Live Wind Map

Beautiful

A moving map of surface winds in the US, updated hourly.  Makes it very easy to visualize high and low pressure areas.

h/t to Flowing Data

Here a Chick, There a Chick, Everywhere a Chick Chick

• There are 4 factory-farmed chickens for every single American.
• The nearly 14 million broiler chickens on factory farms in Nacogdoches County, Texas produce as much untreated manure as the sewage from the Detroit metro area.
• The more than 3.8 million egg-laying hens on factory farms in Gonzales County, Texas produce as much untreated manure as the sewage from the San Jose, California metro area.
• The average Texas hog factory farm has 100,000 hogs.
• There are 48 times more chickens than people in Arkansas.
• There are 40% more cattle on feedlots (2.5 million) than people (1.8 million) in Nebraska.

How many CAFOs are there in your county?  Check it out here: The Factory Farm Map

Bowling for Dollars

What explains this distribution?  What economic impacts will this have?

If the world’s population lived in one city…

If the world’s population lived in one city… « Per Square Mile.

Simply imagine that the world lived with the same density of a real city, and see how much area they take up. If we all lived like they do in San Francisco (space-wise), we’d take up just under 398k square miles, or rather, only four states. Same density as New York? We’d all fit in Texas. (from Flowing Data)

So what’s the mostly densely populated of these cities?  the least?  which cities probably have good mass transit?  Why is Houston so spread out?

Mississippi River transit map

via River Maps « somethingaboutmaps.

Rivers have been a key part of urban life for centuries. They have provided us with drinking water, protection, and a transit network that links us from one settlement to the next.

This really cool map of the Mississippi River system is done in the style of 1930′s subway system maps.  It illustrates the enormity and complexity of the major transportation system of the central US.

Our lucky geography provides us with a cheap way to move goods and people across the middle of our nation.  If not for this system, would we be more like Africa, which has no way to link the interior with the coast on a waterway?

h/t to Strange Maps

The Geography of Unemployment