Sunday, July 27, 2008

Now here's an idea...

Fakeisthenewreal, the same online presence who crunched the data to figure out the most- and least-densely-populated block groups, has redrawn the U.S. map into 50 equally-populated states:Unfortunately he didn't show how he did his calculations*, nor did he make available any more detailed maps showing exactly where the boundaries are. But it is kind of fun to play with maps this way.

* If you don't want to crawl through too much data, you could approximate things by creating clusters of eight and two-thirds congressional districts. Counting the District of Columbia as a congressional district to get 436 districts, you'd have eight remaining thirds of districts to distribute after you divide that total by 8 2/3. You could even things up well by tacking them onto the clusters in states with smaller districts**. The annoying thing there is that the boundaries of congressional districts are so gerrymandered in most states that they don't represent any coherent geographical concepts.

** Congressional districts represent an average of about 650,000 people each, but differ slightly from state to state, as each state has an integer number of representatives.

3 Comments:

At Monday, July 28, 2008 at 11:38:00 AM PDT, Anonymous Anonymous said...

I like the state name "Nice Weather"

 
At Monday, July 28, 2008 at 12:16:00 PM PDT, Blogger Adam Villani said...

"Land O' Lakes" is good, too. What's up with "Loving Hands" for Utah and the rest of the LDS-influenced area? I guess it generally refers to Jesus, but does it have some particular significance for Mormons?

 
At Tuesday, July 29, 2008 at 8:04:00 PM PDT, Blogger Paul C. said...

Alas, I find myself living in a now-defunct filling station (Sohio). Even though I moved to Sohio for college, I still strongly identify with my North Coast roots, cheering on North Coast teams in Cleveland instead of my home-state Reds and Bengals. Guess you can take the boy out of the North Coast, but you'll never etc.

 

Post a Comment

<< Home