Population and Area Proportions of the 50 US States

This graph displays, for each of the 50 states, what proportion of all 50 states’ population and area reside in that state.

Land area is used here, as it makes more sense for comparison to human population than total area.

Population numbers are from the “2010” census.

Note that neither the total area nor the total population here (the latter more significantly) equals the total area or population of the United States because totality here represents the 50 states, and does not include US territories.

For comparison, here’s what this chart would look like 50 years earlier.

Time Zones of the World

Shown here are all time zones that exist in the world sans Antarctica (in deviation from UTC), including consideration of daylight savings time. Light gray arcs connect time zones that share a land border; thus, one could walk in such a way as to immediately transition from a time zone to one that an arc on this chart connects it to.

Walking across the Afghanistan-China border advances time 3.5 hours, from Afghanistan’s UTC+4.5 to China’s UTC+8. If Antarctica is included, time zone adjacencies become drastically crazier; for instance, UTC would border UTC+12.

Average Seasonal Lags in 32 American Cities

Even though the sun is highest at noon and furthest away at midnight (up to time zone discretization and daylight savings), a typical day is not hottest at noon and not coldest at midnight. This is because, for example, after noon passes, the sun continues to heat up the earth more, and the temperature only begins dropping once the rate at which the sun warms the surface of the earth has fallen back below the rate at which the earth radiates heat back out. A typical day demonstrates a diurnal lag.

Likewise, the summer and winter solstices, despite having the respective longest and shortest amounts of sunshine hours, are typically not the hottest and coldest days of the year. There is a usually a seasonal lag, that is, the hottest and coldest days of the year usually fall many days after the solstice.

Many topographical features affect the degree of seasonal lag, and often amounts of summer and winter lag are different, and differently different across different locations.

This chart displays several statistics together. For each of 32 cities in the continental United States, the average hottest day and average coldest day of the year for each city are marked, and each mark spans from the average low to the average high for that city on that day.

In parentheses next to each city name are the average numbers of days of lag past the solstice in summer and winter.

Some marks are wider than other marks to make ranges clearer for cities that have the same amount of a particular seasonal lag and thus may have overlapping marks.

Record Highs and Lows in American Cities

This chart shows the wide span of record highs and lows across the many states in the USA. The data points are colored by region in the USA, to aid general comparisons among regions of the United States.

Notice that some regions have more variety in represented temperature ranges than others; for instance, the region of mountains and deserts between the West Coast and the Great Plains displays a particularly vast span. Most spectacularly, note how far apart Phoenix and Flagstaff are on this chart despite less than 250 kilometers (150 miles) separating them physically. This stark difference demonstrates that local topography far dwarfs general location within a continent in effect on climate.

That having been said, note that this chart should not be interpreted as a complete picture on climate. Other important aspects of climate, particularly precipitation and humidity, are not represented on this chart at all; Californian and Floridian cities are quite near to one another on this extreme temperature chart, but have very different climates in general. Also note that these are *record* temperatures, not *typical* summer and winter temperatures, and that the amount by which record temperatures exceed the usual can differ from location to location.

All Deaths from Ebola

This chart contains one circle for each person so far in history to be confirmed to have died from Ebola virus disease (EVD). Outbreaks of Ebola are displayed in general chronological order from left to right. The current West African epidemic has reached a higher death toll than all 21 previous outbreaks combined, and as of this post is still ongoing, likely to claim even more lives. The outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo represented as the middle portion of the bottom line is an outbreak concurrent with but independent from the West African epidemic.

Some of the deaths shown in the chart as being in the Republic of the Congo were actually in Gabon; I was unable to find data ascertaining specifically which country certain deaths in the first Gabon/Congo Republic outbreak were in.

Map of the Continental US, Scaled by Interstate Number

In interstate highways in the United States, even-numbered main highways are generally east-west with increasing highway numbers from south to north, and odd-numbered main highways are generally north-south with increasing highway numbers from west to east.

If one decides to fix the map of the United States to a grid of interstate numbers, we produce the map below. Notice distance skews that make the fact that the highway numbering rules are only a rule of thumb obvious: highways are frequently not spaced anywhere near to scale with numerical difference, and highways sometimes move to the ‘wrong’ side of a ‘parallel’ highway, making, in a notable example in Ohio, Columbus move southwest of Cincinnati.

This map is a rework of a map of this character that I produced two and a half years ago. The previous one was drawn with Microsoft Paint; this one was produced in Raphael.js.