At Least We Woudn't Have To Move

Only four nations have populations that coincide with their rankings in square miles: Brazil, Ireland, Yemen, and the United States. These "what if" maps have become quite the meme of late. (Source)

Thanks, George!

All the George Rekers buzz pushed this here website thingy into Technorati's Top 100 Blogs this week, a place mostly populated by group blogs like the Huffington Post. I'm way down at #88, but that's still totally braggable. Interestingly, I'm the only blog with a Google domain on the list, but since those busy-busy-busy anti-gay hackers would have to bring down all of Blogspot to get to me, I'm staying put for now.

Today In Mildly Interesting Trivia

This here website thingy gained a (relative) ton of readers from India in the last few months. One year ago, India wasn't even in my international top ten. Desis in the house, raise your hands!

The REAL Top Movies List

After Avatar became the highest grossing movie of all time earlier this week, many of you noted that because of inflation, gross revenue and ticket sales are two different measures of success. The Live Feed notes today that in terms of attendance, Avatar is actually the 26th most successful film of all time. Here's the top 20, by tickets sold.

1. "Gone With the Wind" (1939) 202,044,600
2 "Star Wars" (1977) 178,119,600
3 "The Sound of Music" (1965) 142,415,400
4 "E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial" (1982) 141,854,300
5 "The Ten Commandments" (1956) 131,000,000
6 "Titanic" (1997) 128,345,900
7 "Jaws" (1975) 128,078,800
8 "Doctor Zhivago" (1965) 124,135,500
9 "The Exorcist" (1973) 110,568,700
10 "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" (1937) 109,000,000
11 "101 Dalmatians" (1961) 99,917,300
12 "The Empire Strikes Back" (1980) 98,180,600
13 "Ben-Hur" (1959) 98,000,000
14 "Return of the Jedi" (1983) 94,059,400
15 "The Sting" (1973) 89,142,900
16 "Raiders of the Lost Ark" (1981) 88,141,900
17 "Jurassic Park" (1993) 86,205,800
18 "The Graduate" (1967) 85,571,400
19 "Star Wars: Episode I" (1999) 84,825,800
20 "Fantasia" (1941) 83,043,500

NYC By Day And Night

Gothamist tips us to this neat map showing how the population density of Manhattan changes by day and night. I think that giant spike above midtown is the Bloomingdale's shopping area.

Time Is On Our Side

Stats guru Nate Silver has done his usual brilliant number crunching and made estimates on how long it will take each state to reaching the tipping point at which ballot measures to ban same-sex marriage would fail. Go to the above link for Silver's explanations of how he reached his conclusions. Below is a map/timeline made by a Silver fan, which I found on Fark. Remember, these are the years by which marriage-banning referendums are expected to fail, not the years by which marriage equality would be enacted.

President Southpaw

Barack Obama is our eighth left-handed president. Oddly, four of the last five presidents have been lefties.

James Garfield, 1881
Herbert Hoover, 1929 – 1933
Harry Truman, 1945 – 1953
Gerald Ford, 1974 – 1977
Ronald Reagan, 1981 – 1989
George Bush, 1989 – 1993
Bill Clinton, 1993 – 2001
Barack Obama, 2009

Via Wikipedia:

In his book Right-Hand, Left-Hand, Chris McManus of University College London argues that the proportion of left-handers is rising and left-handed people as a group have historically produced an above-average quota of high achievers. He says that left-handers' brains are structured differently in a way that widens their range of abilities, and the genes that determine left-handedness also govern development of the language centres of the brain. McManus also says that the increase in the 20th century of people identifying as left-handed could produce a corresponding intellectual advance and a leap in the number of mathematical, sporting, or artistic geniuses. In 2006, researchers at Lafayette College and Johns Hopkins University in a study found that left-handed men are 15 percent richer than right-handed men for those who attended college, and 26 percent richer if they graduated. The wage difference is still unexplainable and does not appear to apply to women.

Via StrangeMaps

StrangeMaps tips us to this 1983 graphic from the Dallas Morning News which shows the relative size and populations of some major cities. Obviously, the populations have increased for some of these cities, but like the StrangeMaps dude, I'm more fascinated by their relative sizes and densities.

What remains striking about this map, even though we’re talking about populations and surfaces of 25 years ago, are the relative population densities of the cities. Dallas and Houston are comparable to each other in population and both are in the same category, surface-wise, as London and New York. But the population of the latter two cities is roughly 6 to 8 times higher than either Houston or Dallas, indicating that these have a much lower population density. A possible explanation: the automobile (and the flat prairie they were built upon) has allowed both Texan metropolises to sprawl in ways unimaginable just over a century ago, and impossible even today in more constrained surroundings.

The two other European cities depicted here (apart from London, i.e. Amsterdam and Rome) have city centres that are smaller and more densely populated than their American cousins. About equal in size to Rome (and to each other) are Toronto, Montreal and Boston, but they are much less packed with people (2.6 million for Rome, between half a million and 1.2 million for the other cities). Chicago’s sprawl and density puts it somewhere between Dallas and London. DC and San Francisco are special, in that they are very constrained surface-wise (legally in DC’s case, physically by the Bay and the Ocean in San Francisco’s case). This ‘pressure cooker’ circumstance causes their populations to be much denser than in either of the sprawling Texan cities.

Manhattan Is To Idaho As Queens Is To...

Here are the boroughs of NYC as represented by the states which are closest in population. According to the 2000 US census: Bronx-1.332 million; Brooklyn-2.465 million; Manhattan-1.537 million; Queens-2.229 million; and Staten Island 443,728. I freekin' love maps like this.

(Via - Gothamist)

Catching Up With The Joneses

A new analysis of the last U.S. census reveals that for the first time, two Hispanic surnames are among the ten most common last names in the country. I can't embed it here, but in the linked story there's a neat scrollable graphic of the 5000 most common last names.

The new top ten:

1. Smith
2. Johnson
3. Williams
4. Brown
5. Jones
6. Miller
7. Davis
8. Garcia
9. Rodriquez
10. Wilson

Also new to the top twenty: Hernandez at #11, Martinez at #15. The Hispanic population of the United States grew by 58% in the '90s and now comprises 13% of the nation. Lee, a surname shared by both whites and Asians (and the most common surname in the world), is #22 in the U.S. My own last name doesn't appear on the list as there are only about 600 of us in the country. I've never met somebody with my last name that I wasn't related to.