maps

How to Draw a Funny Lookin' Congressional Redistricting Map

Jim Newell · 10/05/11 03:53PM

Maryland Democrats safely control both houses of the state legislature, along with the governorship. What a great opportunity to draw a bold Republican-screwing congressional map! See, they want to turn the state from a 6-2 Democrat advantage in the House of Representatives to a 7-1 advantage. How do you do that? Well, look at the funny squiggly picture up top, also known as a "Maryland redistricting draft map."

Obsessed Media Track Whereabouts of Amanda Knox's Airplane

Maureen O'Connor · 10/04/11 04:27PM

At 8:35PM GMT, respected British news source The Daily Telegraph broke news in its Amanda Knox liveblog: "Thanks to the wonders of modern technology we can see that Knox's plane is currently over Canada's Auyuittuq National Park on planefinder.net."

Now's Your Chance to Buy Thousands of Unwanted Federal Properties

Jim Newell · 05/09/11 02:16PM

The Obama administration has gone through all of the properties the federal government owns and come up with "roughly 14,000 buildings and structures currently designated as excess and thousands of others that are underutilized." It plans to sell "or get rid of" as many of these as possible over the next three years, which will supposedly save $15 billion.

Tennessee Is the Happiest State, According to Twitter

Max Read · 04/05/11 06:40PM

PhD student Alex Davies has set out to discover the happiest places in the world by analyzing Tweets. A noble project! But one that may need some tweaking, given that according to his data, the happiest U.S. state is Tennessee (tied with Arizona as the eighth most-unemployed state in the union) , and the happiest country is Germany (which, c'mon, it's Germany; if it were a happy country we wouldn't have had two different world wars).

Where the Swears Are

Adrian Chen · 01/23/11 01:59PM

This is 1.5 million geotagged tweets posted between March 9th and April 12th, 2010, mapped according to frequency of profanity. Mountains are the sweariest, valleys the cleanest. Seems the more people live in a place, the more people swear there.

The World According to Facebook

Max Read · 12/14/10 03:15AM

Here's a map of the world, as drawn by Facebook (click to enlarge it). What does that mean? Well, basically: The entire image is defined not by topographical features or political boundaries, but by Facebook friendships.

This Is What New Yorkers Complain About

Brian Moylan · 11/11/10 11:49AM

Wired magazine logged nearly 35,000 complaint calls to 311— New York's call-and-whine help line—and put them in this handy graph based on nature of complaint and time of call. They also break it down by bitchingest neighborhood

A Google Map of Google Maps' Legal Troubles

Remy Stern · 10/27/10 11:57PM

Italian officials today launched a probe into Google, which has been accused of collecting mounds of personal information through unsecured Wi-Fi networks with its Street View cars.