Databases are rad. You click this, toggle that, and you surface little bits of the captured world that have been tumbled into a digital hat, one from which you can produce surprising, shocking, sad facts to share with the people around you. We’ve collected some of our favorites for this week’s Follow Friday. Only it’s not so much a Follow Friday as a fall-down-the-rabbit-hole all weekend kind of situation.
CropScape at the National Agricultural Statistics Service
So then you’re all like, oh, I wonder what kind of crops they grow in the United States, and hey wow, there’s so much corn in Minnesota, and ooooh look at all that cotton in the Texas panhandle, that’s amazing, and also in California, hey wait, I live in San Francisco, let's zoom in to see what’s around here, oh of course, they grow soooooo much stuff in the Central Valley, and those purple dots in Napa, those are grapes, duh, oh, and that’s a funny pocket of alfalfa there and suddenly it’s half an hour later and you’re kind of hungry.
The CDC’s Traumatic Occupational Injury database
We’re not proud of this one, but we have to confess a certain ghoulish attraction to lists and charts of how people get killed or injured at work. Because how else are you going to know that between 1995 and 2000, of 10,000 percutaneous injuries caused by medical devices, 29 percent were caused by hypodermic needles and 7 percent were caused by scalpels? But then you find a listing of childhood agricultural injuries by body part and your stomach kind of lurches. (The good news: Those kinds of injuries dropped by around 50 percent between 2001 and 2012.)
And now, onward to a place where no one gets hurt because no one is there. Quick: Which exoplanet has a really big giant radius? Planet ROXs 42B b! Ok good. Now let’s plot the calculated temperature against year of discovery! Looking pretty hot there, Kepler-70b, bring your sunscreen, amiright? Because when the alien overlords finally make landfall, you’re going to want a little background on their homeworld so you can make ingratiating conversation.
Suggested by Johnny Peruvian
The GM approval database at the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications Do you eat food? Or make food? No, we mean, make food. Like say you’re an eggplant researcher and you want to know what other egg-heads have been doing with that purple monstrosity. You go here and discover that there’s a fancy insect-resistant eggplant approved in Bangladesh, and if you ask us, that’s all the eggplant (of any kind) the world needs. Go home, you’re done, eggplantologist. Click around more to see, say, what Monsanto’s up to as well. There’s a Roundup-Ready wheat that exists. Did not know that.
Suggested by Ben Schaefer
BugGuide.net
What is that bee-you-ti-ful iridescent blue beetle you found on your car the other day? Why, a Fiery Searcher, of course! Ooh, and there's a praying mantis with prey. If you like to look at bug pictures the way others like to look at baby pictures (or, if you find bugs alarming, the way some people like watching Nascar) BugGuide’s got you covered. Did you know that the bumble flower beetle looks like a tiny Chewbacca? So cute!
