Friday, July 6, 2007

Utah Population by County

I found the 2000 U.S. Census population data for each county in Utah last night (I guess it was early this morning). I used GEGraph to create a 3D bar chart of population by county. I did it several times to explore the options, and came up with two that I really liked (one I adjusted after importing it into Google Earth).

The one that I will say was naturally occurring was one where both the height and diameter of the cylinder are scaled relative to the distribution of the population across counties. This one really gives you a good sense of how small the populations of most of the counties are when compared with those counties on the Wasatch Front (Utah, Salt Lake, Davis, and Weber).

The second one had only the height of the cylinder changed with respect to population distribution. The diameters of all of them were the same. Once I got this imported into GE I selected each of the 29 individually and edited their points so that the shape was no longer cylindrical, but instead matched the general shape of the county itself. This view is nice when trying to read the data because the polyhedrons provide a solid background for viewing the text.

The .kml files for both of these are available, but you must email me for them, as I have not yet figured out where I can post them online. I have a couple of options, but they are down at the moment. When I find something I will update this post.

My next project is to figure out how to get all my iTunes library into Fathom. I can get the music in easy enough, but am looking at a way to include the podcasts and the movies as well.

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