Link Banana

NPR has built a fantastic set of maps about how energy is produced and distributed across the United States.

Something I learned: the Hoover Dam, which I naively assumed to be the biggest hydroelectric producer, is pretty average. The real heavyweights are in Washington.

(via BBG)

The most interesting part is the list of magnet and sticky states. I’m shocked to see New York at the bottom of their magnetic list. I’d expect NYC would at least make it most magnetic state in the Rust Belt, but I guess not.

(via kottke)

Angus McLeod has made the strangest study-aid I think I’ve ever seen.

(via Strange Maps)

Truly living up to it’s name, Strange Maps offers the stunning overlay of those areas that were the greatest cotton producers in 1860 — and thus had the largest slave populations — and those areas most strongly for the election of Barack Obama. Proof that if nothing else, history lives on.

Also, I’d love to hear some theories about that high-producer on Tennessee’s southern border that’s now solidly red. Is that a city? — my geography of the South is pretty bad.

This video didn’t just interest me, it enraptured me.

(via kottke)

Neatorama points to some interesting maps. Basically: the total area of the moon covered by the Apollo 11 astronauts was smaller than a soccer field. Or, if they landed on a baseball diamond, they hardly left the infield.

GOOD has a pretty interesting map of history’s greatest journeys. Worth a look.

(via Snarkmarket)

Hidden in a rather good mental_floss post called “3 Controversial Maps” is an interesting idea:

If George Etzel Pearcy had his way, Lynyrd Skynyrd’s famous song would have been called “Sweet Home Talladego.” In 1973, the California State University geography professor suggested that the U.S. should redraw its antiquated state boundaries and narrow the overall number of states to a mere thirty-eight.

Pearcy’s proposed state lines were drawn in less-populated areas, isolating large cities and reducing their number within each state. He argued that if there were fewer cities vying for a state’s tax dollars, more money would be available for projects that would benefit all citizens.

Though there are a substantial number of reasons to immediately reject this proposal, I think I could get used to this new map.

The New York Times has put together another fabulous interactive chart — or maybe it’s a map — of how many medals countries won in each summer Olympiad since 1896.

(via Passport)

Far more variable than you might think. The comparison of various renderings is well worth a look.

(via kottke)

Worst title ever? In any case, Strange Maps has a striking maps of where federally-owned land in located around the United States. You may be surprised to know that Nevada has the most (84.5%), while Connecticut has the least (0.4%). And no, neither number is a typo.

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.

I noticed two interesting things on Google today, so I thought I’d share.

• Google has a new favicon. They’ve switched from the big G to the little one. I like it. (via DF)
• Maps on searches for country names and cities. Now when I want to know where Zambia is, I no longer have click through to Wikipedia to know.

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

Wired Science has an approachable look at this report which measured the per-capita emissions of the 100 largest US metro areas. There’s not much terribly surprising — density is good, public transportation is good, coal is bad, mild weather is good — but the map’s still interesting to see.

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.

I linked to a part of Aaron Koblin’s Flight Patterns project a few weeks ago, without recognizing it as such. Neatorama has compiled some valuable links to his work, and pointed out the awesome video in the title link. Their summary:

In 2005, Aaron Koblin took all of the air traffic over United States data, as seen by the FAA, and visualized it in a beautiful animation. Aaron’s work was originally developed as a series of experiments for the “Celestial Mechanics” project (eye candy!) by Scott Hesels and Gabriel Dunne at UCLA.

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

Both of these caught my eye:

• Delicious Ghost found some maps of where personality types, like extroversion and agreeableness, are located within (48 of) the United States. They’re from a column by Richard Florida, who has many more maps available on his site.
• Ben Fry, who recently made the “all streets” map, was pointed to a map [PDF] of the distance to a road in (48 of) the United States. He was pointed there by Tom Vanderbilt, who wrote that recent diatribe against playsets in your yard.

Passport has collected a few maps that show the extent of the damage done by the cyclone that struck Burma over the weekend. This before and after set is, as is usually the case with hurricanes, rather striking.