option for every congressional district:



Based on a few polls in certain states and districts, Nate created a regression analysis to project what support across every district in the US would likely be, based on a few variables, including poverty rate and Obama's vote share in the district. He found that:

-- The public option is estimated to have plurality support in 291 of the 435 Congressional Districts nationwide, or almost exactly two-thirds.
-- The public option is estimated to have plurality support in 235 of 257 Democratic-held districts.
-- The public option is estimated to have plurality support in 34 of 52 Blue Dog - held districts, and has overall popularity of 51 percent in these districts versus 39 percent opposed.

By implication, the public option was favored in 56 of the 178 Republican-held districts. Nate breaks out the projected support numbers for every district in his post.

Thanks to Matt Osborne for that one.

Deutschland Wahlergebnisse

Germany had an election; Der Spiegel has a map (under the Wahlkriese tab):



(According to Babel Fish, 'erobert' means 'conquered' (evocative!) and 'gehalten' means 'held,' so you can see where parties made gains, especially the CDU and Linke.)

The link comes from the San Francisco Examiner, which says:

The results are in on Sunday’s elections in Germany, and the big news is that it is a big win for the center-right. In the vote for proportional representation (Zweitstimme), Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats (the Christian Democratic Union and the Bavarian Christian Social Union, CDU/CSU) got 33.8% of the vote and the free-market Free Democrats (FDP), Merkel’s preferred coalition partner, got 14.6%, for a total of 48.4%. The Social Democrrats (SDP) got only 23.0%, their lowest share in history, while the Greens (Grüne) got 10.7% and the Left (Linke, more or less the former Communists) got 11.9%. The SDP has been willing to enter into a coalition with the Greens, as it did in 1998-2005, and with the CDU/CSU, as it has in the so-called Grand Coalition since the 2005 election, but not with the Left.

Both of the two largest parties got smaller percentages than in the last election, in September 2005, but the drop for the CDU/CSU was minimal, while the SDP share dropped from 34.2% to 23.0%--one out of its three voters went elsewhere. The percentages for the three minor parties all rose, with the FDP getting the largest percentage in the 60-year history of the Federal Republic. My sense is that voters in Germany, as in Britain, are engaging here in tactical voting.

If my brain is functioning properly (not certain!) that means right/center-right parties got 48.4% of the vote, and left/center-left parties got 45.6%.

You can click on the Interaktive Grafik to see where each parties had strengths. The Christian Democrats did best in northwestern Germany, but showed strength in the southwest and parts of the east as well. The CSU, which appears to stand in relation to the CDU in Bavaria as the DFL party stands in relation to the Democrats in Minnesota, did well on their home turf. The Free Democrats did best in the south and in Schleswig-Holstein in the north. The opposition Social Democrats, who sort of tanked a little, had their best showing in the west, especially in Hessen, Nordrhein-Westfalen, and Niedersachsen. Linke, a left-wing party, did best in East Germany but poorly pretty much everywhere else. The Green Party, kind of oddly, did best in many of the same regions as the Free Democrats; those areas appear to be amenable to third parties, for whatever reason. They also did wellish in and around Berlin.

Michael Barone, the author of the Examiner article, notes: "What strikes me as uncanny is that the CDU/CSU tends to win in the historically Catholic parts of Germany (the south, much of the Rhineland) while the SDP and, in 2009, the Left tends to win in the historically Protestant parts of Germany." He's got some other observations about the vote (and also a few dubious conclusions about what this says about Europeans' desires for smaller government).

Meanwhile, Matt Yglesias notes that the Pirate Party got a decent 2% of the vote in their first election. Not bad!

"Where the Buffalo Roamed"

I can't improve on the blog post title from Stephen Von Worley, who maps the US by distance to the nearest McDonalds:



We here at the Map Scroll would also like to endorse the ironic detachment of Von Worley's post - such a mood being really the only way to cope with the bombardment of consumerist waste the US landscape has endured over the course of the last 60-odd years - which begins thus:

This summer, cruising down the I-5 through California’s Central Valley to the Los Angeles Basin, I unwittingly stumbled upon a most exasperating development: the country strip mall. First, let me state that I don’t hate. I’ve got nothing against Petco, Starbucks, OfficeMax, et al. When overcome by the desire for a cubic yard of kitty litter, a carafe of pre-Columbian frappasmoochino, or fifty gross of pink highlighter pens, I’m there in a jiffy!

But, Mr. Real Estate Tycoon, did you have to plop your shopping center smack dab in the middle of what was previously nowhere? Okay, the land was cheap. And yes, you did traffic studies and proved that the interstate and distant suburbs would drench whatever you built in a raging torrent of eager consumerism. But your retail monstrosity drains the wildness from the countryside for twenty miles in every direction! Sure, you can’t see it from everywhere - but once you know it’s there, you feel it. In the rural drawl of a neighboring rancher, that flat-out sucks!

Which begs the question: just how far away can you get from our world of generic convenience? And how would you figure that out?

He got data on the locations of all 13,000 McDonald'ses in the lower 48, applied some "technical know-how," as the kids call it, and made this map. As you can see, there's really no escaping the Gilded Parabolas in the eastern half of the country. There are, though, a few pockets in the West where the hegemony of the arches needn't weigh quite so heavily on the spirit:

For maximum McSparseness, we look westward, towards the deepest, darkest holes in our map: the barren deserts of central Nevada, the arid hills of southeastern Oregon, the rugged wilderness of Idaho’s Salmon River Mountains, and the conspicuous well of blackness on the high plains of northwestern South Dakota. There, in a patch of rolling grassland, loosely hemmed in by Bismarck, Dickinson, Pierre, and the greater Rapid City-Spearfish-Sturgis metropolitan area, we find our answer.

Between the tiny Dakotan hamlets of Meadow and Glad Valley lies the McFarthest Spot: 107 miles distant from the nearest McDonald’s, as the crow flies, and 145 miles by car!

I'm totally moving to Spearfish.

Via Felix Salmon.

Things Change

Yankee Magazine crowd-sources autumn:



Reports are made by people (qualification: have color vision!) around the northeastern US, who write in and say stuff like

Hi folks, Things around here are really starting to look diferent around here [sic]. We had those last few nights that got alittle [sic] cooler and it seemed like the swamp maples took the hint. Like popcorn when it starts to pop [sic]. The colors realy [sic] started to show, see ya for now [sic]

which you can read by clicking on the map. You can also register to do it yourself. It all strikes me as somehow breathtakingly wholesome.

I also like the existential connotations of the map legend.

Via Andrew Sullivan

Who's Your Polluter?

The New York Times has another one of their ridiculously information-rich maps which shows all of the 200,000+ facilities around the US that have pollution discharge permits, viewable by state:



The orange dots are facilities that have been cited for violations, and you can mouse-over them to see who they are and how many times they've been cited.

All this information is thanks to the 1972 Clean Water Act. It makes you think: thank heavens for that progressive Nixon administration! If not for them, there'd be no Clean Water Act and no EPA. And given the paralysis of the political system these days, as the wealthy classes become ever more shameless about claiming their ever-larger slices of an ever-shrinking pie, even as a sense of social responsibility towards the society which allowed them to garner that wealth continues to erode, it seems very unlikely that political initiatives like that would be able to pass now.

An accompanying article starts off this way:

Jennifer Hall-Massey knows not to drink the tap water in her home near Charleston, W.Va. In fact, her entire family tries to avoid any contact with the water.

Her youngest son has scabs on his arms, legs and chest where the bathwater — polluted with lead, nickel and other heavy metals — caused painful rashes. Many of his brother’s teeth were capped to replace enamel that was eaten away.

Neighbors apply special lotions after showering because their skin burns. Tests show that their tap water contains arsenic, barium, lead, manganese and other chemicals at concentrations federal regulators say could contribute to cancer and damage the kidneys and nervous system.

“How can we get digital cable and Internet in our homes, but not clean water?” said Mrs. Hall-Massey, a senior accountant at one of the state’s largest banks.

Imagine if we didn't have the Clean Water Act.