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Do the natural colors that paint the landscape you call home give a hint about how you might vote in November? To some degree, yes.
The True Colors of America’s Political Spectrum Are Gray and Green https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/09/02/upshot/america-political-spectrum.html
The True Colors of America’s Political Spectrum Are Gray and Green https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/09/02/upshot/america-political-spectrum.html
I've been staring at earth imagery and election results for at least four years, trying to find some kind of key trend in the relationship between the two. But for the most part, what I saw was either obvious or uncompelling (no offense, former me). https://twitter.com/wallacetim/status/800072239307780097
But then I started workin with the inimitable @k3blu3 & we could think realistically about cranking through proverbial piles of data.
Last winter, I started playing around with this idea of color swatches acting as a sort of landscape fingerprint. https://twitter.com/wallacetim/status/1227834263556354048
Last winter, I started playing around with this idea of color swatches acting as a sort of landscape fingerprint. https://twitter.com/wallacetim/status/1227834263556354048
The hacky bash script I wrote to process this image took about 8 minutes to run. https://twitter.com/wallacetim/status/1228556943540678656
When Krishna & I were convinced there might be trends across the political spectrum, he indexed 1-meter resolution imagery for the entire contiguous US and... how long did it take to run this on the @DescartesLabs platform, Krishna? 15 or 30 minutes? 
Krishna & I don't work together any more. 
I've happily returned to @nytimes & he's moved on to @wattTime.
But one thing I LOVED about working with Krishna is that when we believed in something we always kept going.
We didn't stop with a US gradient. We did states too!
I've happily returned to @nytimes & he's moved on to @wattTime. But one thing I LOVED about working with Krishna is that when we believed in something we always kept going.
We didn't stop with a US gradient. We did states too!
And of course we wanted to see what the colors actually represented, so we ran the same analysis using land cover data. This was a tad nerve-racking to be honest. If the trends in this analysis were flat, our hypothesis about the colors would have been thrown out.
There are too many fun details to get into here, but I'd be remiss if I didn't mention some fun quirks in the state gradients. Washington's gradients from Democratic to Republican almost mirrors their west to east land use, for instance.
Left on the cutting room floor, this fun color sort animation by @k3blu3.
Krishna and I finished drafting this piece in February, over half a year ago. So I've understandably spent a lot of time over recent months thinking about color and looking at things like this. https://medium.com/@tim.wallace_98924/they-say-colors-can-be-soothing-here-are-some-colors-c8b1b0e045fd
