Where the Rural Is

This morning I saw a list of the most and least rural states in the U.S. It highlighted both the states with the most rural people overall and the highest percentage of rural people.

The numbers are based on the 2020 Census. An urban area, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, at that time, had a population of at least 2,500 in a contiguous area. 

So that means rural, as an opposite term, would be municipalities whose population is below 2,500.

Overall, a bit over 66 million people lived in rural areas at the time. Not surprisingly, the state with the most rural residents is Texas (4.7 million, 16.3% of the state's population). The one with the highest percentage is Vermont (almost 65% of its population). 

The 10 states with the lowest percentage of rural residents were:

1. California 5.8%
2. Nevada 5.9%
3. New Jersey 6.2%
4. Florida 8.5% 
5. Massachusetts 8.7%
6. Rhode Island 8.9%
7. Utah 10.2%
8. Arizona 10.7%
9. New York 12.6%
10. Illinois 13.1%

Despite being on the top-10 low-percentage list, two states still came out on the top-10 list of rural residents by population: New York is number 7, with about 2.5 million, and California is number 9, with about 2.3 million.
 
The other top 10 states by population, after Texas at number 1, are:

2 North Carolina
3 Pennsylvania 
4 Ohio
5 Georgia
6 Michigan
8 Tennessee
10 Alabama

For the next Census, the definition of urban will be: 

a densely settled core of census blocks that meet minimum housing unit density and/or population density requirements. This includes adjacent territory containing non-residential urban land uses. To qualify as an urban area, the territory identified according to criteria must encompass at least 2,000 housing units or have a population of at least 5,000.

Changing the definition of urban from 2,500 to 5,000 people will make historical comparisons difficult, to say the least. 

As a person who's originally from an area that I definitely consider rural, I wonder a bit about the definitional change from 2,500 to 5,000. I'm not a demographer but places with 4,500 people seem significantly different from ones under 2,500. (Even 2,500 is a lot of people compared to where I'm from!) 

Here's an AP story from the time when the change was announced. As the story says, the change has implications for how money is awarded that affects peoples' lives, including significant ways related to hospitals.

Land Value Map

Excluding urbanized counties —a big exclusion, I know — what state would you say has the highest average land value in the United States?

I saw one of those random-fact maps on Facebook this morning that makes me think the answer is probably....

 

 

 

Iowa.

Almost the entire state of Iowa is colored yellow, which is something like $35,000 per hectare. There's no other state like that on the map. California has a lot of valuable agricultural land, too, but it has mountains  that come in with low land values. 

For an urban area, it doesn't take a lot to get to a million dollars per hectare. For instance, my city lot is 7,500 square feet, which is .17 acres or about .07 hectares. If that lot is worth $150,000 (which it easily could be in Saint Paul... or more, depending on the area), a hectare would be worth about $2.143 million. 

This map also illustrates how much land, especially in the West, is owned by the government, which plays a huge role in those states' politics. I don't think people in the East and South, and even the Midwest, realize that.
 

James Clerk Maxwell

I've been rereading Ursula LeGuin's The Dispossessed for what may be the 15th or so time. The main character is an alien physicist in a relatively far future who is on the verge of developing the theoretical framework needed for transilience, the technology of communicating across space instantaneously.  

It felt like an odd juxtaposition when I saw a post this morning about James Clerk Maxwell, a 19th century Scottish physicist who I don't remember ever hearing of, given my deficient science education.

From his Wikipedia page, I learned that in his short 48 years of life right in the middle of the century, Maxwell was the first to describe how light, electricity, and magnetism are all different aspects of the same thing. He created equations for electromagnetism that are considered the second great unification of physics (Newton is credited with the first great unification). 

Based on that work, Maxwell predicted that radio waves exist. He figured out that color (in light) can be reproduced with just red, green, and blue, and "presented the first durable colour photograph in 1861..." 

He did work in several areas not related to his main fields, like structural engineering, and "was the first to recognize chaos, and the first to emphasize the butterfly effect." He worked in a number of scientific areas I can't even explain. 

He's considered to be the founder of electrical engineering. He introduced the terms relativity and quantum mechanics to the field of physics. 

All of that is from the introduction to his Wikipedia page. I almost didn't read the full version because the introduction seemed pretty thorough. But here's one notable fact from the longer text: Maxwell almost died from smallpox in 1860, before he had published any of what became his best-known work.

The post I saw this morning, which started me on this topic, was about a fundraising effort in the UK to buy the church where Maxwell is buried in Parton, Scotland.  

The community needs 70,000 pounds to buy Parton Kirk from the Church of Scotland and do some immediate repairs. As I understand it, if they do not acquire it, the land (or the building? I'm not sure) will be sold to a storage business. Why the Church of Scotland can't donate the building for such a measly amount of money, I don't know. 

They have until November 1, 2026, to raise the money, and as of this writing the campaign is at just under 45,000 pounds. 

Hurray for Cougars

Here's a random bit of information that I've cited several times since I read it, so I thought I'd better post it here.

Mountain lions (also called cougars or pumas) make American roads safer by keeping deer afraid and therefore away from developed areas, including roads. On Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, for instance, deer-vehicle collisions decreased 76%. 

Deer kill 200 to 440 Americans each year; mountain lions have only killed 29 Americans since 1868.

I know which wild animal I'd rather have around.

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I originally saw this on BlueSky from historian and science fiction writer Ada Palmer. This is the article she linked to.
 

Chernobyl, 2026

I finally watched the HBO five-part miniseries Chernobyl over the past two days. I'm not sure why I didn't see it when it came out in 2019. I think it was because I was busy then with people in my family dying and a small business I was trying to launch, plus a few other things since it came out in May, that month when I'm always doing something else. 

If you haven't seen it, I recommend it. 

I've been trying to bring to mind what I remember from 1986, when the disaster occurred. It was not long before I moved to Minnesota, but after I had decided to come here. I remember hearing about it as it hit the news in the U.S. a few days later, and being freaked out about it, but no details about why it happened or anything. 

I moved here just as the Soviets were working to contain the radiation: while people were dying, and they didn't know if it would poison all of Ukraine. I don't know how soon afterward there was very complete knowledge in the West. Was it one of those stories where, by the time the Soviets let the facts out a few years later, U.S. media couldn't be bothered to make a big deal about it? Or was I just too busy with life by that point and I missed it?

I somehow managed to accumulate some general knowledge that people were evacuated from a wide area around the plant, and that the reactor was enclosed in concrete, but not how that happened. Until I watched the series, I had no idea how many people died along the way. 

This summer, I've been consuming a media diet of Soviet-life-as-cautionary-tale. First there was Star City, then Ponies, and now Chernobyl. Each show is a different example of how creating a society where people are afraid to tell the truth to the people in power above them causes dangerous problems. Chernobyl particularly emphasizes why it's a bad idea to subordinate science to political power and priorities.

It's hard to watch any of these shows in our current time without seeing them as a warning. Too bad that message appears to be too subtle for the people who should learn from it. 

140 Years Ago in Minneapolis

If you're on BlueSky and have any interest in Minneapolis (and sometimes Saint Paul) history, Vince Mpls is a must-follow.

About a week ago, he shared this image of the Minneapolis Industrial Exhibition:

And this description:

Aug 23 1886: Minneapolis Industrial Exposition opens on the East Bank of the Mississippi in Minneapolis, attracting 500,000 visitors in the next 5 weeks. Intended to rival to the Minnesota State Fair over in St Paul, its success was short-lived. By 1903 it was a warehouse, then a ruin, finally torn down in 1945. 

A follow-up comment gave the exact location:

It was on the riverfront just to the left as you crossed the 3rd Avenue bridge from downtown. The "front door" led down to a railroad station on Main Street SE, currently the retaining wall for Lourdes Square townhomes.

He posted this photo to accompany that, showing how the building related to the 3rd Avenue bridge:

It looks as though dome was gone by the time the photo was taken.

By Sea, by Land

Among all the weird maps that Facebook shows me for some reason, I saw this one a few days ago. For some reason the labels are in Swedish, but that's not why I thought it was notable:

Of course, it has the usual problem of the Mercator projection — making Canada and Alaska look a lot larger than they are — but ignoring that, the thing it showed me was that the size of the Mediterranean Sea is similar to the interior of the lower 48 United States. 

It makes it visible that sailing from the eastern shore of the Black Sea, through Constantinople, to Valencia, Spain was approximately the same distance as going from Washington, D.C. to San Francisco. Going through the Straits of Gibraltar, all the way to the western shore of Iberia or Morocco was even farther.

A Pagoda with Heels

It's been a while since I wrote about the corporate paternalism of the Endicott Johnson shoe company. Rereading it today*, after these decades of increasing oligarchic retrenchment and tech-overlordism (and our current eugenicist government policy), I felt as though I was looking at another country, or maybe a different planet.

I was prompted to look at what I had written about EJ because of this post I saw on Facebook called Upstate New York Photos:

The historic EJ Workers Pagoda in C. Fred Johnson Park in Johnson City. Constructed in the 1910s as a pump house for EJ shoe factories. Now a restored folk art structure, it features glass, brick, and shoe heels embedded in its walls.

Shoe heels!

I don't think I've ever seen the pagoda in person. I've ridden on the many carousels in the parks in Endicott, Johnson City, and Binghamton, built for the enjoyment of EJ workers, though. 

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* Recommended!

Nagasaki

Alex Wellerstein, a nuclear historian and professor at Stevens Institute of Technology, wrote a long thread today on BlueSky about the bombing of Nagasaki on this, the 81st anniversary of that day. It provides a number of points from his 2025 book, The Most Awful Responsibility: Truman and the Secret Struggle for Control of the Atomic Age. 

I recommend the whole thread, but his key points are that Truman was read-in only generally on the bombing of Hiroshima, that he didn't understand Hiroshima was a civilian target, and particularly that the bombing of Nagasaki was not at Truman's behest. Wellerstein also provides detail to show there was not enough time for Japan's military leadership to respond to the bombing of Hiroshima before the bomb fell on Nagasaki. 

The U.S. military planned to drop multiple bombs on Japan, he says, and the only constraint was the weather, which led to the very close spacing of the two bombs, just a few days apart. 

Truman, for his part, issued an order on August 10 to stop dropping atomic bombs on Japan. As Wellerstein puts it, "That is the most 'proactive' thing he did regarding the atomic bomb in WWII."

I don't believe I was ever taught that in school.

I think this is significant, because Nagasaki is often framed in "strategic" terms by laymen, journalists, and experts. That is an after-the-fact gloss on it. At the time, it was done because the military felt they could do it, and wanted to do it. Truman was thoroughly out of the loop....

The consequence of all of these misunderstandings is, I think, at the root of both his August 10 order (which he told his cabinet was about avoiding further Japanese civilian lives lost), and his later centralizing of nuclear use authority in the personage of the President.

News on Preventing Ovarian Cancer

This news about the cause of most ovarian cancers, and therefore a way to prevent them, should be widely known. So here it is with a gift link.

Tell your friends with ovaries and fallopian tubes!

As we get older and/or don't want to have children / more children, and especially if we are having some kind of abdominal surgery, removing the fallopian tubes can be added to many kinds of surgery and prevent this deadly cancer. 

A Grim Anniversary

Thanks to Vince Mpls for reminding me that today is the anniversary, and in fact the 175th anniversary, of the enactment of the Treaty of Traverse des Sioux.

It forced the Dakota Nation to cede 21 million acres to the U.S. government, much of it in Minnesota. 

According to the Wikipedia page for the treaty, "The U.S. paid the Dakota an annuity the equivalent of 7.5 cents an acre and [then] charged settlers $1.25 an acre." In addition to this obvious financial chicanery, the treaty's translation for the tribes was also deceptive in describing other terms. And then delayed payment of the compensation over the next decade left the Dakota starving and directly led to the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862.

The treaty was the brainchild of Minnesota's governor, Alexander Ramsey — namesake for my home county here in Saint Paul — and Henry Sibley, until recently another unassailable Minnesota big name. Sibley's name was only recently removed from one of our local high schools (as was Ramsey's). I've yet to hear anyone talk about changing the name of our county.

A giant painting of the treaty-signing used to hang in the Governor's Reception Room at the Minnesota State Capitol until the building was renovated 10 years ago. After the work was completed, there was a big discussion about whether to return it and three other paintings to their prominent locations, given their content. 

After much process, the treaty-signing painting and another one were rehung in a different, less prominent room on the third floor, with contextual information to accompany them. Two others were put into storage. This page on the Minnesota State Historical Society website gives a bit of information about that outcome. 

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Those divergent acreage payments are about $3.00 and $50.00 in 2025 dollars, according to the inflation calculator. 

Bikecentennial

Fifty years ago, it seemed like the Bicentennial was everywhere, all the time. I was a cynical high schooler, post-Watergate, so it all seemed a bit much to me. Constant moments in history on television and red white and blue everywhere for a year or more… it was just a lot of sameness for a young person who lacked perspective. 

I don't remember that there were permanent infrastructure projects completed as part of the Bicentennial, but I've recently been reminded that all of these were timed to mark the anniversary:

• Opening of the first line of the Washington Metro system
• The Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum
• Installation of Marc Chagall's America Windows at the Art Institute of Chicago
• The renovation of the building that became Landmark Center in St. Paul

I'm sure there are a number of other local projects around the country, similar to St. Paul's Landmark Center or the America Windows, that I don't know about. All of these were permanent gifts to the country or states where they're located. Investments in the future, not just temporary celebrations.

One event that happened that year that I never heard about at the time — different from the usual fireworks or dress-up recreations — was the Bikecentennial.

From CoolBikeArt: 

As the USA commemorates its semiquincentennial, the question arises: What's the best way to celebrate a country's birthday? Fifty years ago, over 4,000 riders embraced the Spirit of '76 by cycling from sea to shining sea. It was known as Bikecentennial.


The main route, called the TransAmerica Trail, wound 4,250 miles (6,840 km) through small towns and less traveled roads from Astoria, Oregon to Yorktown, Virginia. Cyclists could participate in smaller sections of the route, but about 1,750 riders signed up for the entire length of the ride.

The riders were self-contained, carrying all their gear on their bikes. They either camped or stayed in community centers, church basements, and school gymnasiums.

"Two months with everything I needed on the bike made me realize that people, including me, have so much unnecessary stuff. All we really need is enough food, a warm and dry place to sleep, enough clothing to survive, something to interest your mind, and a few friends." –Walter Johnson

"Many cyclists who took part in 1976 (and those who take TransAmerica trips today) say essentially the same thing about the experience: 'I learned more about this country in 90 days than most people learn in a lifetime'." –Dan D’Ambrosio

Bike Centennial continues today as the organization Adventure Cycling, so that has also become a permanent gift. This is their write-up about the 1976 ride.

Of course, there's nothing like Bikecentennial for this year's 250th anniversary, and as far as I know, no lasting physical infrastructure projects, either. 

The Collins Concrete Murals

Today, I learned of the existence of the artists Henry Collins and Joyce Pallot Collins, who created concrete public murals in the U.K. between 1969 and about 1980. 

It started from this thread on BlueSky, which asked:

Does anyone know of a definitive list of the concrete murals of Henry Collins and Joyce Pallot? This Surbiton example is a favourite of mine, and their work in places like Colchester (where they were based), Southampton and Newcastle is well known. But what of the rest?

A couple of the Surbiton images that were shared:

Responses led a number of places, especially this site about their work in the city where they spent their life together and began doing murals, Colchester. 

The page about the Collinses on that site says,

They understood the public context of the work and employed an array of unlikely tools including spoons, spanners and even a nutmeg grater to produce a variety of finishes. The texture of the work was important to its overall look, while also discouraging graffiti.

Some visual samples of those varying textures:

A number of their murals are no longer in existence, while others have been moved, some restored, and others exist in degraded condition, given their age. This one in Gloucester is in the latter category:

There are a few more photos, including a close-up of it, in the BlueSky thread. 

The Collinses' murals appear to be an under-appreciated part of Britain's visual culture, if it takes a thread on BlueSky to pull together a thorough list of their murals. 

My speculation is that it comes from a combination of elite bias against the concrete medium and the locations, since the vast majority of their work is not located in London.

Some of the linked pages with images:

• Pallot and Collins Murals – Bexhill on Sea
• Joyce Pallot and Henry Collins – Gwent House Cwmbran (southeast Wales)  (keep scrolling on this page for the best photos)
• Droitwich Spa since Roman Times, St Andrews Shopping Centre, Droitwich, Worcestershire 
• Hitchin History Mural, Paynes Park, Hitchin, Hertfordshire 
• Cowley's Concrete Mural (near Oxford) 

A Land of Not-Extremes

As the World Cup was getting underway, I guess a lot of Europeans were posting to social media about how hot it is here in various parts of North America. A few days ago, Kendra Pierre-Louis @kendrawrites.com put this on BlueSky: 

The reason many Western Europeans don't believe North Americans (including Canadians!) when we say our weather is not something to fuck with is tied to New World degeneracy theory. It's from the 18th century from a dude who never set foot here and posits everything in the New World is weaker.

Which was interesting enough, and there were several responses that were worth reading. But the one that really got my attention was this from someone named karpad:

Fun fact: the record coldest it has ever been in England is the same record cold it has ever been in Louisiana. The hottest it has ever been in England is about the same as the hottest it has ever been in Alaska. America is huge and our weather is extreme and Europe has no frame of reference

England, of course, is in no way the whole of Europe (where there are clearly more temperature extremes than that), but that sure does give you an idea of how much the Atlantic Ocean moderates temperatures. It's not much different from the Pacific Northwest, and for the same reason. 
 

Hallucinated Citations and the Matthew Effect

A month or so ago, I heard about a study that found 85% of LLM-hallucinated citations in scientific article preprints were also in the later journal versions. That means they were not caught by peer review. Bad, right?

It gets worse. The fake citations also disproportionately gave credit to male scholars, who already have many citations. In the BlueSky post where I saw the study mentioned, this was called "a fake-citation Matthew effect."

I had never heard of the Matthew effect, so looked it up. The term goes back to 1968. Robert Merton and Harriet Zuckerman named it (ironically, Merton is the one usually credited with it). 

The name comes from the Parable of the Talents from the Gospel of Matthew in the Bible. In general, it's the tendency for the rich to get richer, but in academia, it's the way "eminent scientists will often get more credit than a comparatively unknown researcher, even if their work is similar; it also means that credit will usually be given to researchers who are already famous."

So the fact that LLM-generated fake citations credit more-established, male scholars is just one more thing to hate about them. They can't even hallucinate fairly.

Is It Latin? Well...

Have you ever wondered about the "Lorem ipsum" words that are frequently used for dummy text?

Emily Zhang, an intrepid YouTube creator whose channel is called Rabbit Hole, found out the full story, and had a beautiful conversation with Hampden-Sydney classics professor Richard McClintock as a major part of it:

I'm very glad I watched this. It's 26 minutes and worth every one. 

We all need something good in our lives these days.
 

What If Lee Won at Gettysburg?

I toy with alternate history a little bit, though usually in 20th century settings. And I know I'm just a piker compared to people who take it seriously. 

The Alternate Historian account on BlueSky asked, a few days ago, "Which historical individual's reputation in alternate history (whether good or bad) is not well deserved?"

One of the answers he got was something I've never thought of before. It came from Sean McKnight @ynot1989.bsky.social:

Robert E. Lee, and it's not even a contest. The man's treated like a noble patrician and military mastermind in actual history, and I am aware of precisely zero works of alternate history that treat him as the myopic military commander, and profoundly evil slaver he actually was.

The best thing that ever happened to Lee was losing Gettysburg. If by some miracle he'd gotten over his own bullshit and won that battle, the victory would have almost certainly led to the total destruction of the ANV during their planned assault on DC.

His army had expended most of their artillery during Gettysburg. They would have gotten swamped at Washington, which was a fortress by the summer of 1863. Defeat would be obvious, but Lee's ego was so inflated before Gettysburg that after, he probably would believe God would provide him cannons.

He'd do a typical dramatic charge, hoping for a dramatic final battle to decide the war, and end up getting obliterated. If he wasn't killed by the Union counterattack, calls to hang him would be deafening.

Lincoln would face enormous pressure to take a harder stance against the Confederates, which with the ANV taken off the board would carry fewer risks.

Lee would be remembered in the North as the greatest traitor in the country's history, and in the South as the man who lost the war.

The destruction of the ANV would also likely mean the death or capture of some of the South's other mythologized leaders. Ewell, A.P. Hill, Longstreet, Jubal Early, J.E.B. Stuart, and Pickett would likely be captured or killed, and their post war reputations would suffer.

Huh. I never thought I should have rooted for Lee to win at Gettysburg, but it sounds like I should have. Then maybe the South would have both lost the war and the time after it, instead of winning Reconstruction.

A Bad Stat, and the Wrong Word

I just finished reading Camille Dungy's 2023 memoir Soil: The Story of a Black Mother's Garden as part of a book group. I recommend it generally.

There was one particular set of facts she relayed late in the book that I didn't know specifically, though it fits with others that are familiar. 

It comes up at a point in late spring or summer of 2020, when Dungy's husband has been on a long bike ride. She tells her friend Tim, who is white, that she tracks her husband's whereabouts with her phone while he's on his rides. 

Their conversation was just a few months after Ahmaud Arbery was murdered by white men while jogging in Georgia, and of course, not long after George Floyd was murdered by Derek Chauvin in Minneapolis.

After recounting their conversation, she goes on to write,

A recent national study reveals that Black cyclists are 4.5 times more likely to die in an accident than white cyclists. Law enforcement agents in cities around the country cite Black cyclists at grossly disproportionate rate. Though the population of Tampa, Florida, is only 25 percent Black, Black cyclists accounted for 80 percent of the city's bicycle citations in 2015. In a nine-month span in 2017, Chicago law enforcement agents issue 321 citations to cyclists in Austin, a predominately Black neighborhood, and only 5 in predominately white Lincoln Park (page 235). 

I found a 2022 article about that national study. The higher rate of death for Black cyclists, it turns out, isn't because they ride bikes more than white people. In fact, it's the opposite:

...Black residents logged proportionally fewer miles on foot, bike, or car than most other groups, relative to their share of the population, according to the National Household Travel Survey data from which the stats were sourced.... White cyclists, who are the demographic group most likely to ride exclusively for recreation or sport rather than transportation, logged significantly more miles per capita than cyclists from other demographics...

This 4.5x statistic raises the question that I always ask when things like this arise: when there's clearly either a structural problem at fault (such as the road designs in Black communities vs. white ones) or overt racism of drivers (!)... are those "accidents"? 

Can we stop using that word and start using at least a neutral word instead, like crash? Calling them accidents is adding insult to injury, or in this case, death.

Talking Minnesota Turkeys

Minnesota has more than 70,000 wild turkeys, including a substantial number of urban turkeys. They live here in Saint Paul (and Minneapolis), where their traffic-stopping ways are well known. I just learned they even have an Instagram account at the University of Minnesota.

A few weeks ago, Minnesota Public Radio informed me that the wild turkey population of Minnesota was extirpated back in the 19th century and was only reintroduced in the 1970s from just 29 birds, which were brought from Kansas. They were released in Houston County in the southeastern part of the state.

These thousands and thousands of turkeys are the descendants of fewer than 30 individuals. Talk about a genetic bottleneck. 

According to the Minnesota DNR, we're not supposed to feed turkeys (so keep track of what falls off your bird feeder), and if a turkey is aggressive toward you, be aggressive back.


A teenaged turkey gang at a neighbor's house, 2012.


A different teenaged turkey gang in a neighbor's yard, 2021.

How Big Bird Works

A friend sent me a link to a video about Carroll Spinney, the man who was Big Bird from the time Sesame Street began production in the 1960s until he retired at age 84 in 2018, the year before he died.

This link goes right to the part of the video about how he did it from inside the Big Bird puppet — which I never thought about before. Spinney was not nearly as tall as Big Bird, so what part of him held up the bird's head? And if that's, let's say, his arm... what controlled the bird's arms? And… how did he see out of the puppet?

All questions are answered. 

(Spinney also played the Oscar the Grouch puppet.)

The whole video is more interesting than I would have thought, even for someone like me, who has never watched Sesame Street. 

Carroll rehearsing a scene in partial costume.