The government has an interesting Food Environment Atlas that lets you map things by county.

One neat layer is pounds of fruits/veggies eaten at home per capita. They also have grocery store access, food prices, and a lot more!

The NY Times has come up with a new map using Census data on income, race, housing, same sex partners, and education. Nifty interface!

The data is from 2005-2009, the American Community Survey, which is happens in-between the major decennial census.

They display the data at the census tract level if you zoom in. I cannot tell if they are trying to show block level data - as they have dots representing data on blocs, however I don't think the American Community Survey does blocks.

I think this blog is heading towards being all about maps!

Factory Farm Map

This map features cows, pigs, and chickens (no sheep though) by county. It is interesting to see the difference between milk and cows for meat, or layers versus broilers. You can also see the increased concentration of factory farms. The farms are getting bigger!

When my Mom grew up on a farm they had their own chickens. Now a days, very few people do this.

This map is insanely good

Income, race, education, health, political participation and more -- all presented in a user friendly format.

The only downside is that their smallest area is a Congressional District. They should have done zip codes! More work, but so much more logical.

Recently I've been playing World of Warcraft. While this is mostly wasting my time, it does let me put my economics to practice due to the existence of a market economy (an auction house where players buy and sell).

One part of the game is that characters can have two main professions and build up the skill in that profession.

I have a gnome mage and I decided to be a tailor. Unfortunately tailoring has turned into a massive expense with almost zero benefits so far.

I think it might be possible to create a website for election night that uses previous election results and the incoming election night tally to accurately predict who will win (and vote percents).

The key is to use data from previous election nights. You want to know how many votes each party had every minute (or every 5 minutes). You can use this combined with where the votes are coming from (probably county level resolution is the best we could get) to accurately predict who is going to win.

You can now make your own heat maps using the system that I created for the Energy Justice Communities Map.

http://www.campusactivism.org/heatmap/heat.php

Currently it is running very slow. The code is faster if you run it on your own computer (possibly 10-100 times in my case), and it might help to give mysql a lot of memory (notably for its key cache). You can download the source code.

I've got heat maps working for operating coal, nuclear, gas, biomass, hydro, and municipal solid waste incinerators.

List of Heat Maps

I broke the lower 48 states in the US into around 700,000 grid squares. Roughly 3 x 3 mile.

You can see the heat map with the markers that link to more detailed facility information, or without them.

There are three different levels of color saturation which let you decide whether to show a map saturated with facilities, or a "points of light" view.

See other US cities

Ben Manski is the Green Party candidate for Wisconsin State Assembly 77th District. It looks like he is in a two-way race with the Democrat non-incumbent candidate for this Madison seat. There is a Republican and also a Constitution Party candidate, but I'm guessing that the Republican is in third place.