In my previous post, I noted the low median income in the census tract surrounding the Sedgwick stop on the Brown and Purple Lines. That the median income in that part of the city would be less than $20k went against my own experience of Chicago—as well as my prejudices about the North Side. How [...]
Pete sent out this New Yorker interactive web thingy that handsomely redraws each MTA line as, instead, a graph of median income rising and falling as the trains move between poorer and richer neighborhoods. I figured it would take only a few hours to throw something similar for Chicago, and I was right. Below are [...]
Every map nerd in the world is probably fascinated by exclaves, and, as a map nerd, I count myself in that number. So today I found out this morning that there’s a new set of shapefiles of country boundaries provided by the Humanitarian Information Unit, purported to be the most high-resolution available. As a result, [...]
A friend looked over my recent posts and said, basically, that this analysis of things that had already happened was all find and dandy, but might it be possible to predict the results of the second round? On Tuesday, I speculated that a coalition of the Labor Party (Darbo partija), Social Democrats, and Order and [...]
Continue reading about Predicting the second round of Seimas elections
In my previous post, I provided links to fancy interactive maps from the Lithuanian Election Commission. They map turnout, how people voted on the referendum, and other fun things. But they also map something completely useless, namely the party that “won” each constituency in the vote to decide how many proportional seats the party will [...]
Continue reading about Actually useful maps of the Lithuanian Seimas (parliamentary) elections
About five percent of Lithuanians voted early with me during the course of the week. The bulk of the electorate, at over 50% turnout, voted on Sunday to promote a different direction in the Lithuanian Parliament. Out are the conservatives and liberals. In are the populist/centrist Labor Party and Social Democrats, who will likely form [...]
Continue reading about First glance at Lithuanian Seimas (parliament) results
After my maps of public transportation distribution in Chicago and Paris got a bit of publicity, people started asking for more. Here, I try to consider issues of population density as well as the role of buses.
Continue reading about On comparing Paris and Chicago public transit
[This post is a slightly enhanced version of an email I sent to the Humanist mailing list today in response to this message asking about the value of GIS curriculum in scholarship. Here, I begin by quoting the relevant parts of the original post] At my university, a vice president has been arguing that there [...]
A rectilinear map of the Amtrak system that makes the US look like a giant subway? If anyone in my family read anything I put online, I would presently write things like “this would be a great holiday present for me, you know!” Actually… the map of the Interstate system might even be more to my tastes… I have certainly spent more time cutting across America on those colored lines than on Amtrak’s.
Continue reading about A rectilinear map of the Amtrak system that makes the US look…
“If you have no clear idea of what you want to replace the state with, you have no right to subtract/withdraw from the state. Instead of taking a distance from the state, the true task should be to make the state itself work in a non-statal mode. The alternative “either struggle for state power (which makes us the same as the enemy we are fighting) or resist by withdrawing to a position of distance from the state” is false—both its terms share the same premise, that the state-form, in the way we know it today, is here to stay, so that all we can do is either take over the state or take a distance towards it. Here, one should shamelessly repeat the lesson of Lenin’s _State and Revolution_: the goal of revolutionary violence is not to take over state power, but to transform it, radically changing its functioning, its relationship to its base, and so on.”
– No more Žižek, I swear, after this, also from 2009’s First as Tragedy, Then as Farce. This is a crucial point for my dissertation though (made by a jillion geographers, though, not Žižek; Geographers ♥ Lenin ☭).