Link Banana

I swear this article appears at least semiannually in some paper somewhere. This one chose the “epicenter of artistic talent” angle.

(via Ideas)

This thing made me go “Wow!” It’s a map of America’s Interstate highways smoothed into a series of straight lines, like a subway map.

(via Snarkmarket)

Though I’m not quite sure what makes these satellite images “abstract,” I do think they’re pretty neat. (Seperately, some of these pictures were linked to in this post.)

(via Andrew Sullivan)

In an excellent overview of suburbs in the United States, The Economist recently pointed to an interesting fact: while suburbs are increasingly diverse, urban areas are becoming whiter.

According to William Frey, a demographer, the white population of big-city suburbs grew by 7% between 2000 and 2006. In the same period the suburban Asian population grew by 16%, the black population by 24% and the Hispanic population by an astonishing 60%. Many immigrants to America now move directly to the suburbs without passing through established urban ghettos. Having conquered suburbia, ethnic-minority groups are now swiftly infiltrating the more distant “exurbs”.

As the suburbs become more mixed, some inner-city areas are turning less so. Los Angeles, which markets itself as the city “where the world comes together”, and New York (“the world’s second home”) both added whites and lost blacks between 2000 and 2006. So many blacks moved out of Los Angeles that, were the exodus to continue unabated, they would disappear from the city around 2050. Manhattan and San Francisco lost Hispanics as well as blacks, which is remarkable given that group’s speedy growth in the country as a whole. Meanwhile, the world came together on their fringes.

Though they’re mostly small, The Economist makes the interesting point that there are actually a relatively high number of land-locked countries with navies.

Am I the only one who thinks it’s odd that that no gnomes live in France or Italy?

Because it gives me a small measure of comfort to know that even their fellow Europeans are capable of confusing Latvia and Lithuania, I note that the Czech soccer federation did the following:

The Latvian flag was in the game program along with a photo of the Latvian national soccer team. Before the match, Czech organizers played Latvia’s national anthem. However, the Czech Republic was facing Lithuania on Tuesday night, not Latvia.

Passport has pulled some maps from an interesting study, “Natural Disaster Hotspots: A Global Risk Analysis” (PDF).

They divided the world up into sub-national swathes of land and analyzed population and disaster data going back about thirty years for six disaster types: drought, flooding, cyclones, earthquakes, volcanoes, and landslides. For reasons of data accuracy and availability, the results are relative rather than absolute likelihoods that disasters will occur in various corners of the globe.

The study focuses on more significantly populated areas amounting to about half of the world’s land area. It approaches loss as potential damage to that which is “valuable but vulnerable includ[ing] people, infrastructure, and environmentally important land uses.” And what’s more, based on data from a Brussels-based research center, the study hints that disaster frequency is increasing.

Further proof that Europeans — admittedly, with some justification — don’t have a clue about the geography of the United States.

This is a pretty interesting little tool. It maps how (geographically) the world is seen by some prominent newspapers and their editors-in-chief.

(via Boing Boing)

The state legislators in Georgia went to the history books to try to cure their water problem:

SOON after James Camak demarcated the border between Georgia and Tennessee in 1818, he began to develop doubts about his work. Thanks to a faulty sextant and bad astronomical charts, he had drawn the line a mile south of the intended boundary, the 35th parallel. Were the error to be corrected, Georgia would find itself in possession of a short stretch of the Tennessee river.

Until recently, Georgia’s politicians did not pursue their claims to this sliver of territory very vigorously. But a bad drought, and the growing militancy of two other neighbouring states about the sharing of water, have prompted a change of heart. Last month Georgia’s state assembly passed a resolution calling on the governor to set up a commission to look into the disputed boundary.

The Economist says black is the new white. At least as far as fleeing poorer urban neighborhoods in California is concerned.

Since 1990 the city’s black population has dropped by a quarter, from 488,000 to 364,000, even as the overall number of residents rose. The exodus is most noticeable in areas where blacks were once concentrated, such as Compton and Crenshaw. The population of the 35th congressional district, over which the old-fashioned race warrior Maxine Waters holds sway, is now less than one-third black. “It’s becoming hard to find black neighbourhoods,” says Dowell Myers, a demographer at the University of Southern California.

There is also the important point that this movement, like most movement affected by real estate prices, has stalled with the recent mortgage crisis.