voluntaryXchange

Words Have Meaning

Like pretty much every human, I was genuinely horrified by the shark attack in Maine this past Monday.

But I am a bit bothered that I have seen nothing, anywhere, noting that you probably shouldn’t swim in a body of water named after food.

I dunno’, I think it’s plausible Mackerel Cove was named after all the mackerel there.

Smaller mackerel are forage fish for larger predators, including larger mackerel and Atlantic cod.[2] Flocks of seabirds, whales, dolphins, sharks, and schools of larger fish such as tuna and marlin follow mackerel schools and attack them ...

There is a public beach there. My guess is that it was opened when sharks were mostly fished out of waters in the northeast. Fair enough.

But that doesn’t mean that the words shouldn’t mean something to potential swimmers.

Somehow, we seem to have evolved into this sort of “societal teenagerism”, where the connections between words and implications for ideas are readily ignored. Like this:

Fishing out all the sharks, and

Safely swimming in a place named for shark food.

Those two ideas go together. So does their inverse.

***************************

FWIW:

Yes, I love swimming in the ocean too.

Yes, I am part of the Jaws generation, and I worry too much about sharks.

Yes, I can see myself not giving these names a second thought.

None of which changes anything above.

Iso-Temperatures Map

This connects geographic positions of equal temperature.

This gives you a great sense of something few people realize: western coasts are more densely inhabited than eastern ones at the same latitude. Just look at how warm coastal Norway and Alaska are. The reason is that the ocean retains warmth better than dry land.

BTW: I grew up in Buffalo. This is part of the reason Buffalo is so snowy: it’s at the eastern end of a warm lake (nice in the summer) from which cold continental winds can pick up a lot of moisture in the winter.

This also gives you a sense of why early European settlers of North America were started by the harsh weather: the band of comfortable weather is far narrower on the east side of North America than on the west side of Europe.

The City of the Decade (2019 Edition)

The teens are almost over. What American city will our memories associate most with this decade?

Yeah … you’ll have to scroll down if you want the quick answer.

**********************

I posted 14 years ago that prior to the internet, I’d seen the idea of cities being synonymous with decades somewhere in print. But the source is long gone to me.

After much navel gazing (here and here), I decided that the city of the oughties was the IE (Riverside/Ontario/San Bernadino). It was the newer, third part of LA/OC/IE, and the one most on our minds in the Great Recession as home prices went up and then went down again.

**********************

So, here’s my list:

• 20’s = Chicago (organized crime)
• 30’s = Los Angeles (movies)
• 40’s = Washington (war)
• 50’s = New York (live TV)
• 60’s = San Francisco (counterculture)
• 70’s = Houston (oil money)
• 80’s = Miami (style, drug money and kingpins)
• 90’s = Seattle (coffee, grunge and Frasier)
• 00’s = IE: Riverside/Ontario/San Bernadino (immigrants legal and not, house flipping, mortgage issues, butterfly wranglers with $900K budgets)

Here are the also-rans from the last decade, with some snark:

• Phoenix (still … meh)
• Las Vegas (I think it peaked around 1999)
• Salt Lake City
• Denver (maybe it’s me, but this one is fading)
• Austin (still rolling, maybe the 20’s)
• Charlotte (just … nah)
• Riverside and the Inland Empire
• Dallas (never say never … it may still happen)
• New Orleans (sorry, Brad Pitt went home)
• New York (de Blasio is not helping)

You’ll notice there’s not snark after Salt Lake City. I lived there for a year in the early 90’s. Since then, I’ve been back perhaps 30 times. If you haven’t been, you need to go. It’s a pretty amazing place, and has become a magnet for LGBTQ+ people … I’d call parts of it the biggest contiguous area of gentrification I’ve ever seen. And they’re pushing for the Olympics again in 2030. And don’t get me started about the Silicon Slopes. The latest is the forthcoming Real Housewives of Salt Lake City … what a sign that a city has arrived.

My sense right now is that SLC crushes Austin if I’m still writing this blog in 10 years.

**********************

But what about this decade? Honestly, this is pretty easy. The teens are the decade of the smartphone and the network externality driven tech giants, and AppGooBook beats out AmaSoft in Seattle.†

So the city of the decade is the South Bay: San Jose, Santa Clara, Palo Alto, and of course Cupertino, Mountain View, and Menlo Park.

† Right after posting this, I learned a new acronym for these: FAANG (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google). Note that Microsoft isn’t even in there.

Cool Maps: Pangaea, By Countries

Somehow, this helps me understand:

I do kinda’ wonder what was in the current Arctic Ocean at that time.

It certainly could have rifted open like the Atlantic did, but I don’t know if there’s evidence to support that.

And you can’t just say there was a continent there that sank between the waves. The cratons for that would still be around.

But I tend to doubt it was a large lake, as shown here.

Cool Maps: Understanding Canada

Canada’s median population line:

When I grew up in the Buffalo suburbs, older people pejoratively called that bit of Ontario below the line Canada’s “Banana Belt”.

You Might Want to Show the Pack Ice That’s Actually There

This is today’s Google Maps view of northeastern Siberia.

For the casual viewer, this suggests that the ice at the North Pole is gone.

In a world in which teenagers insist that polar bears are already extinct (yes, happened to me yesterday), and the National Geographic has to issue a (two page !!) correction that it’s photo of a presumably dying polar bear was not related to climate change, perhaps Google ought to think these things through a bit better.

In Google’s defense, yes, it’s kind of nice to be able to see the depth of the Arctic Ocean and surrounding seas. But how hard would it be to do that as an overlay? Particularly when they are so diligent about showing snow cover on solid ground?

Gosh … Google might even do a public service by showing how the pack ice evolves with the seasons, given that this is the time of the year those potential sealanes start to open up.

FWIW: why on earth was I looking at this? Because of a headline about a Siberian town where the daytime skies turned dark. The article didn’t have a map, so I looked it up, and it’s flagged above.

Soviet GNP In 1953

Here’s a horrifying map:

This is a declassified image from the CIA. It shows the USSR divided into economic regions in 1953, with the percentage of national GNP produced in each region.

The horror is typical Edward Tufte stuff: why separate the pieces, why the chartjunk 3-d effect, no legend for the roman numerals, the moire effect, and so on.

A black and white version of this is discussed in this publication declassified a few years ago. On page 13, that document estimates Soviet nominal GNP in 1953 at 1,205 billion rubles. At the official exchange rate for that year of 4 rubles to the dollar, that works out to a GNP of 301 billion dollars. Digging a little into BEA table 1.7.5 shows that U.S. nominal GNP in 1953 was 389.7 billion dollars. This puts the Soviet economy at a little over 3/4 the size of the U.S. economy.

Hindsight is 20/20. We now know that estimate is laughable. Something in the range of 10-30% is now considered reasonable.

(Somewhat) Lost to History

Given the inglorious end to apartheid, it isn’t surprising that parts of it are forgotten or surpressed.

Forty or so years back, the creation of predominantly black “homelands” was in the news.†

From the CIA’s achives, here’s a map of that plan.

Some of you may remember when Sun City was a destination resort, and there were controversies over entertainers that played there. The issue was that Sun City was in Bophutatswana (just about in the center of the map).

I get why apartheid was worse than comparable systems like Jim Crow, but I can’t say I was ever sure why these homelands were worse than, say, Indian reservations in the U.S.

FWIW: And what dimbulb thought the portmanteau “Bantustan” was a good name for these things?

† I’m not that comfortable calling them black. But native won’t work either, since there have been non-black emigrants living in South Africa for a few hundred years now.

Technorati Tags: south,africa,apartheid,homelands,bantustans

Well, It’s There, But Is It Important?

Big news today is the national cancer incidence map published in Cancer.

The difference in cancer rates between environmentally cleaner and dirtier counties was 39, out of 100,000, per year. That’s not deaths, that’s diagnoses.

Is that a lot?

On this blog, we’re not innumerate about stuff like this.

Divide 100,000 by 39 to get about 2,50. So 1 more person out of 2,564.

But how many of those normally get cancer? The rate is 451 out of 100,000 every year. Divide that by 39 to get 12 (more or less).

So, how big is 2.500 people?

In my town, there’s an elementary school for about every 5,000 people. That’s all the parents, kids (of all ages), extended family under one roof, and even the neighbors who have no connection to the elementary school. Basically, it’s a big neighborhood.

And if that big neighborhood is clean you’d get 24 cancers, and if it’s dirty you’d get 26.

That’s not nothing. But I also think the difference is smaller than a lot of hearsay and anecdotes about cancer would have you believe.

BTW: I look at that map, and I think it’s mostly related to commuting.

UPDATE: I had one more thought last night about the pattern here. since this is occurrences of cancer, it could be related to how much time and effort doctors put into finding cancers. For me, that would help explain California, where they have money, but people don’t seem to trust doctors invasive efforts very much.

Technorati Tags: cancer,by county,incidence,map,national,rate

Geographic Correlation and Well-Being

Interactive graphics showing the patterns in which we live together are becoming really common. They’re a useful way to think about our world.

This is important in macroeconomics, because we choose to live in places near others, and we agglomerate around areas where living standards are either high or growing quickly.

Today’s addition to this is that the Bureau of Transportation Statistics (part of the federal Department of Transportation) has produced a map of noise pollution. It’s interactive, so you should click through.

Obviously, most of it is related to airports and roads. But, of course, where do you want to live? Probably within an easy drive of an airport. Here’s a screen capture that readily shows the pattern of where we are living our lives and spending our days in the Great Basin:

Just about every place in the region you’ve ever spent time in is on these orange lines.

Cross-posted from SUU Macroblog, which is required reading for my macroeconomics classes.

Via bookofjoe.

Technorati Tags: maps,noise,sound,pollution,bureau,transportation,statistics