e7odie - Blog

Namesake of All United States' Counties

8/23/2016

The idea for this one came after I saw this semi-related map about the language of origin of every county's name. After tediously going through each "List of counties in [State]" Wikipedia pages, I finally finished this time-consuming project to see what every county was named after.

First off, there's a decent grain of salt to be taken with this map. While most counties were pretty simply and straightforward, a lot of them were far more complicated than that. The two most complicated categories were

counties named after two things - so, for example, a county named after a geographical feature (e.g., mountain or river) that was in turn named for a person or a native American tribe
counties named after people with long titles, perhaps of the format [First Name] [Last Name], [Title] of [Place] in which the county name is just the title or place -

I admit that when I started this, I spent more time delving into these outlier examples to determine what I should color the respective county; but as time went on this got more frustrating as the extra research rarely resulted in a clear answer. As such, several counties are striped for multiple namesakes. Also, speaking of striped counties, some of them are striped because the etymology itself is disputed. Alaska's Nome Census Area for example, has three potential stories behind its name, each of which is a different color in my key of 6 categories.

Anyway, without further ado:

Not too many not-already-obvious trends to really analyze or comment about, here.

Lots of Spanish, Native American, and natural oriented names in the west
Lots of counties named after elsewhere locations in the northeast (thanks, uncreative colonists)
North Dakota, Missouri, Indiana, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Georgia have some of the highest percentages of being named after a person (Delaware and Hawaii also have high percentages of a single category, but, ya know, having fewer than 6 counties helps)
Somewhat surprisingly (to me, at least), there are three counties in Iowa that were named after battles in the Mexican-American War

Lastly, just because I feel like this will be a common question when you're looking at all the counties in the US, here's the top of the list (15+) of the most common county names (just taken straight from a separate Wikipedia page):

Washington County (31)
Jefferson County (26)
Franklin County (24)
Jackson County (24)
Lincoln County (24)
Madison County (20)
Clay County (18)
Montgomery County (18)
Union County (18)
Marion County (17)
Monroe County (17)
Wayne County (16)
Grant County (15)

Top Nations at the Past 6 Summer Olympics: My own medal tables

8/22/2016

With the 2016 Rio Olympics just coming to a close, of course I have to do some analysis on the medals and performances. However, I didn't really like either method I typically saw, that being either sorting nations by golds won or sorting by total medals won. So I created my own method to calculate a weighted total. It was quite simple, but I feel efficient: 3*G + 2S + 1B (where G, S, and B are the nation's number of gold, silver, and bronze medals won).

There were obviously a few other country's that I could have included since they appeared near the top of the medal tables in each of these years - Canada, Spain, Hungary, and Romania all appeared in the top 15 of at least two of the listed Olympic games - but these are all the nations that appeared in more than they didn't.

In terms of trends and comments, the biggest one that jumps out is Great Britain. Massive kudos is deserved for going from 19th to 2nd in just 6 Olympics. Also the way in which France and Italy's paths seem to be tracking each other (especially in these first 3 Olympics) is somewhat humorous. Oh, and speaking of France and Italy, my apologies to their vexillologists - I did the best I could, but there's no good way to "stretch" those flags into lines. I was able to make the Union Jack work and was lucky not to have any harder flags. Let's just say I won't be looking forward to updating this graph if any other than other vertical triband flagged nations or Amerian Samoa or Dominican Republic or Panama or Jamaica or Tanzania become an Olympic powerhouse.

Dividing the world into 'n' regions (from n=1 to n=22)

8/22/2016

So this started off as a search for something similar and when I couldn't find it, I made one of my own. I thought I had previously seen a series of maps that divided the world into various numbers of regions. What if you had to group the entire world into only 2 sections; where do you draw the line? How about 5 regions? And so on and so on. Perhaps I was just making things up, as I couldn't find said mythical post. So here's mine:

Here's a link to an imgur album of the same images: http://imgur.com/a/DflY7

Best Logos in Major (American) Sports Leagues

5/10/2016

I actually created this particular poll before the other logo poll I just posted (the one just for college/FBS logos). I simply asked people to pick their favorite logo in each of the Big 4 leagues + MLS and NCAA. The problem I realized with the NCAA portion - and why I eventually embarked on a larger college-only poll - was that there were just too many options so any results I got weren't that representative. Nonetheless, I still got results for each sport. As noted, several leagues had a tie for 3rd place, but all of them had a clear first and second place.

Best Logo in College Football

5/10/2016

I created this poll to determine who has the best logo in college football*. I use an asterisk because the format I used has it's disadvantages to go with its advantages. I didn't attempt to use a traditional bracket system that pits a 1-seed against a 16-seed (largely because I didn't want to presume from the get-go who was "worthy" of a 1-seed). Instead, my primary focused was pitting similar logos against each other in round 1. This is unfortunate because it means you're likely to have to pick between two logos that you like as well as two logos that you dislike. My second focus was to have each region of the bracket be a style or type of logo. So you have (A) single letters, (B) two interlocking letters or multiple letters, (C) a mix of text and images, and (D) no-text. Unfortunately, some of section C overflowed into section D. But the main purpose of this setup was so that the bracket would determine, early on, who has the best 'A' logo or 'U' logo or logo that has an animal above the school's acronym above the school's mascot, for example; and, later on, who has the best logo of two interlocking letters or best logo with no text.

So when you look at this and see Virginia, Washington State, Georgia Tech, and Michigan State in the Final Four, that doesn't necessarily mean that they're the 4 best logos in all of the FBS. But rather, just that they're the best to come out of those regions. Several undeniably great logos were eliminated early. Clemson, Arizona State, UAB, Rice, Cincinnati, UCLA, Virginia Tech, and North Carolina just to name a few. If we attempted to rank all logos #1-129, many of those I just listed would likely make it into the top quartile.

Beta-testing a new board game: Carnivores

10/23/2015

[DISCLAIMER: This is not my creation]

Though not my creation, I thought this would be a good way to share this cool creation by.../u/El_Poopo. I haven't yet had a chance to give this a play-test, but I fully intend on doing so in the near future.

Here is the link to the creator's google doc for the game: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1X_ZCD3YE2kKPegAbw448-h52M2AnCd-kP5QZ2cBDd5o/edit. As you see, the game is very simple but lends itself to a chess-like level of strategy and mastery.

I took the creator's board and simply added the title and instructions to make an actual "board" for when I eventually print it.

100 years of U.S. presidential elections: A table of how each state voted

10/23/2015

I was curious about certain states that have been deemed "pointless to campaign in" or ones that people "know" will vote one way or the other. This is probably an inaccurate way to think about it, but nonetheless I was curious which states actually matter. By that I just mean which states don't have a foregone conclusion of a party that they're almost inevitably going to vote for. Because I know voting against the grain in certain states can feel like fighting gravity. So anyway, all this resulted in the following table:

Here are some clarifications and interesting takeaways from this:

The "other"s in 1948 and 1968 are Thurmond ("States' Rights Democratic") and Wallace ("American Independent"), respectively.
Arguably the most important thing to note about these trends is "The Switch," i.e., the point at which the Republican and Democratic parties basically switched places. To give this some context, South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, North Carolina, Arkansas, Georgia, Texas, and Louisiana all voted Democrat more than 75% of the time between 1916 and 1964 and less than 30% of the time since then. On the reverse end of that spectrum, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, New York, Minnesota, Vermont, and Maine all had at least a 25 percentage-point increase in the amount of times they voted Democrat if you compare those same two time periods.
While Ohio and others get all the press for being the swing state(s), Nevada actually has the best record of picking the eventual-winner. 24 out of the 25 elections depicted in this 100-year period went the same way as Nevada voted. The only time they went off-track was 1976 when they voted for Ford instead of Carter. On the other end of that spectrum, Mississippi has the worst record for matching the national result as they've only done so 12 times in this period. This makes them the only state to vote for the eventual winner less than 50% of the time.
In the past 9 elections (so, dating back to 1980's Reagan over Carter), 14 states have voted for the same party every time. These states are Alabama, Alaska, Idaho, Kansas, Minnesota, Mississippi, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, and Wyoming. You have to go back 13 elections - or 1964 - before 0 states have voted the same every time.
Speaking of the 1964 election...The most Republican-voting state is Alaska which has voted red in 93% of these elections; all but Johnson's landslide win in 1964. As for the most Democrat-voting state, there's a 3-way tie between Massachusetts, Minnesota, and Rhode Island at 72% or a record of 18-and-7.

The United States of Europe

9/23/2015

As of now, this is incomplete; but I to intend to continue working on it and, with the assistance of others who know more about the left-out countries than I do, will fill out the rest eventually. Currently, this is a map I made based off the comic of another Redditor, who I later collaborated with to fill it out slightly more. The idea was simply to draw parallels between US states and European countries. Grounds for these comparisons could be anything - from economic GDP to cultural problems, from common histories to geographic similarities. Most have been given speech bubbles to help explain what exactly my (or the original comic maker's) thought process was. I was really tempted to add Georgia as Georgia.

If you don't know your European countries or your US state flags, see below to see all the pairings.

For clarity's sake, here's all the country/state pairings: Iceland/Hawaii, UK/Texas, Ireland/Idaho, Portugal/Oregon, Spain/Nevada, France/California, Switzerland/Canada, Italy/Florida, Belgium/Washington DC, Netherlands/Colorado, Germany/New York, Austria/New Jersey, Slovenia/New Hampshire, Arizona/Hungary, Albania/Mississippi, Macedonia/West Virginia, Bulgaria/Virginia, Greece/New Mexico, Slovakia/Michigan, Poland/Montana, Maine/Denmark, Lithuania/Connecticut, Latvia/Rhode Island, Estonia/Delaware, Finland/Washington, Sweden/Vermont, Norway/Alaska, and Africa/Mexico.

And all the unpaired countries: Andorra, San Marino, Monaco, Vatican City, Malta, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Czech Republic, Croatia, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro, Romania, Moldova, Ukraine, Belarus, Russia, Turkey, and Cyprus. If you feel like there's a glaring comparison to be made between one of these countries and an as-of-now unused state, please leave a comment and I'll be sure to update the image with your input.