Coal Mine in Your Back Yard: Online Map Fun!

CoalDiver.org provides a diverting tool for visualizing how much land a coal mine chews up. The site, developed by our friends at Plains Justice, features "How Big Is It?", a mapping app where you can see the geographical footprint of a coal mine in the Powder River Basin in the Wyoming's Thunder Basin National Grassland and overlay it on any of your favorite destinations. My results this morning (click pic to embiggen!):

Lay the west gate of that mine near my house, and the complex would stretch about six miles northeast and six miles southeast. Counting sections, I guess it's about 25 square miles, maybe more.

Today's enviro-engineering question: how much electricity could we produce by covering the same amount of land with a wind farm?

Bonus Statistics and Speculation: The Powder River Basin accounts for over 75% of the coal produced in the western United States and over 40% of total U.S. coal production. Hmm... could that help explain why railroad lobbyist turned Senator John Thune is so eager to block the national grassland wilderness in western South Dakota that would take up land near a prime rail route to that coal bonanza?

Treat for Political Map Junkies: Google Maps Election Projections

Google rides again with a convenient little cartopolitical diversion: our favorite seekers of world domination have created an interactive map of projections for the 2010 midterm elections! You can see best guesses from Cook, Rothenberg, CQ-Roll Call, and RealClearPolitics for the Senate, House, and gubernatorial races in each state or for the whole country at a glance. Republicans, revel in the pinkish tide sweeping across the country in the gubernatorial races. Democrats, thrill to the too-close-to-call battle in the South Dakota House race (CQ and Cook say toss-up; RCP says lean GOP; Rothenberg says teeny tilt Dem).

Worth noting: Google ignores the third candidate in South Dakota's House race, B. Thomas Marking, who I might suggest hasn't missed much since he suspended his campaign for FEMA training in Alabama.

Also worth noting: the Google election projection map is embeddable... but as I test it this morning, lacks a horizontal scrollbar that would allow me to fit it into the humble 460-pixel confines of this blog's main content panel. Alas!

North Dakota Chats up South Dakota; Minnesota Ignores Us

Rebecca Blood turns my attention to Lexicalist.com, which analyzes online text and demographics to figure out who's talking about what where. You type in a word, Lexcialist calculates the prevalence of that word in online conversations by state, sex, and age.

So I type in South Dakota. The results:


Lexicalist.com ties most of the conversation about South Dakota, 81.2%, to speakers/bloggers/tweeters in South Dakota. Among outsiders, we figure most prominently in the consciousness of our northern neighbors: North Dakotan online sources contribute 6.2% of mentions of "South Dakota (certainly 5.2% are prefaced with the phrase, "Gee, why can't we be more like..."). Wyoming produces 4.0% of South Dakota mentions; Iowa 2.5%. Our Minnesota neighbors provide only 0.7% of South Dakota mentions, a tick fewer than even Montanas make... and Montanans have Yellowstone and the Rockies to distract them. Minnesotans talk about North Dakota twice as much. What gives?

Plug "Minnesota" into the Lexicalist search query, and you find that Minnesotans provide only 35.3% of their own mentions. 13.0% come from North Dakota, and 10.2% come from South Dakota. (I leave it to the Minnesota Department of Tourism to speculate as to what words precede our mentions of our easterly neighbor.) Hmmm... are South Dakotans more self-absorbed than Minnesotans? Mentions of Minnesota are more spread out among other states, suggesting their marketing and top-of-mind-awareness are better than ours... or that they just get more online press thanks to the Twins.

One more random note for the watercooler: The three states that talk about New York the most are New York (12.6% of mentions), New Jersey (5.7%), and North Dakota (4.3%). South Dakota ties with Alaska for talking about New York the least, not even registering on Lexicalist's count. Hmmm....

Brookings and Lincoln Healthiest SD Counties; Lake in Top 20

Salut! to PP and Epp: the healthiest counties in South Dakota are Lincoln and Brookings. So says the 2010 County Health Rankings from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute.

My home, Lake County, comes in 14th on health outcomes and 18th on health factors. These rankings suggest that our actual health is a little better than the social and environmental factors influencing health might predict.

Some health details for Lake County:

1. Compared to the state rate, we have less premature death, teen births, and even a little less income inequality.
2. Alas, we also have significantly less access to healthy foods (Dan, listen up), slightly greater liquor store density (Dan), and slightly more binge drinking (Dan!).
3. Our physical health is slightly better than the state average, but our mental health is slightly worse (let the jokes about Lake County bloggers skewing that average begin!).
   

Cartophiles delight: CHR maps the health factors and outcomes for every county in the country. The South Dakota maps:




Update: Cory Klumper applies his mad public radio skills to this study and notes that rural counties make up 20% of the healthiest places but 80% of the unhealthiest places. Hmm....

NY Times Maps House Health Care Vote

Maps! We love maps! And the New York Times delivers with this cool interactive map of how the members of the U.S. House of Representatives voted on H.R. 3962, the really big health coverage reform bill that still manages to treat women like second-class citizens (thanks for nothing, Rep. Stupak).


This is just a screen capture; go to the original at NYT, and you can run your mouse over the map and get instant info on who's who and how they voted. Note that the lone Republican vote for the bill came from Louisiana Rep. Anh Cao, that single red spot down on the Gulf (ooo... click on it, and the map zooms in! Cool!)

NYT also offers an interactive table breaking down the no votes by previous electoral margin of victory, constituents' preference last year for Obama or McCain, Blue Dog status, and other interesting stats.

A couple other significant votes:

• Speaker Pelosi's bill got one more vote than it would have last summer, thanks to the Sarah Palin and the Tea Party insurrectionists of New York's 23rd: Rep. Bill Owens, elected Tuesday as the first Democrat from that district since 1873, voted aye.
• My man Dennis Kucinich voted nay... but I give him a pass, because he's willing to call the bill what it is: a continuing sop to the private insurance racket that continues its immoral grip on health care. (By the way, Speaker Pelosi, where was the open debate on the Weiner Amendment you promised? Oh: looks like Dems caved on that one, too. Rats.)
  

Comparison: Wind Power Potential, Rock Port MO vs. Madison SD

I just got a really good reply from Mayor Hexom on the potential for Madison to replicate the success of Rock Port, Missouri, in obtaining more than 100% of its electricity needs from wind power. I had noted previously that Mayor Hexom had said wind power could cost the city 20 cents per kilowatt-hour. I found this amount surprising, especially considering that John Deere's turbines in Rock Port generate juice for 5.5 cents/kWh (and Uncle Sam knocks 2 cents off that with a subsidy). Mayor Hexom explains that his 20 cents/kWh figure assumes smaller wind units, like those in Howard and Pipestone, not the big megawatt-plus beasties going up in the new wind farms. Economies of scale also help: as noted previously, Rock Port's four turbines were made all the more feasible by the fact that Wind Capital Group was already putting up a bigger wind farm in the neighborhood. Adding the Rock Port bump to the project cut costs significantly over building four turbines independently.

Mayor Hexom also pointed out that a look at the wind potential map will show Madison isn't in as good a wind generation area as places like Wessington Springs, where Heartland is involved with that big wind farm on the ridge.

Look at the map... they have maps for that?

Of course they do!

First, let's look at the U.S. Department of Energy's wind resource map for Missouri (click image to enlarge):


Zoom in on the northwest corner of that picture. I've marked the rough location Rock Port. America's first 100% wind-powered town sits in a mostly tan region—tan meaning Class 2, "marginal." There is a smattering of orange—Class 3, "fair"—in the neighborhood. Compared to the rest of Missouri, Rock Port is as good as it gets for wind potential.

Now, compare that to the wind resource map for South Dakota (click image to enlarge):


Holy crap! No wonder Missouri folks fall over when they come visit us. Look at all that wind!

Our fair city of Madison sits in the midst of Class 3 and Class 4 ("good"!) terrain. We're pikers compared to the Coteau des Prairies and most of the state west of the Jim River Valley, but we still stand tall—slantwise—compared to Rock Port and 80% of America.

So note, Madison wind power boosters: With Class 2, maybe Class 3 wind, Rock Port is able to get more power than it needs from four 1.25-megawatt turbines. With our Class 3, maybe Class 4 wind, we could line Highway 34 with the same turbines and probably get even more usable juice.

Madison's "problem" isn't that we don't have good wind; it's that wind farm developers can get even better wind just 80 miles away in a couple directions.

But if we're interested in local power generation (and dare I say it: self-sufficiency?), these maps support the idea that if Rock Port, Missouri can do it, so can Madison, South Dakota.

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p.s.: Did you hear the one about the boy in Malawi who built a working wind turbine from junk and pictures from a book in the library? No joke: William Kamkwamba. Totally inspirational. Kamkwamba is Africa's Dick Wiedenman... using his junk powers for good!

Bonus Web Gizmo: ZIP Code Maps!

For all my cartographomaniac readers, an afternoon treat: ZIP code maps! The good folks at US Naviguide Co. have whipped up a Google Maps mashup that shows the ZIP code for every point on the American map (well, at least pretty much every point in the lower 48). Among the oddities revealed: little discontinuous outposts of ZIPs near Egan, Sinai, and Badger. Go figure!


Click your ZIP, see what your postal neighborhood looks like—what more fun could you have in the office on a summer afternoon?