Rashid's Blog: A Place for Inquisitive Souls

Occupy Wall Street staged a rebellion against corporate corruption and economic inequality in Manhattan’s parks and streets, but the battle for the city began with nineteenth century electrification of Broadway. (Published in Guernica, 15 October, 2012)

To wander Manhattan is to step into the modern fulfillment of an earlier age. The hurtling traffic, the stylish storefronts and bars, the pyramids of cupcakes, the lantern light of iPhones—it may all seem dreadfully contemporary, but its antiquity lies in the time of steam. “New York is a product of the nineteenth-century Industrial Revolution,” Lewis Lapham observed in the fall 2010 issue of Lapham’s Quarterly, “built on a standardized grid, conceived neither as a thing of beauty nor as an image of the cosmos, much less as an expression of man’s humanity to man, but as a shopping mall in which to perform the heroic feats of acquisition and consumption.”

If…

How did Kentucky vote in last night’s election?

Using AP data downloaded from here, I made an instant map in ArcGIS 10.1 of the results by county:

The map shows the spatial distribution of voting percentage by county for President Obama.

Rather than just doing a simple choropleth map, it’s often better to look at how a place differs from the average to get a measure of the different politics of the state. So here you can see by county where votes were very much lower for Obama (brown shading) and higher for Obama (light blues).

Here’s a regular choropleth map of percent of the vote by county; showing a clear Romney victory (via NYT, follow link to interactive version). As you can see the maps are (and should be) broadly similar. However, the first map indicates the situation in a bit more detail, for say redistricting or…