Some puzzling maps:

What?

Empireal disintegration.


Feeding many people...

The dismalness of the most dismal of sciences

Krugman largely says what's obvious from the outside:
06economic.7-190

Social contagion, a review

The New York Times looks back at the work of Christakis and Fowler on social contagion.
13contagion.2-190

Synchronization

Steve Strogatz on all things syncful:

Controlled pattern formation in sheep

Flight patterns

A spreadworthy message

An excellent viral video from a recent political campaign.

Corporate contagion

The social network component of the spreading of spreading.
(The main article is here.)


The diffusion of retail establishments

The spreading of certain buildings
across the United States.


Identity, Self-Awareness, and Twitter

From the New York Times Magazine, a great, mutlifacted article about how we communicate online.

Political book preferences

Amazon has an interactive map of the US showing which political books are bestsellers as a function of state. You’ll notice that Vermont is rather blue.

The end is nigh...

As we record more and more information about ourselves and
everything around us, Chris Anderson argues
in Wired that the end of theory is nigh.
(He’s certainly not the first to do so.)

It’s certainly true that we have moved into an age of
data abundance as far as social sciences go.
It’s worthwhile to simply dive into these streams
of data and look for patterns. Questions will naturally
appear, we will search more, and theories will form.
And while simple theories may not be available for
many problems, we at least have the task of improving the science of description.