Data Dump

Here are a couple sites to bookmark for your civic population research and curiosity needs: city-data.com and dataplace.org. You can see dozens of statistics about any zip code in America. A few interesting things in my browsing:

1. Population Density: I grew up in a place with a density of 4288 people per square mile. Now, it's over 11 thousand, and we're not even in the city proper. Our old condo in Bucktown was in a population density of almost 24K/sq. mi. For reference, a random zip code in Brooklyn has over 38K/sq. mi.

2. Racial Makeup: my neighborhood in Amarillo had one black person for every 46 white people. In Oak Park, the ratio is about one to three. During the 1996-97 school year, I lived in a place (Tuskegee, AL) with a black/white ratio of 38/1.

3. Age Distribution: Each page on city-data.com opens with a graph showing the distribution of ages across the local population. Why is there such a concentration of 21-year old women in the neighborhood of my youth? Check out this concentration of college-aged youth.

There's a lot more interesting stuff in there, including complementary graphs showing the marital status of men and women across all ages. I'm unreasonably melancholy after watching the bars representing widowed and divorced people grow with age.