Just got back home. It’s 5:06am, and on the way home it began to get brighter and brighter.
We stopped for Indian food. It was a good decision.
John Moore: It’s the older generation that’s entitled, not students
Setting aside the fact that this intergenerational hectoring dates back to Socrates, let us ask: Who exactly is making the charge? Quebec has had low tuition rates for a half century. That means almost every living adult in the province, having already been afforded a plum goodie, is now wagging his finger at the first generation that will be asked to pay the tab. So who really is entitled here?
Data overload man. Data overload
(via theatlantic)
Trololo man…50 years later still trololoing away.
Packing up all my DVDs (Taken with Instagram at Jumex)
The Most Racist Map of America You’ll See Today
Disclaimer: I do not condone the usage of racial slurs, but am doing so in this post to point out some locations that stuck out while I was doing this project. Additionally, this is my first data interactive. Please notify me if you find errors
With the help of Páll Hilmarsson, a data hacker from Iceland that I found through ScraperWiki, I’ve mapped out as many racially charged geographic places as possible.
Included are places named: Dead Negro Draw, Squaws Tit, Wetback Tank and Kyke Creek
Background:
The idea came to me a couple months ago when I saw a segment on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart about “Jew Pond.” The pond got it’s name after two Jews bought the surrounding property over half a century ago. The name stuck until the town recently voted to change it.
I set out to find all of the racist named locations in the US with the help of the United States Geological Survey. On their site is a list of all the geographic names in the United States.
Methodology (by Páll Hilmarsson):
Here are the steps I took. I am fairly confident in the results, but I’m also fairly confident it could be done different/better.
1. The file with geographic names was pipe (|) delimited and not comma delimited. Although not necessary I replaced the pipes with commas. In a terminal: cat NationalFile_20120416.txt | sed -i ‘s/|/,/g’ > places.csv
2. I had a hunch that a file with 2.221.270 lines would have some errors, so I ran it through the awesome csvclean tool (http://csvkit.readthedocs.org/en/0.4.4/scripts/csvclean.html). That stripped 645 lines from the file, most of them with the message “Expected 20 columns, found 21 columns”. The error lines get saved to a seperate file, places_err.csv, for inspection and the clean file in a new one, places_out.csv.
3. Next I wanted to remove the columns that were not needed to make the file a little bit more managable (it was at 301mb). So I ran csvcut (http://csvkit.readthedocs.org/en/0.4.4/scripts/csvcut.html) csvcut -c 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11 places_out.csv > places_out_cut.csv but it gave a encoding error. A bit of googling around led me to conclude that the file was utf-8 with BOM. To strip the BOM from the file I used the shell script found here: http://thegreyblog.blogspot.com/2010/09/shell-script-to-find-and-remo… (if you are on OS X then you will have to install seq for it to work - instructions here: http://scruss.com/blog/2008/02/08/seq-for-os-x/ After the BOM cleaning then the csvcut command ran fine and the new file was down to 206 mb.
4. Then I wrote a short python script that processed each line from the file and if found a match from a slur csv file, writes a new file: matched.csv, adding a column with the slur word found.
The files are in a dropbox folder here: http://go.gogn.in/M28DEH
How you can help:
The National File on the USGS’ site is only so good. I found more instances when running the code on individual state files. Here’s a link to the individual state files if you’d like to search for more.
Find a location that doesn’t belong or know of one I didn’t include? Send me an email
Footnote:
I chose to remove most instances of the word “coon” from my search. Although it is a derogatory term, it can also mean racoon. In total, the word was found 1016 times and was the most common name. I’ve left in more clearer instances, though, such as “Granny Coon Spring.”
It’s like the Matrix!
WHEN YOU’RE FINALLY GRADUATING
And you realize you have to try and find an entry-level job in Austin:
