Earlier this year, I published a map showing the most common road suffixes in each county, judged by the number of streets with that suffix. I was surprised at how quickly it took off on Reddit, inspiring a boatload of messages asking for the data and disputing the results. I hadn’t really realized how intensely…
Introduction If in the unlikely event you’ve never heard of the Great British Bake Off, let me enlighten you: it’s a TV show where British people bake things in a tent. It’s not quite as relaxing as it sounds: contestants are asked to bake some very complicated things under extremely stressful conditions. One challenge of…
Making silly maps is my jam, but I definitely have a strong US bias. I’m American, so the first thing that comes to mind is… America. It felt like time I made a map for some other country. The obvious candidate was the British Isles, and what could be more British than pubs? I decided…
My dad’s coworker told him that the city with the most Mexican restaurants is Chicago, a statement that didn’t sound right to either of us. There’s nothing better than proving somebody wrong, so I set out to investigate the matter for myself. I found where (I think) his coworker got that fact: a report put…
Bill Rankin’s amazing work at Radical Cartography is very inspiring. I’m particularly enamored of his tree maps, both large-scale and small. I decided to mimic his map of New Haven’s street trees using data for Portland, Oregon, my beautiful town. Sadly, I do not know how he constructed his map at the incredible level of…
This project has been running in the background for some time, and I’m pleased to finally have it done! I was curious to see if people in different locations tend to use different emoji (emojis?). There’s a variety of sources to collect emoji from, but the one that, in my opinion, best combines geolocation and…
Here’s something that’ll date me: the first metal album I bought (at a Circuit City, no less) was Killswitch Engage’s 2002 opus Alive or Just Breathing. While my musical taste has moved on from that particular band, I am still fond of the genre. Not enough, though, to really understand the sub-genres out there: how exactly…
Plotting cul-de-sacs using the US Census’ TIGER/Line geographical data was such fun (how often is that sentence uttered?) I wanted to keep going. I decided to make a fun little map showing the distribution of road suffixes (e.g. Road, Street, Lane) across the country. It took me a lot of Googling to first start to be able…
I got curious about cul-de-sacs after making a wrong turn into an unfamiliar subdivision and getting completely, totally lost. I kept making turns into dead ends, which raised the question: how the hell many of these godforsaken things are there, anyway? To answer this question, I was worried I’d have to invest serious time into…
Many people have probably heard of this handsome fella, Charles II, King of Spain. He’s pretty much known as “that really inbred king”: His parents were uncle and niece. His father’s parents were first cousins, once removed. His mother’s parents were cousins. And this continues for some way up the family tree. There’s plenty of…