☞ Interesting Regional Maps of the United States

There are many ways to divide up the USA

I love maps that divide up the United States in interesting ways. This involves creating varied regions, ones that sometimes even cut within state lines, demonstrating that the US can be stranger than you might realize. I’ve tried to compile a small sampling.

Let’s begin with official governmental divisions:

Federal Reserve Districts.

US Court of Appeals and US District Court regions.

Department of the Interior regions based on watersheds.

Census regions.

There are some more here.

But you can also look at less official regions as well. For example, here is one analysis of American baseball fandom from over a decade ago (and here’s another one):

Or you can examine cultural and historically connected regions, such as “the Nine Nations of North America”:

Or a newer division from the book American Nations:

Or this one from Reddit:

And there are so many more! Have a favorite? Please feel free to share it in the comments. This is my catnip. ■

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Me, explaining the proper way to eat a large sandwich.

I had the pleasure of delivering a book talk about The Magic of Code at the wonderful Linda Hall Library! Check it out here.

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The Orthogonal Bet Has Video (and a Website!)

Check out the website. And our YouTube channel.

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From the Wikipedia entry for bismuth:

Bismuth was formerly understood to be the element with the highest atomic mass whose nuclei do not spontaneously decay. However, in 2003 it was found to be very slightly radioactive. The metal’s only primordial isotope, bismuth-209, undergoes alpha decay with a half-life roughly a billion times longer than the estimated age of the universe.

Now that’s something.

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The Enchanted Systems Roundup

Here are some links worth checking out that touch on the complex systems of our world (both built and natural):

🜸 The Pivot of History: “How Horse Riding Became Possible — and Changed the World”

🝤 Ungrounded thought: ‘If you redefine “thinking” to mean “arriving at a solution through an iterative linguistic loop” … yes, that’s what these models do. That definition is pretty thin. We talk about humans thinking harder, which is not the same as thinking longer.’

🜚 Jonbar hinge: “In science-fiction criticism, a Jonbar hinge or Jonbar point is the fictional concept of a crucial point of divergence between two outcomes, especially in time-travel stories.”

🝳 A Classic Graphic Reveals Nature’s Most Efficient Traveler: “A famous graphic, now updated, compares locomotion in the animal kingdom”

🝤 The Case That A.I. Is Thinking: “ChatGPT does not have an inner life. Yet it seems to know what it’s talking about.”

Until next time.