“The future ain’t what it used to be.”

-Yogi Berra

  • 13 Posts
  • 335 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: July 29th, 2023

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  • Data is not magical, however much you wish it to be.

    I’ve built maps estimating how much of your lawn you are watering at at 15cm pixel resolution. Techniques to count how many cars per driveway are parked at evening hours. How much water, per hour, being used by every address in a county.

    I have seen dashboards developed by collaborators who have access to near real time data regarding the physical positions of hundreds of millions of devices.

    Just because its the highest resolution data that you know about, doesn’t mean its the highest resolution data which exists.


  • I think for this map to be salvaged you need to fix the denominator and not use political boundaries for aggregation. Hexagons or raster because the entire point is to make it arbitrary. The formula would need to be something like (Auto Deaths per capita)/(Road Miles Traveled Per capita), or maybe (Auto Deaths per capita)/(Sum of length of roads per cell).

    Regardless, its still a population map because the denominator gets really small in rural areas, and the map still doesn’t tell us anything about how safe or dangerous roads are.