Net Migration in the US

An interesting interactive migration map from Forbes shows net migration for 2008 for every county in the US:



You can see migration to a given county from any other county in the country. E.g., 66 people moved from Dane County, WI (Madison) in 2008, and 34 moved in the opposite direction. Or: 149 people moved from Harris County, TX (Houston) to Queens, NY, but 449 made the opposite trip. Also, this being Forbes, matters economic are considered integral, so per capita income for migrants is also shown. This is pretty interesting, actually, as it is suggestive of the sort of moving involved: the average income for folks making the leap between high-tech hubs San Mateo, CA and Travis County, TX (Austin) was $74,500. For those moving from Cameron County, TX on the Mexican border to Clark County, NV (Las Vegas) it was just $12,900.

Has BP Ruined the Entire Atlantic Basin?

This video paints a dismaying picture:



Via Mother Jones, which says:

The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) just released this horrifying animation of how ocean currents may carry all the oil in the Gulf of Mexico. According to their computer modeling of currents and the oil, the spill "might soon extend along thousands of miles of the Atlantic coast and open ocean as early as this summer."

"I've had a lot of people ask me, 'Will the oil reach Florida?'" says NCAR scientist Synte Peacock in a statement accompanying the animation, which he worked on. "Actually, our best knowledge says the scope of this environmental disaster is likely to reach far beyond Florida, with impacts that have yet to be understood."

The models show oil hitting Florida's Atlantic coast within a few weeks, then moving north as far as about Cape Hatteras, N.C., before heading east.

One question I haven't seen answered is: at what level of dispersion is the oil no longer harmful? I assume that if a hundred million gallons were distributed evenly throughout the world's oceans, it wouldn't even be noticeable, and would biodegrade in no time. But somewhere between that, and the actual conditions we have - giant plumes and enormous sheens concentrated in the northern Gulf of Mexico - is the threshhold beyond which dispersion takes care of the problem. I don't know what that threshhold is - whether, for instance, the quantities shown swirling about in the mid-Atlantic in this animation would still be dangerous to ecosystems. At the least, though, this looks bad for pretty much the entire coast of Florida.

Mapping the Invisible in the Jungles of Belize

Jungle. Ancient civilization. Lasers. Cool:



Says the NY Times:

A small aircraft flying back and forth above the ancient Maya city of Caracol, in Belize, used a laser to penetrate the dense forest canopy.

Viewed in three dimensions, the data revealed new ruins, causeways and agricultural terraces of the sprawling city. A detail [of a detail] of Caracol's city center is shown here.

Interesting stuff, but a little disheartening in a sense. The age of physical human discovery is truly over; nowadays all we get is laser-guided dispatches from the global panopticon.

Hanging of the Parliament

So they went ahead and had those elections in the UK, as you may have heard. The result was a major victory for primary colors, as this Wikipedia map shows. (Blue = Conservatives; Red = Labour; Yellow = LD; assorted = regional and minor parties):



The political parties, however, didn't do so hot. Oddly, though electoral politics is supposedly a zero-sum game, all three major parties managed to lose. The Tories fell short of the majority they were hoping for; Labour lost a ton of seats and had their worst showing in decades; and the Lib Dems, despite anticipation of major gains and predictions that they might crack 100 seats, actually lost a handful of seats. The Tories now have 305 seats, to Labour's 258, and the Lib Dems' 57, with the rest distribute amongst various regional parties and a Green. With ~323 needed to form a majority, the parliament is, as they say, hung.

For comparison, this is what the map looked like after the last election, in ought-five:

Whither the Spill?

Thither, according to an oceanologist from the University of South Florida College of Marine Science Ocean Circulation Group, which has modeled the forecasted trajectory of the spill:



The narrator is expecting the slick to get caught up in the loop current, which feeds into the Gulf Stream, which runs up the East Coast of the US. Says he:

It's not looking good for the whole Gulf and for the East Coast, really... All these arrows are pushing it toward the loop current and once that happens, well, all bets are off... I hope that the people on the east coast are getting prepared for this, and Florida 'cause it looks like it's gonna come your way. It looks like it's not just a Gulf Coast deal.

At the end he gives two pieces of advice: to say our prayers, and to keep the pressure on BP to "spend every dime they have" on the clean-up. I humbly encourage my readers to put more energy into the latter.

Spill, Baby, Spill

Proving that you don't have to have centralized government control of your economy to wreak environmental havoc, that oil rig that blew up last week off the coast of Louisiana is causing problems:



So says Eric Berger:

Officials from Louisiana to Florida remain concerned about oil leaking from a Transocean rig that exploded last week in the Gulf of Mexico, killing 11.

As crews attempt to stop the flow of an estimated 42,000 gallons a day escaping from a pipe about 5,000 feet below the surface, the oil slick has been slowly expanding across the Gulf.

Satellite images have helped officials track the slick as it swirls around the Gulf. Here's the best, most recent image captured by NASA's Aqua satellite.

That's a thousand barrels of oil a day, leaking up from the bottom of the Gulf where the rig's pipe snapped off (those are technical terms). And it looks increasingly likely that the only thing that will work to stem the leakage is to drill a relief well, but that'll take months. (Part of the problem is that the well is 5,000 feet down, which complicates any potential engineering solution, as you can imagine - but those are the sorts of problems you run into when you're scrounging under the earth's proverbial sofa for the every last drop of fossil fuel resources you can find.) The slick is already 80 miles by 36 miles across and likely to reach land within days. This thing could get very ugly for the Gulf Coast.

UPDATE: Now it's 100 x 45 miles.



From the Times-Picayune.

UK Election Calculator

The BBC has an election seat calculator for the upcoming UK elections:



I will say this: UK electoral democracy appears to be pretty messed up. Like, US-caliber mess up. I say this because as you can see, I've set the calculator so that the 3 majorest parties all get just about the same percentage of the vote (a third each, if you want to check my math). Yet look at the seat distribution that results from that popular vote outcome:



See? Messed up. Everyone gets the same number of votes but the Tories and Lib Dems combined don't have as many seats as Labour. W, if I may say, TF? I assume this is a function of the Lib Dem vote being highly concentrated in ethnic areas? And the conservative vote being somewhat concentrated in rural areas? But I'm sort of projecting from the American political scene, so that may be way off base.

At any rate, the BBC's "poll of polls" currecntly shows the Conservatives with a slight lead: 33% to 29% for each of the other two parties. That would result in 285 votes fo Labour to 244 for the conservatives, and a whopping 92 seats for team yellow. Democracy!!!And since this would result in a hung parliament, I assume the High Court would intervene and choose the victor in a 5-4 ruling according to their own political predilections. What, isn't that how everyone does it?

So Long, And Thanks for All the Fish

The Aral Sea is just... about...



Gone. Another image of the sea from March 2010:



From the Huffington Post:

The drying up of the Aral Sea is one of the planet's most shocking disasters, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said Sunday, as he urged Central Asian leaders to step up efforts to solve the problem.

Once the world's fourth-largest lake, the sea has shrunk by 90 percent since the rivers that feed it were largely diverted in a Soviet project to boost cotton production in the arid region.

The shrunken sea has ruined the once-robust fishing economy and left fishing trawlers stranded in sandy wastelands, leaning over as if they dropped from the air. The sea's evaporation has left layers of highly salted sand, which winds can carry as far away as Scandinavia and Japan, and which plague local people with health troubles.

The story of the Aral Sea is the sort of thing you want to point to when people argue that technology and human ingenuity will save us from our own self-inflicted crises. The Shrinkage started with the Soviet Union's plan to divert the Amu Darya and Syr Darya to grow a bunch of cotton in the middle of the desert. Hilariously, the Soviets knew the Sea would vanish as a result of this plan - but they did it anyway:

''It was part of the five-year plans, approved by the council of ministers and the Politburo,'' said Aleksandr Asarin, an expert at the Russian State Hydroproject Institute who angered his bosses by predicting, in 1964, that the sea was headed for catastrophe. ''Nobody on a lower level would dare to say a word contradicting those plans,'' he said, ''even if it was the fate of the Aral Sea.''

Apparently Kazakhstan is working to revive what is now the North Aral Sea with some success. There's less hope for the southern sliver of the sea that remains. The water, already so salty as to have been rendered lifeless, continue to recede from the stranded fishing villages and rusting husks of Soviet-era fishing boats that used to subsist on the sea's bounty.

Cities at Night

Via The Map Room, NASA's Earth Observatory posts some nice images of cities at night. E.g.:



From le text:

Border cities like Ciudad Juaréz, Mexico, and El Paso, Texas, illustrate different city patterns side-by-side, suggesting cultural influences on the development and growth of cities and infrastructure. Ciudad Juaréz supports at least 1,300,000 people. On the U.S. side of the Rio Grande, El Paso is marked by the brightly-lit Interstate Highway I-10 that cuts across the city. Although the area of El Paso, with an estimated population of slightly more than 600,000 is roughly on the order of the area of built-up Ciudad Juaréz, the density of settlement evidenced by the distribution of lights is much less.

Taken April 7, 2003.

Taxi Taxi

No, not the decently high quality yet reasonably priced used clothing store on Westheimer Road in Houston, TX. Why would you think I'm talking about that? I'm referring to this map animation from the New York Times:



It's a heat map showing frequency of cab pick-ups at every single block of Manhattan for every single hour of the entire week. Animatable. Zoomable. Rolloverable for the specific number for any single block and a corresponding graph for the entire week. Really just a gratuitous display of data triumphalism from the Times who, one senses, are just sort of showing off at this point. This map, for instance, doesn't really tell you anything you don't already know - people take cabs in Midtown during the day, in the Village at night. But if you're of a certain bent you might find the sheer detail and comprehensiveness of the presentation here sort of jarring.

It does seem like we're approaching a point, rather rapidly, where almost any information about spatial conditions, processes, or events can be instantly translatable into cartographic form. I am looking forward to the day when I can zoom in close enough on Google Earth to see a real time image of myself sitting at the computer using Google Earth. The image will narrow in on the computer screen... closer, closer, until-

Mapping Global Happiness

Yet another entrant in the genre of happiness cartography, this time courtesy of Gallup:



The survey of 155 countries describes respondents as "thriving," "struggling," or "suffering" according to the Cantril Self-Anchoring Striving Scale. The scale is very straightforward - it simply asks people to locate themselves on a scale of 0 to 10, where 0 is the worst possible life for themselves and 10 is the best. The three categories break out as follows:

Thriving -- wellbeing that is strong, consistent, and progressing. These respondents have positive views of their present life situation (7+) and have positive views of the next five years (8+). They report significantly fewer health problems, fewer sick days, less worry, stress, sadness, anger, and more happiness, enjoyment, interest, and respect.

Struggling -- wellbeing that is moderate or inconsistent. These respondents have moderate views of their present life situation OR moderate OR negative views of their future. They are either struggling in the present, or expect to struggle in the future. They report more daily stress and worry about money than the "thriving" respondents, and more than double the amount of sick days. They are more likely to smoke, and are less likely to eat healthy.

Suffering -- wellbeing that is at high risk. These respondents have poor ratings of their current life situation (4 and below) AND negative views of the next five years (4 and below). They are more likely to report lacking the basics of food and shelter, more likely to have physical pain, a lot of stress, worry, sadness, and anger. They have less access to health insurance and care, and more than double the disease burden, in comparison to "thriving" respondents.

The patterns are familiar from other similar surveys: overall the Americas tend to be happiest (a median of 42% of respondents are thriving), followed by Europe (29%), Asia (17%), and Africa (8%).

The five most satisfied countries in the world are - say it with me now - the Scandinavian countries of Denmark (82% thriving), Finland (75%), Norway (69%), and Sweden (68%), plus the Netherlands (68%). The highest in the Western Hemisphere is Costa Rica (63%), followed by Canada (62%), Panama (62%), Brazil (58%), and the United States (57%). Asia is led by New Zealand (63%), Israel (62%), and Australia (62%). The least satisfied are mostly in Africa - Togo (1%), Burundi (2%), and Comoros (2%) are the least satisfied countries in the world. Meanwhile, the big Asian countries are surprisingly low on the scale: Japan comes in at just 19% thriving, India at 10%, and China at 9%.

Fast Food Nation

Stephen Von Worley, burger cartographer extraordinaire, has created a map that presents fast food dominance across US territory in delectably manichean terms:



Not wrongly, Von Worley frames the Empire of the Gilded Parabola as evil and (more wrongly) the other fast food outlets as a scrappy alliance of insurgents. Says he:

In this and the following graphic, each individual restaurant location has equal power. The entity that controls each point casts the most aggregate burger force upon it, as calculated by the inverse-square law – kind of like a chart outlining the gravitational wells of galactic star clusters, but in an alternate, fast food universe.

By far, the largest pocket of resistance is Sonic Drive-In’s south-central stronghold: more than 900 restaurants packed into the state of Texas alone. Sheer density is the key to victory!

The rebels already have the numbers – over 24,000 locations in total – but they’ve divided and conquered themselves by strict adherence to the peacetime principles of brand identity and corporate structure. This is war, and for the sake of self-preservation, all must be sacrificed! Kings and Queens: get used to hanging with the common folk. Tone down the sarcasm, Jack. And everyone, please, stop yanking Wendy’s pigtails! Y’all need to work in harmony to succeed with the winning strategy: an Alliance!

I.e., black space is McDonalds land. The only other contiguous territory of any real scale belongs to Sonic, across much of Texas and subsidiary areas. But Jack in the Box shows some strength in the Southwest, Burger King's got a far-flung string of outposts from the Southeast to the Northwest, and even Hardee's puts up a fight in the Carolinas. Dairy Queen, which I had always thought of as sort of the village pub of small Texas towns, actually looks to be even stronger in precisely the areas of the Upper Midwest which are most prone to actual blizzards.

Go to Von Worley's post to see another map that shows that as a combined force, the upstarts swamp the McHegemon.

Via Andrew Sullivan.

Pacific Tsunami

There was an 8.8 magnitude earthquake in Chile this morning. That is one of the ten strongest quakes in history, and a hundred times stronger than the 7.0 that leveled Port-au-Prince last month. It struck a relatively unpopulated area, though, and also a far more developed country, so the damage and number of deaths won't be nearly as high as in Haiti. It was expected to produce a tsunami, however, and NOAA's West Coast and Alaska Tsunami Warning Center has a map showing the predicted energy of the tsunami as it crosses the Pacific:



They also have a map showing predicted arrival times of the tsunami. From the time of the earthquake it was expected to take 7-8 hours to reach Central America, 15 hours to reach Hawaii, and ~22 hours to reach Japan. They've issued a tsunami warning for the entire Pacific basin, though the tsunami isn't expected to be catastrophic.

The wave is expected to be about eight feet high when it reaches Hilo.

Olympic Medals Map

The NY Times has an interactive map of Olympic medals won by country:



This represents medals won in the Vancouver Olympics thus far. You'll notice that the United States has a larger circle than Canada. This is because the United States has won more medals than Canada. I draw attention to this fact because the Canadians were all bragging about how they were going to win the most medals. Clearly they are going to fail to do so. Their hubris rankles; hubris belongs to Americans and Russians. In Canadians it is just... unbecoming. Also, as a United Statesian, it's fun to root for my country on the rare occasions when we are the underdog, like in the winter Olympics and the World Cup.

The map has medal winners going back to the first Winter Olympics in 1924. You can see that it was basically a meeting of Europeans, with a few odd North Americans thrown in, until the last few cycles. Now the North Americans are a much bigger presence, as are the Asians and even the bleepin' Australians, who need to knock it off with the excelling at sports all the time. Are there even any ski resorts in Australia?

Meanwhile, The Vancouver [de]Tour Guide 2010 team sends along their effort to google map some stuff of interest around Vancouver. They describe it as "a mixture of google bombing, counter-cartography and psychogeography that uses Google Maps to contest the online/offline representations of Vancouver during the Olympics." I link to them here mainly because I enjoy the words "counter-cartography" and "psychogeography."

The United States of Facebook

PeteSearch finds some patterns in the ways Facebook users are connected to each other:



The colored clumps represent areas within which users' friends tend to be found. That is, someone within Greater Texas, for instance, will tend to have more friends within that region than outside of it. Lines connect cities which tend to have more friend connections.

Says Pete: "Some of these clusters are intuitive, like the old south, but there's some surprises too, like Missouri, Louisiana and Arkansas having closer ties to Texas than Georgia." On Stayathomia:

Stretching from New York to Minnesota, this belt's defining feature is how near most people are to their friends, implying they don't move far. In most cases outside the largest cities, the most common connections are with immediately neighboring cities, and even New York only has one really long-range link in its top 10. Apart from Los Angeles, all of its strong ties are comparatively local.

In contrast to further south, God tends to be low down the top 10 fan pages if she shows up at all, with a lot more sports and beer-related pages instead.

On Dixie:

Dixie towns tend to have links mostly to other nearby cities rather than spanning the country. Atlanta is definitely the hub of the network, showing up in the top 5 list of almost every town in the region. Southern Florida is an exception to the cluster, with a lot of connections to the East Coast, presumably sun-seeking refugees.

God is almost always in the top spot on the fan pages, and for some reason Ashley shows up as a popular name here, but almost nowhere else in the country.

On Mormonia: "It's worth separating from the rest of the West because of how interwoven the communities are, and how relatively unlikely they are to have friends outside the region." The Nomadic West has much longer lines of connection than other regions, which is not terribly surprising. Socalistan is not simply Californiastan (or California for that matter) because the center of gravity clearly bends LA-wards. And Pete observes that Pacifica is "the most boring of the clusters."

All this, Pete notes, is "qualitative, not quantitative," so data caveat emptor and all that. Still, an interesting representation.

Via Andrew Sullivan.

Satisfaction

Gallup asked some people how satisfied they were with their standard of living, which yielded this result:



Says Gallup:

The 2009 satisfaction results are based on combined data for Gallup Daily tracking from Jan. 2 through Dec. 30, 2009, including more than 350,000 interviews for the entire year. The state sample sizes range from 632 in the District of Columbia and 878 in Wyoming to 37,203 in California. Forty-one states had more than 2,000 respondents...

Overall, 31 states showed an increase in satisfaction of at least one percentage point between 2008 and 2009, whereas 5 showed a decrease of at least one point (the greatest decrease, Hawaii's, was less than four points.) The remaining 14 states plus the District of Columbia changed by less than one point.

Now that just doesn't make any sense. Obviously things went downhill from 2008 to '09. Don't people know that? Don't they realize they must be less satisfied now than they were a year ago? Or is it that lean times make people feel more fortunate about their relative prosperity? After all, even now more than four-fifths of people who want jobs have them. That's 80% of the country that probably realizes they could be worse off than they are.

At any rate, it's interesting that the most satisfied states seem to be those that have been least affected by the recession, rather than the ones that have the highest standard of living. And for the least satisfied states it's the same deal: they don't have the lowest objective standards of living, but they have been hard hit by the current recession. I take this to mean that satisfaction, in this context, correlates with perceptions of change in economic conditions, rather than economic conditions as such. (Which makes some sense: if you have a net worth of $1,000, and you find a hundred dollar bill on the street, you'll probably feel a lot more satisfied than someone who's got $10,000 in the bank, but just lost $50,000 at the craps table in Vegas (Nevada, by the way, is the least satisfied state in the country).)

But overall there's not a real huge range from least to most satisfied. Nevada, like I say, is the least satisfied, but 69% there still express satisfaction with their standard of living. The most satisfied is North Dakota, at 82.3%, followed by South Dakots, at 80.8%. (The Dakotas, by the way, are the two ugliest states in the country as well. The reader may make of that what she will.)

BONUS FUN FACT: Did you know the Rolling Stones' (Can't Get No) Satisfation is only the third-best version of that song? It's true! Here's the best:

Russians Call it 'Sneg'

I know what you're thinking. You're thinking: how much of the Northern Hemisphere is currently covered in snow, and can this information be represented in mustard yellow? Well, aren't you in luck:



That's from the Rutgers University Global Snow Lab. By way of commentary, Jeff Masters says:

We live in the United States of Snow. A rare Deep South heavy snowstorm whipped across the southern tier of states yesterday, dumping six-plus inches of snow over portions of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina. Even Florida got into the act, with up to two inches recorded in the extreme northwestern Panhandle. The snowstorm left 49 of the 50 states with snow cover, according to an article by Associated Press. Hawaii was the lone hold-out. David Robinson, head of the Rutgers Global Snow Lab, said that 67.1% of the U.S. had snow cover on Friday morning, with the average depth a respectable 8 inches. Normally, the U.S. has about 40 - 50% snow coverage during the 2nd week of February. January had the 6th greatest snow cover in the 44-year record over the contiguous U.S., and December 2009 had the most snow cover of any December on record. The current pattern of record heavy snows over the the Eastern U.S. is primarily due to a natural oscillation in the Earth's climate system called the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO).

If one single person comments that this proves global warming does not exist, as God is my witness I will reach through the Internet and pop you right in the nose. I will then proceed to make a substantive argument as to why all this snow is actually just what you'd expect (in the short term) in a warming world, but I'd really prefer to not have to do that.

The Reformed State Map of the US

A proposal for electoral reform from fakeisthenewreal:



It's neat and all that the US was the first modern country to adopt many democratic institutions - we did it way back in the 18th Century, before the French Revolution even. Bully for us! However, a side effect of our early adoption of 'democracy' is that we have a lot of weird anachronistic leftovers from the pre-1789 era. Slavery was one, but fortunately we finally managed to get rid of that. But other, less significant but still not insignificant pre-democratic inconveniences remain. This map is meant to address some of these issues. Says fitn:

The electoral college is a time-honored system that has only produced results in conflict with the popular vote three times in over 200 years. However, it's obvious that reforms are needed. The organization of the states should be altered. This Electoral Reform Map redivides the territory of the United States into 50 bodies of equal size.... [This plan] overrepresentation of small states and underrepresention of large states in presidental voting and in the US Senate. Preserves the historical structure of the electoral college and the United States unique federal system, balancing power between levels of government. States could be redistricted after each census - just like house seats are distributed now.

Fifty states, as you see here, each with just about the same population. Yes, this would help with the problem of the electoral college system for picking presidents, which is insane by any reasonable standard and without which we might have avoided a certain period of unpleasantness from 2001-2009.

But the real advantage is in the Senate. Right now, Wyoming has as many senators as California. Vermont has as many as Texas. That's just straight up retarded. It's certainly not democratic. And don't give me any of that crap about how it preserves the sovereignty of states as the Great and Omniscient Founding Fathers intended, because do you know why they ended up with this provision that every state have an equal number of senators? To protect regional interests from the will of the majority; i.e., to protect southern interests; i.e., to protect slavery from meddlesome northerners. (And like just about everything unseemly in American politics, it all somehow goes back to the legacy of slavery...) Nothing approaches this level of blatant anti-democratic institutional structure in the free world. What's more, we can't even amend the constitution to allow for proportional representation in the Senate: the Founders made sure of that by making it the one thing that couldn't be repealed by amendment. Brilliant! So we would have to hold a constitutional convention and start over from scratch if we wanted to reform the Senate in a way that would really live up to modern norms.

Or - we could follow this guy's plan: just take the scissors to the ol' state map and produce what you see above. There would still be two senators per state, but every state would have equal population, so representation would be proportional. A fantastic idea! This would be much fairer than the system we've got going on now. In particular, as it stands, rural areas are way, way overrepresented in the Senate; having two senators each for neo-states like SF Bay, Los Angeles, Boston, New York, and Dallas would remedy that.

As for the electoral college, it wouldn't solve the problem entirely. It would still be possible to lose the popular vote and win the electoral college, but at least it wouldn't be due to the fact that the smallest states get overrepresented in the electoral college (e.g., North Dakota gets 3 EVs, because of its 1 representative + 2 senators, though it only has the population to justify 1).

Of course, there would be some logistical problems in re-organizing state governments throughout the country. But bah, I say. Small potatoes: the senate is dysfunctional as it is and it is going to end up killing the country. My own personal choice would be for us all to just ignore the Senate until it went away, sort of like the House of Lords. But this plan strikes me as the next best thing.