Whenever your friends tell you viewership numbers for House of Cards or Orange is the New Black, uh, they’re lying to your face

This is a good lesson in the context I reference in the title of this blog: Netflix is all the rage in certain friend groups/socioeconomic sectors as “Oh, is (such-and-such) streaming?” But here’s the important thing to remember: Netflix is a subscriber-based… Continue Reading

Tucker County, West Virginia is the least diverse place in America. Cue the eye rolls.

Randy Olson — a true “data visualization” guy — put in some work on the diversity of every county in the United States. There’s some detail on it here, and on his own blog here. Here’s how the process worked:… Continue Reading

The three most-searched-for terms in porn, from an occupation standpoint, are likely “teacher,” then “babysitter,” then “nurse”

The cliche is “pizza delivery boy” or “plumber,” but the reality is: Full data here (the link is safe for work; it’s just their Insights blog, which can actually teach you a lot about the habits of different parts of… Continue Reading

People are leaving New York, Chicago and Los Angeles for Houston, Dallas, Seattle, Charlotte and Nashville

The future of America, in several maps. Continue Reading

Birmingham, Alabama is where college grads are the most segregated from everyone else, eh?

Birmingham has a pretty checkered history with another type of segregation, but now here comes some new research around the segregation of college graduates from everyone else within a given metro area. This is vaguely similar to previous research on cities where rich people… Continue Reading

Gird your loins: Brooklyn is now officially “Manhattan Part II”

See that chart? Egad. (Via here.) In early 2009, the difference between similar apartments in Manhattan and Brooklyn was $1,800 per month. Now it’s around $210 per month. Just a quick reminder of how urban areas develop / certain spots become… Continue Reading

New potential (logical?) use of social media: spotting disease/illness trends ahead of time

From here: “The big advantage of social media is you can get a lot more data, and you can get it more quickly and more economically,” said Henry Niman, a biomedical researcher and president of Pittsburgh-based Recombinomics Inc., which analyzes… Continue Reading

Urban sprawl and politics: Republicans tend to live in sprawling metros, and Democrats tend to live in compact ones

Here’s a new report (PDF) from Smart Growth America on the portions of America with the largest (and smallest) amount of sprawl. I’ll break it down for you quickly. The three parts of America with the most sprawl are: 1. Hickory/Lenoir/Morganton (NC) 2.… Continue Reading