Thing 10: A Nation Turns its Lonely Eyes to Flikr

After a brief hiatus that can only be explained by sloth rather than illness (this time anyway) I have returned from the netherworlds to explore the wonderful world of www.flikr.com. I knew I was going to be in trouble on this one. Caroline helpfully pointed out that even math teachers could find a lot of interesting things. Unfortunately Caroline underestimated the entire world's (including many math teachers) deep loathing of statistics and statisticians. Tellingly my first explorations looking to find tags related to statistics, normal distributions, bell curves, probabilities, standard deviations, standard errors, and other terms was met with a heaping helping of nothing.

Fortunately the whole world loves colorful info-graphics! After all, if they didn't how would U.S.A. Today even stay in business? I tend to find informational graphics to be fascinating and often aesthetically meaningful (and as the child of a Ph.D. in Art History mother I am quite prepared to defend this rigorously). When done well information graphics can be, well, beautiful. And Flikr provided some excellent examples that were available under creative commons. You'll see the whole bit in my shortly to be posted thing 11. But under CC licensing I was able to find one of my favorites. The following info-map displays lexical usage of generic terms for soda by county, all the way from Coke to Pop to "other" (seriously what's wrong with you western North Carolina? Pick a term for crying out loud). Fun and informative.

P.S. Click on the picture and enlarge your screen to see detail.