This is from Strange Maps (no big surprise there). The first map shows the counties throughout the South that voted for Barack Obama. The darker blue the higher the vote. The second map shows the centers of cotton production in 1860, immediately before the Civil War. Saying "cotton production" is obviously an alternate here for pinpointing centers of dense African-American population in the 19th Century. If you go to StrangeMaps you can find out what happens when you superimpose the two. I'm not going to steal that, because he did the work and you should take the 30 seconds to visit his site. As a historian what fascinates me most is the apparently static nature of concentrations of African-American populations in the South. It says something--even in the year we have just elected the first black President--about the relative failure of an informal pattern of de facto segregation to dissipate, even after nearly 150 years. As a political animal, it tells me that th...

OK Bloggers, The race is on. We need some research to fulfill the needs of our deviant liberal friends, which nation or group of nations, the US, South East Asia, or China has the highest documentable rate of prostitution? I will give you a clue, the US and China do not post rea l numbers or give you the actual scale of the problem. As we all know what a fat horn dog Ben Franklin was, I thought this quantification of prostitution rates might make him proud. I am not sure how proud he would be to know that there is a hooker dance party community in his native Philadelphia. At the same time, I want to make it very clear that I find this type of exploitation deplorable and want to find ways and have helped the Global Mission for Comprehensive Human Development find ways to create better paying jobs for people who were forced into this lurid business. But one thing is clear according to the interviews we have conducted, independent Hookers (without a pimp) have more fun. Those with a pimp ...

US life expectancy in 2000 was 77.1 years (obviously averaged for gender differences, but I wanted a fairly simple figure). We often see figures on life expectancy used in debates over health care, pointing out that the US has a fairly low life expectancy as far as industrialized nations go. But what that leaves out is the wide regional variety in life expectancy across our nation. Strange Maps (remember their map of state GDPs equated to foreign countries?) also has a map that equates the life expectancy in each state of the union with that of its nearest analog abroad. All of you who are aficionados of Michael Moore's Sicko (and if you are, what are you doing here, anyway? gathering ammunition?) will recall that the fat boy grew positively rhapsodic about the better health care to be found in Cuba. Which is a good thing for those of us who live in Delaware, I guess, since our life expectancy most closely equates with Castro's workers' paradise. The BAD NEWS is that C...

This will date you: the Marvel No-Prize (and did you advance to the rank of Keeper of the Flame?). I actually got one of the treasured empty envelopes for having a letter published in Fantastic Four #90. If I'd had the foresight to hang onto it, who knows what it would be worth today? OK, for no-prize-at-all-except-bragging-rights, here's a question: What percentage of all the modern humans who have ever lived is believed to be alive today?