Taking some time away from the blog to visit Europe. The highlights:  UPDATED: Here are some Google Earth waypoints, via Google Latitude (which I unfortunately forgot to turn on until we arrived at our first stop in France).  Day one: In Beauvior, France, to visit Mont Saint Michel: Day two: O... Read more →

A few weeks ago I noted my attempt to obtain a presidential travel database from the White House via the Freedom of Information Act. Fail:  Read more →

Thanks to the U.S. Census Bureau, I learned this week that Americans eat on average about 21 pounds of rice each year — and they wash it down with about 13 pounds of ice cream, apparently. I wondered, what else do Americans eat, and how has that changed over time? Using the bureau’s “Per Capita... Read more →

Yesterday I posted a map that used proportional symbols to visualize the home cities of Online News Association conference attendees. Today’s version uses great circles to map the routes attendees took to Boston (assuming they had direct flights, of course). Red lines represent more attendees f... Read more →

More than 1,000 people were on the attendee list for last weekend’s Online News Association convention in Boston, according to a list the organizers graciously released.  The data weren’t perfect. Only about 3 in 4 attendees listed their home cities. Of them, about 650 were from the United Stat... Read more →

Using Tableau Public, my NPR colleague Andy Carvin visualized thousands of his tweets about the Arab Spring:  View larger, interactive version Read more →

As you may have noticed, a large NASA satellite is expected to crash into the earth sometime this week, but fortunately not in DC, according to the Post’s Joel Achenbach:  This just in: Washington will be spared when the NASA satellite UARS crashes to Earth. So will Manhattan. Indeed, the enti... Read more →

The military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy ended today, eliminating a practice that led to more than 13,000 service member discharges since 1993. Its enforcement has been in decline since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, according to unofficial stats from Wikipedia:  See larger, interactive ... Read more →

More bad news for President Obama, via CBS News:  As concerns about the struggling U.S. economy grow, a new CBS News/New York poll finds that President Obama’s overall approval rating has dropped to 43 percent, the lowest so far of his presidency in CBS News polling. In addition, his disapprov... Read more →

The U.S. has doled out more than $400 billion in economic and military assistance to other counties since 1946, according to this table on Data.gov.  Top recipients: Israel ($34 billion), Iraq ($33 billion), Egypt ($30 billion), Afghanistan ($15 billion), India ($15 billion), Russia ($14 billio... Read more →