precisecuriosity

[precisecuriosity]

I wrote the post below last year when the Indian Mars mission had just taken off. Now the mission is a success, with a ton of great coverage.

Then the New York Times goes ahead and includes this cartoon...

I think their intention was to come off as funny or satirical. It didn't do either of those things. Now, I know better than to get incensed over everything the NYT does. They are clearly tone-deaf about many things. So I'm just going to re-iterate this -> I’d rather have technical difficulties hold India back instead of unwarranted commentary from western media loaded with colonialist hubris.

I woke up proud this morning. At 2:38 PM Indian Standard Time on Nov 5th, the Indian Space Research Organization sent a Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle to launch a Mars orbiter.

This is a big deal. For the country. And for the world. The more countries we get to contribute to the progress...

[precisecuriosity]

THIS is the future of mobile: mum-in-law and mum, visiting from India, figuring out 2048 together.

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Post from last week: Being more like Whoopi

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New favorite sentence.

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"Sorry I ruined your party … ooh cupcakes."

[via]

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Friday evening wisdom.

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I look at this and think ‘how many Indians could we fit in all this space!’

Nobody lives here: The nearly 5 million Census Blocks with zero population

A Block is the smallest area unit used by the U.S. Census Bureau for tabulating statistics. As of the 2010 census, the United States consists of 11,078,300 Census Blocks. Of them, 4,871,270 blocks totaling 4.61 million square kilometers were reported to have no population living inside them. Despite having a population of more than 310 million people, 47 percent of the USA remains unoccupied.

Green shading indicates unoccupied Census Blocks. A single inhabitant is enough to omit a block from shading

Quick update: If you’re the kind of map lover who cares about cartographic accuracy, check out the new version which fixes the Gulf of California. If you save this map for your own projects, please use this one instead.

Map observations

The map tends to highlight two types of areas:

places where human habitation is physically restrictive or impossible, and

places where human habitation is prohibited by social or legal convention.

Water features such lakes, rivers, swamps and floodplains are revealed as places where it is hard for people to live. In addition, the mountains and deserts of the West, with their hostility to human survival, remain largely void of permanent population.

Of the places where settlement is prohibited, the most apparent are wilderness protection and recreational areas (such as national and state parks) and military bases. At the national and regional scales, these places appear as large green tracts surrounded by otherwise populated countryside.

At the local level, city and county parks emerge in contrast to their developed urban and suburban surroundings. At this scale, even major roads such as highways and interstates stretch like ribbons across the landscape.

Commercial and industrial areas are also likely to be green on this map. The local shopping mall, an office park, a warehouse district or a factory may have their own Census Blocks. But if people don’t live there, they will be considered “uninhabited”. So it should be noted that just because a block is unoccupied, that does not mean it is undeveloped.

Perhaps the two most notable anomalies on the map occur in Maine and the Dakotas. Northern Maine is conspicuously uninhabited. Despite being one of the earliest regions in North America to be settled by Europeans, the population there remains so low that large portions of the state’s interior have yet to be politically organized.

In the Dakotas, the border between North and South appears to be unexpectedly stark. Geographic phenomena typically do not respect artificial human boundaries. Throughout the rest of the map, state lines are often difficult to distinguish. But in the Dakotas, northern South Dakota is quite distinct from southern North Dakota. This is especially surprising considering that the county-level population density on both sides of the border is about the same at less than 10 people per square mile.

Finally, the differences between the eastern and western halves of the contiguous 48 states are particularly stark to me. In the east, with its larger population, unpopulated places are more likely to stand out on the map. In the west, the opposite is true. There, population centers stand out against the wilderness.

::

Ultimately, I made this map to show a different side of the United States. Human geographers spend so much time thinking about where people are. I thought I might bring some new insight by showing where they are not, adding contrast and context to the typical displays of the country’s population geography.

I’m sure I’ve all but scratched the surface of insight available from examining this map. There’s a lot of data here. What trends and patterns do you see?

Errata

The Gulf of California is missing from this version. I guess it got filled in while doing touch ups. Oops. There’s a link to a corrected map at the top of the post.

Some islands may be missing if they were not a part of the waterbody data sets I used.

::

©mapsbynik 2014 Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike Block geography and population data from U.S. Census Bureau Water body geography from National Hydrology Dataset and Natural Earth Made with Tilemill USGS National Atlas Equal Area Projection

[precisecuriosity]

How Jessica Hagy became a cartoonist

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I'm a productivity nerd. Sharing some of that nerdery here.

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Terry: You have a masters in human rights from the London School of Economics?

Hari: Yeah, I wasted a lot of money before I decided to do stand-up full time, Terry. 

Hari Kondabolu (pronounced “hurry”) is going to be on the show soon! We wanted to give you a sneak peek at his stand-up. 

His new comedy album is called Waiting For 2042. 

[precisecuriosity]

This is amazing

This Wednesday, Marvel comics released All New Marvel Now #1 which featured the first super hero appearance of Kamala Khan, the new Ms Marvel who will be getting her own series next month. She is the first female Muslim character to receive her own series from either of the big companies, and...

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Stereotype threat is more prevalent and more destructive than you think.

#ITooAmHarvard is a project by Black students at Harvard to speak out about the racism that they experience in their daily lives as students. It will also be a play.

Pretty heartbreaking. These beautiful and bright students deserve so much better. Above I included some of the photographs (there’s many more) of Black women who are students there because I think it’s important to point out how racism is not only impacting Whites’ perception of their intelligence but also how White people approach their appearance as well, in gender-specific ways. This is heartbreaking to me albeit not surprising. The myth that working hard = happy payoff is a fairy tale. Racism is ubiquitous. 

I really wish them the best with their education and the ability to navigate these microaggressions and overt acts of racism. This stuff increases stereotype threat and impacts mental health and health which impacts performance. I want the best for them. Much love. ❤

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Whoa! #truedetective

You clever, clever people.

(via)

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Found my soul sistah.

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There is a definite place in the world for laser-focused expertise — strategy is not one of them. Richness in thinking comes from diversity of exposure. You don’t come up with interesting new connections if you only read about one thing over and over. That was the fundamental flaw of all industries that got disrupted by some new app.

Spoke to the great folks at GapJumpers for their series Where the Puck is Going…

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I buy more books than I can finish. I sign up for more online courses than I can complete. I fundamentally believe that if you are not learning new things, you stop doing great and useful things. So family, curiosity and hunger for knowledge all define me.

If I ever had a life mantra, it would be this.

How Satya Nadella will lead Microsoft differently - Quartz

[precisecuriosity]

About doge

Me:

dude http://dogeweather.com/

Friend:

I feel old because I just dont get doge

Me:

hahahah

what is there to get?

it's just doge

trying to get doge is like trying to get lulz

it's not "why" it's "why not"

Doge goes up against the very core of human desire for causality

it's like asking what came before the Big Bang