"All Streets consists of 240 million individual road segments. No other features — no outlines, cities, or types of terrain — are marked, yet canyons and mountains emerge as the roads course around them, and sparser webs of road mark less populated areas. "

"chart is from a paper called "Building a Better America One Wealth Quintile at a Time" by Dan Ariely and Michael I. Norton."

"Everyone who is trashing Obama's healthcare plan should be required to answer the following multiple choice question"

"When you are at the top of the world, the most powerful nation on Earth, the most successful company in your industry, the best player in your game, your very power and success might cover up the fact that you're already on the path of decline." That question—how would you know?—captured my imagination and became part of the inspiration for this book"

"Geographers from Kansas State University have used certain statistical measurements to quantify Nevada’s sins and come up with a county-by-county map purporting to show various degrees of lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy and pride in the Silver State. By culling statistics from nationwide databanks of things like sexually transmitted disease infection rates (lust) or killings per capita (wrath), the researchers came up with a sin index. This is a precision party trick — rigorous mapping of ridiculous data."

"Using the Labor Department's local area unemployment statistics, Slate presents the recession as told by unemployment numbers for each county in America. Because the data are not seasonally adjusted for natural employment cycles throughout the year, the numbers you see show the change in the number of people employed compared with the same month in the previous year. Blue dots represent a net increase in jobs, while red dots indicate a decrease. The larger the dot, the greater the number of jobs gained or lost. Click the arrows or calendar at the bottom to see each month of data. Click the green play button to see an animation of the data."

"No empire can survive being rendered a permanent laughingstock, which is what happened as of a few weeks ago, when the buffoons who have been running things in this country finally went one step too far. It happened when Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was forced to admit that he was once again going to have to stuff billions of taxpayer dollars into a dying insurance giant called AIG, itself a profound symbol of our national decline — a corporation that got rich insuring the concrete and steel of American industry in the country's heyday, only to destroy itself chasing phantom fortunes at the Wall Street card tables, like a dissolute nobleman gambling away the family estate in the waning days of the British Empire."

a map of self-reported happiness by state

an attempt to solicit world opinions on the US presidential election and display them graphically.

original tune to which Key's "Defence of Fort McHenry" was mashed up with, resulting in the Star Spangled Banner I wonder what would have happened if today's copyright laws would have been in force then...

"If the next Presidential administration really wants to embrace the potential of Internet-enabled government transparency, it should follow a counter-intuitive but ultimately compelling strategy: reduce the federal role in presenting important government information to citizens. Today, government bodies consider their own websites to be a higher priority than technical infrastructures that open up their data for others to use. We argue that this understanding is a mistake. It would be preferable for government to understand providing reusable data, rather than providing websites, as the core of its online publishing responsibility. "

The Underground History of American Education

"It’s a stirring call to arms when Doctorow writes: “Even if you only write code for one day, one afternoon, you have to do it. Computers can control you or they can lighten your work — if you want to be in charge of your machines, you have to learn to write code.” The framers of the American Constitution were in a sense a bunch of political science nerds too, pulling all-nighters to hack together the code for a government without tyranny. “Little Brother” argues that unless you’re passably technically literate, you’re not fully in command of those constitutionally guaranteed freedoms — that in fact it’s your patriotic duty as an American to be a little more nerdy."

Ever wondered how your state stacks up compared with others on obesity rates, SAT scores, or number of recent army recruits? How does your congressional district fare compared to your neighbors on life expectancy, high school dropout rates, or earnings? Find out with our mapping tool, which allows you to create customized maps by state or congressional district.

by one international measure, Finnish teenagers are among the smartest in the world. They earned some of the top scores by 15-year-old students who were tested in 57 countries. American teens finished among the world's C students even as U.S. educators pi

photos of nostalgic American scenes that are disappearing

Good introductory information on traveling abroad as an American student. Or use the Flash version: http://studentsabroad.state.gov

"There exists a database of Americans, who, often for the slightest and most trivial reason, are considered unfriendly, and who, in a time of panic, might be incarcerated.

good piece from Tim Wu on the tech policy direction that the next US president should take

"seizure of electronics at U.S. borders has prompted protests from travelers who say they now weigh the risk of traveling with sensitive or personal information on their laptops, cameras or cellphones."

Globalization allowed the U.S. to specialize in the creative aspect of things, the risk-taking production of concepts and ideas--that is, the scalable part of production, in which more income can be generated from the same fixed assets through innovation.

Shows what carries are at which airports

Look up where a phone exchange is located on a map

interactive infographic of the 2008 US budget

This publication shows how the median income family's income tax dollars are spent for every state and 200 cities, towns and counties.

a table and graph of the top marginal tax rate faced by married couples for most of the last century in the US

visually analyze and understand the demography of the United States through the use of interactive maps and data reports

Place the states without borders

They Rule allows you to create maps of the interlocking directories of the top companies in the US in 2004. The data was collected from their websites and SEC filings in early 2004, so it may not be completely accurate - companies merge and disappear and

The following series of county-level choropleth maps, which reveals the distribution of the larger and more regionally concentrated church bodies, draws on this resource.

The legal drinking age for different countries varies dramatically, from 0 to 21, as seen in the table below. The United States has the highest drinking age in the world.