Geobica

@geobica.com

hi I'm geobica I'll be uploading old stuff I've made and new stuff I make here for a while.

All voting systems have some form of strategic voting, a bit like how all map projections have some distortion. (See Gibbard's Theorem for the mathematical proof of this.) Here's an animation that shows a case in which strategic voting is possible with Instant-Runoff Voting (IRV):

Map I made in 2020 to compare how the International Date Line is usually depicted on maps (in gold, though it varies a ton) to how it exists based on Nautical Time Zones, with zones cut out around island countries based on their Territorial Waters:

A slice of an equirectangular map of the Central Pacific running from the north to south poles showing an "Imaginary IDL" in gold and a "Nautical IDL" in red.

I have just learned that my roommate has been eating my chocolate covered raisins, then spitting out the raisins. And that this is apparently preferable to just eating chocolate. I could be annoyed but I am more so fascinated instead.

Map I made on 2022-12-01 of the listed source and mouth of every river on English Wikipedia that had those as coordinates:

An equirectangular map of countries with orange lines connecting the source and mouth listed for each river on wikipedia. Many are inaccurate, which can be seen by the horizontal lines running across the North Atlantic.

There is no real difference between ducks and geese, or even swans for that matter, the names are used essentially at random for different species:

John Boyd's taxonomy of Anseriformes as seen on Wikipedia, colored by which birds are commonly called "ducks", "geese", "swans", or "screamers".

Here's a map from 2023 showing school districts in the US overlaid with county borders. Some states have one district per county, some have multiple per county, and in some the borders are pretty much entirely unrelated. For the most part, it's complicated.

Map of School Districts in the US from the NCES EDGE dataset, colored based on how school district boundaries relate to county borders.

I'm going to start posting some stuff from the archives here. I'm thinking I'll post one or two old things per day for a while with new stuff mixed in, stuff that's too minor to put on my blog but that I think would be neat to have out there somewhere.