US Facebook Map - Pete Warden

http://petewarden.typepad.com/searchbrowser/2010/02/how-to-split-up-the-us.html

As I[Pete Warden]'ve been digging deeper into the data I[P.W.]'ve gathered on 210 million public Facebook profiles, I[P.W.]'ve been fascinated by some of the patterns that have emerged. My latest visualization shows the information by location, with connections drawn between places that share friends. For example, a lot of people in LA have friends in San Francisco, so there's a line between them.
Looking at the network of US cities, it's been remarkable to see how groups of them form clusters, with strong connections locally but few contacts outside the cluster. For example Columbus, OH and Charleston, WV are nearby as the crow flies, but share few connections, with Columbus clearly part of the North, and Charleston tied to the South:

Some of these clusters are intuitive, like the old south, but there's some surprises too, like Missouri, Louisiana and Arkansas having closer ties to Texas than Georgia. To make sense of the patterns I'm seeing, I've marked and labeled the clusters, and added some notes about the properties they have in common.

Stayathomia

Stretching from New York to Minnesota, this belt's defining feature is how near most people are to their friends, implying they don't move far.

Dixie

Like Stayathomia, Dixie towns tend to have links mostly to other nearby cities rather than spanning the country.

Greater Texas

Orbiting around Dallas, the ties of the Gulf Coast towns and Oklahoma and Arkansas make them look more Texan than Southern.

Mormonia

The only region that's completely surrounded by another cluster, Mormonia mostly consists of Utah towns that are highly connected to each other, with an offshoot in Eastern Idaho.

Nomadic West

The defining feature of this area is how likely even small towns are to be strongly connected to distant cities, it looks like the inhabitants have done a lot of moving around the country.

Socalistan

Californians outside the super-cities tend to be most connected to other Californians, making almost as tight a cluster as Greater Texas.

Pacifica

Tightly connected to each other, it doesn't look like Washingtonians are big travelers compared to the rest of the West.

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Alice's Adventures in Wonderland - TextArc

http://www.textarc.org/Alice2.html

[Click on image above to launch TextArc application]

TextArc: Revealing Word Associations, Distribution and Frequency. TextArc is a tool designed to help people discover patterns and concepts in any text by leveraging a powerful, underused resource: human visual processing. It compliments approaches such as statistical Natural Language Processing and Computational Linguistics by providing an overview, letting intuition help extract meaning from an unread text. Here, an analysis of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland demonstrates TextArc's structure and some capabilities.
TextArc represents the entire text as two concentric spirals on the screen: each line is drawn in a tiny (one pixel tall) font around the outside, starting at the top; then each word is drawn in a more readable size. Important typographic features, like the mouse-tail shape of a poem at about two o'clock, can be seen because the tiny lines retain their formatting. Frequently used words stand out from the background more intensely.

[Source: www.textarc.org]

Egyptian Ruins in the Grand Canyon?

http://www.crystalinks.com/gc_egyptconnection.html

Perhaps the most amazing suppression of all is the excavation of an Egyptian tomb by the Smithsonian itself in Arizona. A lengthy front page story of the Phoenic Gazette on April 5, 1909, gave a highly detailed report of the discovery and excavation of a rock-cut vault by an expedition led by a Professor S.A. Jordan of the Smithsonian. The Smithsonian, however, claims to have absolutely no knowledge of the discovery or its discoverers.
[...]
According to the story related to the Gazette by Mr. Kinkaid, the archaelogists of the Smithsonian Institute, which is financing the expeditions, have made discoveries which almost conclusively prove that the race which inhabited this mysterious cavern, hewn in solid rock by human hands, was of oriental origin, possibly from Egypt, tracing back to Ramses. If their theories are borne out by the translation of the tablets engraved with heiroglyphics, the mystery of the prehistoric peoples of North America, their ancient arts, who they were and whence they came, will be solved. Egypt and the Nile, and Arizona and the Colorado will be linked by a historical chain running back to ages which staggers the wildest fancy of the fictionist.

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