The Geography of Google Street View

I don't get to take road trips as often as I'd like, so I was excited to see that, thanks to Google Maps Street View, I can travel to a lot of places via "virtual road trip." In some ways the world geography of coverage - i.e., the places that are visible via Google Maps Street View - is rather predictable: I suspect there would be a fairly strong correlation between this map and a world map of countries by GDP (Gross Domestic Product, a commonly used indicator of wealth and economic productivity) per capita. So it's no surprise that the most heavily mapped include North America, Western Europe, Australia/New Zealand, Singapore, and Japan. It's also not too surprising to see that South Africa is the best covered country in Africa.

But there are surprises - on the one hand, not much of Germany, Belgium, Austria, or Portugal have Street View available yet; I'd be curious to know why. (I'm also disappointed that I can't do a virtual road trip through Iceland yet...) And why so little coverage in South America (outside of the major population centers along the Brazilian coast) and almost none in India or China?

On the other hand, there is pretty good coverage in Romania and Czechia... why these two and not other Eastern European countries? I was also pleased to discover that I could use this to visit the Canary Islands and a tiny smidgen of Antarctica.

Political change in Milwaukee County

Here's a fascinating map showing political change in Milwaukee County since 1966 (and here's an accompanying table).

Geographies of Obesity and Diabetes

A colleague sent this interesting link today - check out these maps of the geographic distribution of obesity and diabetes in the US. You can see how the distribution has changed over time at the state level of resolution; you can also see how distributions vary at the county level within states, as well as across racial/ethnic categories.

It looks like Milwaukee County has higher levels than the state of Wisconsin as a whole. But some of these data are puzzling... why do the numbers seem to drop so quickly when you cross the state line from Nebraska to Colorado, or Illinois to Missouri?