New Comparison From Nate Silver

Details.

Mortgage Math

(Via Andrew Sullivan.)

GOP Statistics

Hunger Games Sets Box Office Record

With an estimated take of $155M, Hunger Games is the only non-sequel to place in the top ten greatest opening weekends ever.

More Mildly Interesting Trivia

75% of JMG traffic is domestic. Canada is next with 6%, then the UK with 3%. After that, it's all 1% and fractions thereof. And let's wave hello to our lone daily readers from Lesotho, Tajikistan, and Kazakhstan!

How Many People Can Fit In NYC?

The New York Times looks at shrinking densities:

As crowded as the city feels at times, the present-day Manhattan population, 1.6 million, is nowhere near what it once was. In 1910, a staggering 2.3 million people crowded the borough, mostly in tenement buildings. It was a time before zoning, when roughly 90,000 windowless rooms were available for rent, and a recent immigrant might share a few hundred square feet with as many as 10 people. At that time, the Lower East Side was one of the most crowded places on the planet, according to demographers. Even as recently as 1950, the Manhattan of “West Side Story” was denser than today, with a population of two million.

On weekdays Manhattan's population roughly doubles to 3.9 million.

Worldwide Income Distribution

National Geographic has a huge interactive version.

Fastest Growing Big Cities

The U.S. Census has ranked the fastest growing cities whose metro populations exceed one million. My exploding hometown of Orlando ranks at sixth fastest-growing with 2.1M residents. When my family moved there in 1971, the population was around 60,000. The day after we arrived, Walt Disney World opened.

8,175,135 Stories In The Naked City

New York City officials are apoplectic about just-released 2010 census data which turned up a quarter-million fewer residents than expected. The new figures will mean many millions less in federal funding for everything from schools to social programs to anti-terrorism measures.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg immediately challenged the bureau’s finding, saying it shortchanged the city by as many as 225,000 people. He said it was “inconceivable” that Queens grew by only 1,343 people since 2000 and suggested that the profusion of apartments listed as vacant in places like Flushing and in a swath of southwest Brooklyn meant the census missed many hard-to-count immigrants. City demographers offered a number of explanations for the low figure, ranging from the possibility that the 2000 census had overestimated the population to the likelihood that many tenants, especially immigrants, living in overcrowded and illegally divided apartments and basement cubicles were overlooked even after aggressive efforts by census takers, civic groups and city officials to find them.

Immigration activists point out that many of the undocumented didn't want to be counted and may have purposely evaded census workers. Some other interesting NYC demographic tidbits revealed by the census:

- The Asian population now exceeds one million, a 34% increase over ten years to 13% of the population. The biggest increase was seen in Brooklyn, which in 2010 had 41% more Asians than in 2000.
- For the first time since the Civil War, the city's black population declined during the census period. Non-Hispanic blacks presently make up 23% of the city.
- Hispanics now comprise 29% of the city's population.
- Since 2000 the Bronx lost 22% of its white residents, who now make up just over 10% of the borough.
- 42% of all state residents live within the five boroughs.
- If the boroughs' populations were ranked nationally as stand-alone cities, Brooklyn and Queens would be the third and fourth largest behind Los Angeles and Chicago. Manhattan would be sixth largest, behind Houston. The Bronx would be ninth, after Phoenix.

Where People Volunteer

More on volunteerism here.

The Lusty South

Researchers at Kansas State University have compiled "seven deadly sins" maps of the United States. Based on per capita rates of all STDs, here's "Lust."