Did we discuss Choropleths?

 Ever heard the word "Choropleth?"

It is not a common word, yet it is commonly encountered in our daily lives, whether on television, or in newspapers or magazines.   It's a fancy word that describes encoding data into geospatial maps or into colorful graphs to help the viewer gain easier understanding of complex data. 

For example, Figure 1 is a temperature-graded weather map for an early summer day across America:

Figure 1 -- June 2, 2013 temperature ranges across America

And Figure 2 is a population density map of the American states:

Figure 2       Population densities for states in America, circa 2007

There is a lot of sophistication that goes into creating effective choropleths, and some subtleties that might not be apparent at first blush.   One of the key capabilities is comparison of 'similar' data, for example, one time-frame vs. another while holding the variables constant.

Figure 3, for example, shows successive three-month 'windows' for COVID case-rates for the upper Midwest states (seven states--North and South Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, Nebraska, Iowa, and Minnesota).  For these choropleths, counties shown in white are the 'best,' grading into blue and then brown and finally into orange (the worst level).   

Note that the first three months of the COVID pandemic had little penetration into these states (left graph), while the middle three months showed increasing discovery.   The right graph, though, shows an enormous growth in case-rates, which in fact had a very explainable cause--the Sturgis motorcycle rally in mid-August in South Dakota even though most public health officials state-wide and nationally urged that the event be cancelled.  The SD governor, Kristi Noam, refused to do so (you've heard of her since).

Figure 3     COVID case-rates (X per 100,000) for Upper Midwest in 2020

Figure 4 illustrates the same criteria (cases per 100,000 population) for seven states New England states (e.g. Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut and New York).  Note here that the first period (the left graph) was the worst for this region, especially in areas around New York City and up the Atlantic Coast to Boston.  Later periods lessened the case-rate impact for NYC, and it remained virtually constant along the seacoasts, even as more of the upstate counties showed increased case-rates.  None of these seven states had regions that ever 'went nuts' by comparison with virtually all of the seven upper Midwest states in the same third period.

Figure 4     COVID case-rates (X per 100,000) forNew England and NY in 2020

Over the 2020-2022 three-year period, InnovaScapes Institute (with help from AstroVirtual Inc.) compiled, collated, and analyzed daily COVID data for all 3,141 US counties, along with 196 total countries.   Choropleths became our most important tool for displaying and describing our findings.

I eventually talked with many epidemiologists around America and Europe, and occasionally I would ask "are you familiar with choropleths?".    One fellow, a key individual at Johns Hopkins hospital (which created, and shared publicly, the most complete data collection), said {somewhat haughtily, to my mind} that "every epidemiologist KNOWS about and uses choropleths."  He went on, though, to say that "practically no one in the Public Health sector knows how to use them."   

For our purposes, they proved invaluable.  For example, using them nationally in March 2020 enabled us to 'discover' that ski resorts were a tremendous source of contamination, something that eluded the entire world community except for what they thought were isolated instances.  Our findings easily revealed that eight US ski resorts were among the highest fifteen counties in America the third week in March, 2020--but 'who knew?"   If public health officials were serious about stopping or slowing the pandemic spread, they'd have to say, "Half of the worst one-half of one percent of American counties, were international ski resort counties?  Wow, we need to focus on that!"  The sad fact is that they didn't know to do so.

Powerful tools--now you know to call them "Choropleths."

 

 

Judith Viorst still 'has it'

 We were sent a copy of Judith Viorst's newest book, "Making the Best of What's Left," last week, where she once again did a smashing good job of holding attention and providing great insight into lives, maybe especially ours at our relatively mature ages.  She has written, what, maybe fifty books over a lifetime, many of them incredibly insightful for whatever topic she has chosen.   Well, at 94, she's done it again.

She at 94 has moved into an RC (Retirement Community) and she is clearly not thrilled by her new neighbors and companions.   So she makes a book about them, their foibles, and how they represent the issues for anyone over 80 years old.   In particular, she described one whose spouse (an important Washington D.C. personage) had died and she now found that "no one calls, no one invites me to dinner, or lunch, nor to events."  Viorst was amazed by the utter non-recognition by this woman that the colleagues and friends that they'd had for years weren't really friends--they were political friends, in it for the name connection, not for the bonhomie.  Another version of the "Previously Important Person" syndrome that I've remarked on several times.

Some cannot let the past go.   I am, sad to say, one of those folk.  I still tell the old stories, as though they matter.  They DID matter, but they don't now.  I still think of them as great stories, with meaningful punch lines, and trenchant insights, but I am mostly alone in such thinking.  Viorst goes on to explain this by saying, "once you reach a certain age, you become invisible to people.  You can talk, but they don't hear you."   Damnable situation, she sez.  Yup!

But once in a while, the light does go on for me.   Like the post last October, where I was prattling to my daughter and grand-daughter about "THINGS IMPORTANT" like Neil Armstrong landing on the moon, and COPD being more than just a Smoker's disease, and they could have cared less.   The fact that I realized it is notable for me; the fact that it took an extra day is not so impressive.

So what do you do with these stories?  

Forget 'em?  Hard to do, especially if you've been mostly a storyteller all your life.

Write 'em up in a memoir?   Who would want to read it?  And if you did write it, how much of it would be true (or does that even matter?).  My dad always claimed that his mother had a remarkable memory, "why, she could remember things that never even happened."

Get sore about the whole thing, pissed at age passing us by?  Who would even notice you are pissed.  Or care, for that matter.

So, the net net of it all, according to Viorst and my own recongizance, is that anyone in this last Fifth of Five Life Periods (each roughly 20 years long for the most fortunate of us) is essentially condemned to living a major version of "youth will be served"      

Sports heroes face this earlier than most.  Ask Novak Djokovic how it feels, or Roger Federer who just couldn't stand the loss of #1 capability.   None of you probably recall that Ted Williams (one of the crustiest baseball players ever) did indeed "go out on top" but Joe DiMaggio (perhaps more famous and certainly much more well liked) just stayed on the field and in the line-up until it was pathetic.   Tom Brady did defy the odds, and so too Djokovic for a while, but both are struggling to quit gracefully.

Is there a lesson here?  Well, my good wife Jenny sez "Why are you doing yet another start-up?"  And I don't answer, but I'm thinking of calling up Clint Eastwood to ask, "why one more movie?"

Readership numbers

 As I've noted in some other blogs, authors get curious on occasion whether anyone reads their stuff.  These blogs mostly maintain a simple page-view counter, and I monitor it aperiodically.  We started this blog in 2013, mostly as a way to commit some random enthusiasms to print.   The year saw eighty posts, on a plethora of topics, followed by twenty-one more the next year.  Then a virtual six year gap, until the 2020 COVID pandemic hit, and I began recording findings (some 44 posts that year).   Since the initial COVID postings, my attention shifted to our new company, AstroVirtual, which has its own Blog, at https://www.astrovirtual.com/astrovirtualblog.   It doesn't yet display a page-count ticker, but we've posted a few notes there.

The significant thing, and I can report this in a subsequent post, is that the COVID studies conducted at InnovaScapes have resulted in a sizable book, an anthology that looks at COVID around the planet over the first three years.  Importantly from my perspective, we discovered several key operational disasters that routinely plagued the health community.  These are significant enough that we intend to publicize this fairly widely if possible to help for the next epidemic or pandemic.  

If I have as much success with this venture as with the sixty-year crusade about COPD and toxic air, it will be beyond frustrating.

As for the InnovaScapes blog itself, I've done a few posts since 2020, some 25 to date in five years, not exactly tearing up the landscape.   Readership for the first eleven years was 35,406 page-views, about 3,200 per year.  The past fifteen months, we've added 11,510 page-views, so readership is up more than double even with modest posts.  So I'm grateful that someone seems to care.  Maybe I'll start being more attentive.

Here's some page-view graphs for four of my blogs

What is a Picture Worth?

 The Chinese, it is said, said that a Picture is worth one thousand words.   Did they really say that?  Well, Confucius often gets the credit, but someone did research and claims that Fred R. Barnard first used this in print in 1921 in an advertising trade journal.   I think I'll bet on Confucius, but let's explore this a bit.

I first learned about this rule around age 10, when we got our first black-and-white television set.  I'd read vociferously, many accounts about World War II battles iin borrowed Britannica encyclopedias, only to discover that the word-images that I had constructed about many events did not match hardly at all the new dynamic images flashing on our TV in 1950.

Moreover, you could only borrow one volume at a time (my neighbor's limit), so you could read about Navies, Norway and Neanderthals just fine, but you had no immediate recourse to complementary stories about Armies, Sweden or Piltdown Man (not yet known as a fraud) until a separate volume was available

And then, in a late-life maneuver, I tackled the question posed in "Jaws" where the ship-mate, upon his first encounter with the huge shark, stumbles into the main cabin, and blurts out to the captian, "we're going to need a bigger boat."

I composed a possible "image-driven answer" for that one.  What kind of boat, how big--and produced the following image, alog with a short video.

Here's the short video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RqwmQHCNE0E

Note that each of these ten pictures could easily be worth 1,000 words by themselves.

But notice the small yellow box--image-driven stories means adding voice to the images, ala the video.  And graphical analytics complete the picture for any content with data inclusion.   So, while the Chinese might have coined a great idea, there is more to the story in a multi-mediated world.

Views, Viewpoints, Reviews, and Interviews

I awoke thinking about "Views".   

To view is to look, to watch, to observe, to witness.  View used this way is a verb.

The view is a scene, a landscape, a vista, a sight to behold..  View used this way is a noun.

My view is my perspective, my summarized 'take', my Viewpoint.

To review is to look again, or to summarize, or edit.   A play on words, you can review a view.

To interview is to seek someone else's view, or set of views, or their viewpoint.

This can be somewhere between recursive and convoluted, and still be accurate: "I reviewed the interview of Herman's viewpoint about the view."

The working word here is "Views"    I have spent a lot of time over the years developing and creating views--perspectives might be another word--about many topics.   I've espoused "Pictures" along the way, as in "One picture is worth one thousand words." and we've copyrighted the term "Envisionz" for our company AstroVirtual (see that blog https://www.astrovirtual.com/astrovirtualblog/envisioningdata).

But words can "paint a picture" too.   "Viewpoints" is a column that appears in our weekly county newspaper, the Yamhill County News-Register (https://newsregister.com/about-newsregister).  And I was lucky enough to have that paper select two of my articles for June, that I'll describe below.

This paper traces its roots to 1866, and has been owned and operated for the past 95 years by the same family, the Bladines.  Along the way, they've won numerous accolades, including "Best region's (Oregon) weekly newspaper in 1931 and 1935, and the best nation's weekly in 1939 newspaper."  The honors continue to this day, winning "best non-daily newspaper honors" in Oregon for most of the past twenty years.   

A notable point about the News-Register's history is that Nicholas Kristof's first job, while still in high school, was to be a reporter for the News-Register, and he still returns to town (McMinnville, OR) and presents his latest findings for the locals.  As an example, he gave a standing-room only talk about his new book, Chasing Hope, last summer (https://www.amazon.com/Chasing-Hope-Reporters-Nicholas-Kristof/).  

The paper is noteworthy in my view (there's that word again) for its willingness to tackle partisan issues with a clear passion.   Clearly left-of-center, but open to opinion from all sides, it allows, nay savors, letters to the editor, and Viewpoints, from diverse perspectives.   As many of our blog readers well know, I have strong views about some topics, including 'data-driven decision analysis,' and with the recent unbelievably stupid decisions by Robert Kennedy Jr. about vaccines for Americans, I chose to 'sound off' and share my views from the COVID pandemic experience.    I penned a proposal to the Viewpoints editor, and he forthwith gave me a column on 6 June, 2025 for which he selected the title to draw attention.

Entitled "Stop re-writing history to downplay the pandemic," I waxed eloquent about Yamhill County statistics, and the impact of COVID on a placid rural county far from any news-highlighted hotspot.  Doing the research, I quickly found that our little Yamhill County had the highest per capita death rate of any of Oregon's 36 counties within weeks of the outset. Huh?  Why?

Just to make sure that people understood my "Viewpoint," the first two paragraphs were fairly bold (the 'old Charlie' some of my oldest followers said, somewhat tongue in cheek).  Here are the opening two paragraphs: The lunacy continues. Now the demented head of HHS, clearly beset by his own brain worm, has decided for all of us that we basically should not have free rights to the Covid vaccines unless we are over 65 with other unspecified underlying conditions.

Have we lost sight completely of what America meant only months ago in terms of personal freedom? How Americans can tolerate the ridiculous, dangerous, anti-scientific leadership in Washington, D.C., is stunning to any rational observer.

And here's the article (https://newsregister.com/article?articleTitle=charles-house-stop-rewriting-history-to-downplay-the-pandemic--1749243039--52092--commentary)

I know, I know--this invites ICE to come knocking on the door, or vigilantes to grab their AK-47s and start driving my way.  I don't consider myself an activist, but on topics like this, I do get enthused, even energized.  Jenny sez rabid.  Ah, well, thank God for a newspaper willing to grant a Viewpoints Page.

I'll describe the second Viewpoints article in a subsequent post.   For now, though, keep those words in mind--View, Viewpoint, Review, and Interview.