5 ms·
http://xkcd.com/1138/ http://xkcd.com/1138/
by icefox 13y ago
http://xkcd.com/1138/ http://xkcd.com/1138/
- s0rce 13y agoAnd the data normalized per county is overrun by noise from counties with 10 people and 1 player.
- imp 13y agoClick "Per Capita" on the map. They have that accounted for.
- Crito 13y agoThe per capita map is practically just the inverse of the count map. We're still really only looking at population data.
- mxfh 13y agoThere is a per capital (college-aged male population) view. Yet there is an issue with the scale, which is quite distorted by single player/low population (<50k) county values. They should be filtered out for the definition of the coloring scale. They don't provide any good information since county population sizes vary by magnitudes. (I wouldn't even recommending filling the county with a color in these cases as simple dot at the county centroid should suffice) Granularity matters, counties are a not a optimal unit for this, aggregating by congressional districts would better, yet still not optimal. [added] Alternatively counties could be clustered to some minimum size. The US Census Bureau provides sets of counties with above 50000 total population as a XLS spreadsheet. http://www.census.gov/people/eeotabulation/data/eeoupcoming.html http://www.census.gov/people/eeotabulation/data/eeoupcoming....
- evandena 13y agoYou just have to cross your eyes and look for color swaths, not individual red counties. When that's done, you can see that the South is the clear leader.
- mxfh 13y agoPretty easy to guess why: no hockey (among others) to compete with for sports talents?
- Crito 13y agoThere is something more going on than just that. There are places in the US that take highschool football more seriously than other places take all of their highschool sports combined. Like, a highschool game isn't just something students and their families go to, but something the whole town goes to. Its not like that is the only thing to do in town either, they have cable TV, the internet, and bars just like the rest of America (well, except for a few dry counties). I honestly have no idea what to make of it. Calling football in the south a religion is cliche, but as far as I can tell it is just an accurate way of describing it.
- checker 13y agoThey can play and practice year-round without renting out expensive indoor facilities.
- drone 13y agoCheck out these two articles: http://www.theatlanticcities.com/arts-and-lifestyle/2012/04/which-parts-country-produce-most-nfl-players/1840/ http://www.theatlanticcities.com/arts-and-lifestyle/2012/04/... http://www.footballstudyhall.com/2013/9/11/4718442/college-football-state-texas-california-florida http://www.footballstudyhall.com/2013/9/11/4718442/college-f...
- ovulator 13y agoThe more interesting data is when it is filtered by conference or team.
- mountaineer 13y agoYes, this should be the focus of it. The blog post does go over school rankings by geographic diversity.
- snake_plissken 13y agoI don't understand how this comic relates to absolute vs per-capita
- ignostic 13y agoI thought the same thing - until I noticed the per capita button. This should be on by default. Unfortunately it then becomes clear that sample sizes are so small that we can't draw any real conclusions. You look at Garfield county in Montana and there are only 25 college-age males, so the 1 player anomaly makes it suddenly look like a big sports hub. Cool concept and execution, but insufficient data.