Professor Bainbridge...on law, politics, religion, culture & food

Cool Maps

Strange Maps has three very cool new posts:

A map of the USA by county showing whether coke, soda, or pop is the most commonly used term for soda pop.

The Olympic Medals Map for 2004.

Perhaps the most interesting of all, however, is the genetic map of Europe:

Genetically speaking, Finns and Italians are the most atypical Europeans. There is a large degree of overlap between other European ethnicities, but not up to the point where they would be indistinguishable from each other. Which means that forensic scientists now can use DNA to predict the region of origin of otherwise unknown persons (provided they are of European heritage). ... The discovery that autosomal (i.e. non-gender-related) aspects of DNA may be used to predict regional European provenance of unkown individuals was made by prof. dr. Manfred Kayser’s team of forensic molecular biologists. In a press release, the Erasmus UMC stated that this might potentially be helpful in resolving so-called ‘cold cases’.

The genetic map of Europe was compiled by comparing DNA samples from 23 populations in Europe (pictured on the right-hand side map).  Those populations were then placed on the ‘genetic’ map according to their similarity, with the vertical axis denoting differences from south to north, and the horizontal one from west to east. The larger the area assigned to a population, the larger the genetic variation within that population.

Interestingly, “the Irish population almost doesn’t show any characteristics that would distinguish it from the British one.” Tell that to Ian Paisley and Gerry Adams.