With majority support in 44 states, and more in favor than opposed in 4 others, same-sex marriage is a done deal for most Americans. Besides, it's legal nationwide after a Supreme Court ruling in 2015. But Americans in two states are holding out when it comes to moral approval: Missisippi, where more are opposed to same-sex marriage than in favor of it, and in Alabama, the last state where an outright majority oppose it.

Support rose above 50% for the first time in 2011 and has not gone below that mark since then. Support rose to 60% for the first time in 2015 and has not gone below that mark since then. Support continues to rise while opposition continues to fall each year, driven in large part by a significant generational gap.

From 1988 to 2009, support for same-sex marriage increased between 1% to 1.5% per year, but thereafter support began to rise at an accelerated pace.

As of 2016, 83% of Americans aged 18 to 29 support same-sex marriage.

As of 2018, for the first time in Pew's research, more Americans over 65 favor same-sex marriage than oppose it. To find a broad national demographic opposed, you have to filter your way down to categories like "Republican Boomers" or "Weekly Church Attendees." Read the rest

Outside the big cities, England and Wales is aging. From Plumplot:

In 2002, 40% of the population was over 44 years old. Fourteen years later it was 43.5%. The share almost equaled to the population below 35, which was 43.7%. Life expectancy also increased. For people aged 65 years or older, the expectancy increased by more than two years. Their share increased by 2.1% between 2002 and 2016. There were 7.1k centenarians in 2002 and 13.7k in 2016.

I was curious about the white-hot sliver of youth in the wilds of Wiltshire. There are military bases around those parts, but couldn't immediately confirm that's the reason why. Read the rest

Páraic McGloughlin's Arena is "brief look at the eart from above" mesmerizes us with the shapes we made upon it, culled from satellite imagery then ordered frame-by-frame to give the uncanny appearance of a single plot of land rapidly changing.

Check out Páraic's Instagram for more work from the Sligo-based artist.

Pearse McGloughlin and I collaborated on the audio resulting in something between music and a soundtrack.

Audio mastered by TJ LippleHear

more of Pearse's music here : open.spotify.com/track/0mvfR4zmmxDTvlYyWmmJvG?si=KIHR2daoe

sweetnocturnes.com

Arena soundtrack available here: store.cdbaby.com/cd/pearsemcgloughlin3

open.spotify.com/album/2RNXEQZlBaBgeVmyLESIgb

Amber Willams at Directors Notes took the time to make an interview with me about the making of "Arena" and my work in general , you can check it out here: directorsnotes.com/2018/04/04/paraic-mcgloughlin-arena/

Thanks a million Amber.

Here's another short movie from Páraic, titled Chase, compiled using the same technique but at ground level.

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This Google Earth image of Antarctica's South Georgia Island depicts either a UFO that crashed and skidded across the snow or a hunk of ice that rolled along after an avalanche. According to this YouTube video from Secureteam, with 2.5 million views, it's definitely the former. Keele University physical geographer lecturer Richard Waller suggests it's the latter. Below, a zoomed-out view of the area. (Space.com)

Previously: Another UFO found in Google Earth image of Antarctica

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In much of the world, addresses are difficult to convey because they refer to locations on unnamed streets, in unnumbered buildings, in unincorporated townships, sometimes in disputed national boundaries (I have often corresponded with people in rural Costa Rica whose addresses were "So-and-so, Road Without Name, 300m west of the bus stop, village, nearest town, region"). Read the rest

Earth Wind Map shows the winds blasting over a beautiful, rotatable 3D animated globe. Various modes (click the text on the bottom left) show air, oceanic, particulate and even auroral maps. Read the rest

Crying in Public is described as an "emotional map of New York City, made out of the important things that happen to us outside." To use it, you drag a one of 15 different emojis (crying, dancing, sex, drugs, vomit, etc) onto a map of New York City and briefly describe the incident. The creator of the site, kraykray, is going to add more cities.

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The United States is a bit more corrupt than tight-arsed northern European and richer Commonwealth nations, but isn't particularly corrupt all considered. Trump's slackin'! Movers and shakers: Britain itself cleaned up its act after years of politicans dipping into the public kitty, but Australia's slipping--reportedly a crisis of perception more than actual corruption, but alarming all the same.

Since 2012, several countries significantly improved their index score, including Côte d’Ivoire, Senegal and the United Kingdom, while several countries declined, including Syria, Yemen and Australia.

Here's the least corrupt/

1. New Zealand 2. Denmark 3. Finland, Norway, Switzerland 6. Singapore, Sweden 8. Canada, Luxembourg, Netherlands, United Kingdom

16. United States

And the most corrupt.

180. Somalia 179. South Sudan 178. Syria 177. Afghanistan 175. Yemen, Sudan 171. Lybia, North Korea, Guinea-Bissau, Equatorial Guinea

Here's an embed that may or may not work: !function(e,t,s,i){var n="InfogramEmbeds",o=e.getElementsByTagName("script")[0],d=/^http:/.test(e.location)?"http:":"https:";if(/^\/{2}/.test(i)&&(i=d+i),window[n]&&window[n].initialized)window[n].process&&window[n].process();else if(!e.getElementById(s)){var r=e.createElement("script");r.async=1,r.id=s,r.src=i,o.parentNode.insertBefore(r,o)}}(document,0,"infogram-async","https://e.infogram.com/js/dist/embed-loader-min.js"); Read the rest

At r/DataIsBeautiful, academiaadvice posted this map of U.S. gun homicides per 100,000 residents between 2007-2016.

Source: U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention - https://wonder.cdc.gov/ucd-icd10.html - Tools: Excel, Datawrapper. Rates are expressed on an annual basis, covering the years 2007-2016. Raw CDC data

By comparison, here's gun ownership rates:

Idaho's relatively low gun homidice rate (about 1.2 per 100k) still outstrips those of heavily urban democracies like the UK (0.23) and Japan (0.1). The variation within U.S. regions conceals the general scale of the killing on a whole (5.3 per 100k). And that particular number excludes about half the gun deaths in America—gun deaths that are as less likely elsewhere as the homicides are. One we decide to ignore the obvious correlation -- absolute thresholds of gun owenership and availability -- the more significant obscure ones become. Read the rest

In Freedom House's 2018 world freedom map, 71 countries registered declines while only 35 saw gains: "emboldened autocrats, beleaguered democracies, and the United States’ withdrawal from its leadership role" have created a crisis.

Among those slipping into "not free" status were Turkey and the Central African Republic, which each saw dramatic declines of more than 30 percent in the last year, according to Freedom House's criteria. Ukraine, Mali, Nigaragua and Honduras were among those countries slipping from freedom to "partial" freedom. In Europe, Hungary slipped 20 percent, to stand only 2 points within the range of free countries. Tunisia, though, the Arab world's only "free" country, clung to that status despite domestic strife.

Democracy faced its most serious crisis in decades in 2017 as its basic tenets—including guarantees of free and fair elections, the rights of minorities, freedom of the press, and the rule of law—came under attack around the world. ... Perhaps worst of all, and most worrisome for the future, young people, who have little memory of the long struggles against fascism and communism, may be losing faith and interest in the democratic project. The very idea of democracy and its promotion has been tarnished among many, contributing to a dangerous apathy.

Most alarming, though, is America's drop to 86/100. Though still well within the range of free countries, it has slipped noticeably behind all those Northern European democracies lurking in the 90s. It's turning into a big crap Italy.

The president’s behavior stems in part from a frustration with the country’s democratic checks and balances, including the independent courts, a coequal legislative branch, the free press, and an active civil society.

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Fejetlenfej posted a set of maps of european forest cover to imgur, with posters available on Etsy. Though cover is distressingly spase in places such as Denmark and England, check out the places that seem picked clean, as if trees were a menace to be exterminated without remorse. Is there so much as a shrub in Italy's Po Valley?

Data: Global Tree Canopy Cover, 2010, U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) High resolution map of all the forests of Europe. Color scheme goes from black as 0% forest to bright green as close to 100%, dense forest. After finally forcing myself to focus more on creating new things, this is my first new design in almost a year. I'm quite excited to show it to you guys, so please, any feedback welcome. Map made mostly with the open-source QGIS software.

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Simon Rogers, a data journalist and data editor at Google, created a series of maps showing the regional popularity of certain kinds of restaurant. Read the rest

Cottereau: This video shows the borders and populations of each country in Europe, for every year since 400 BC. Vassal states and colonies are not included in the count of a country's population." What a mess! One thing I learned is how sparsely-populated Britain was in the Roman age. Read the rest

The Pudding's Music Map shows the number 1 song all around the world. It's like a weird game of Risk, a world of brief new empires rising in the wake of Despacito's worldwide domination. The data comes from YouTube's API and is tracked by city. Read the rest

Topi Tjukanov makes remarkable mapped data visualization, like this map of optimal routes by car from the geographic center of the contiguous United States to all counties. Read the rest

Using a Google Maps overlay, Solar System Maps shows how large the solar system would be if Earth or other celestial bodies were much smaller than the are. Here's "Earth the size of a basketball," centered on SFO. The outermost ring is Pluto's orbit.

If Jupiter were the size of a tennis ball, Pluto's orbit could still encompass the British Library, the Tower of London and the Houses of Parliament. Read the rest

University of Oxford’s Malaria Atlas Project just published new research showing that 80.7 percent of the world's population live an hour or less from a city. (In the visualization above, "d" stands for "day" and "h" is for "hour.") The map takes into account transportation infrastructure across the globe. From Nature:

...New data sources provided by Open Street Map and Google now capture transportation networks with unprecedented detail and precision. Here we develop and validate a map that quantifies travel time to cities for 2015 at a spatial resolution of approximately one by one kilometre by integrating ten global-scale surfaces that characterize factors affecting human movement rates and 13,840 high-density urban centres within an established geospatial-modelling framework.

Our results highlight disparities in accessibility relative to wealth as 50.9% of individuals living in low-income settings (concentrated in sub-Saharan Africa) reside within an hour of a city compared to 90.7% of individuals in high-income settings. By further triangulating this map against socioeconomic datasets, we demonstrate how access to urban centres stratifies the economic, educational, and health status of humanity.

"Accessibility to Cities" Read the rest