4 March 2018 Printable United States map This is a general-purpose map of the United States, designed from the bottom up to be printable by everyone, and to look great on the humble 8.5 x 11 paper. When making maps, or just looking at data, I do a lot of sketching. I usually Google Image search some kind of basemap, and scribble on that. ...
How far is Hawaii from the nearest landmass? 3 March 2017 Originally I had said that the closest point on the North American mainland to Hawaii was near Flumeville, California. However, I was wrong! As it turns out, the southernmost tip of the Alaska Peninsula is actually about 12 miles (20 km) closer. Located near the town of False Pass, the tip of an unnamed peninsula overlooking Ikatan Bay is exactly 2,259. ...
Fun with city subreddits 6 February 2017 I’ve been playing with python to try to learn how to make maps using Matplotlib. As it turns out, it’s not all that complicated. Using Reddit’s API I scraped the top 300 posts from the largest city subreddits in the United States and Canada. After some data wrangling I end up with a Pandas dataframe with the coordinates of the city, as well as all the titles of the top 300 posts associated with that city’s reddit. ...
Mexico’s urban pileups 14 December 2016 -- Buy high-res file -- The US-Mexico border is the most frequently crossed, and one of the longest, in the world. The difference in development between the Mexican and US side is perhaps the greatest of any international border. This results in a really interesting urban pileup effect where many Mexicans move to cities that are right along the US border. ...
The Unscientific Bay Area 23 August 2016 -- Buy high-res file -- Originally this was supposed to be the start of a line of posters, but it failed to gain traction, despite overwhelmingly positive reactions. Nonetheless, below’s the original post for posterity. I was really inspired by all the positive reactions and support that I got for the original Bay Area map. So I decided to completely redesign and vectorize everything, making it crisp enough to give people the prints they were asking for. ...
America’s GDP Split 20 February 2014 America’s gross domestic product split geographically, 50-50. The map shows a 50-50 split of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of the United States. The GDP of the cyan area is equal to the GDP of the orange area. This would equate to $8.10 trillion for each colored half in the above map. The orange areas are the 23 largest metro areas (technically MSA’s) by GDP. ...
How big is the Arctic Circle? 10 October 2016 The Map Porn subreddit has a requests page now, which is pretty awesome. User Mjager asked what the Arctic Circle would look like projected near the equator, to get a sense of scale. I decided to just go ahead and do it. The radius of the Arctic Circle varies minutely with each year. Also, “projecting” is onto the Equator is tricky because the Earth isn’t a perfect sphere, yet the Circle is defined in terms of latitude. ...
Snow Days 29 January 2014 Notes: The lightest green says “any snow” but also includes merely the prediction of snow. Also, this is snow accumulation over 24 hours/overnight. In much of the Midwest and Great Plains, school closing often depends more on wind chill and temperature than on snow accumulation (“cold days”). Thus, this map may be misleading in those areas. Many jurisdictions in California and other western states have significantly varied snowfall, depending on elevation. ...