How cats vote
Joao Barbosa posted these two maps of Paris on Bluesky: votes in the mayoral election, and cat ownership. If you’re one of the dozens of people on the internet who aren’t American, the political colour scheme is the way you expect.
You can probably come up with explanations for the left-wing lean of the cats if you’re a cat person. And even more so if you’re a dog person.
Another useful map is this one from a report on the risk of gentrification in Paris caused by the 2024 Olympics. It’s a map of income: light colours are high income, dark colours are low income.
There seems to be a general rule that all choropleth maps of a given place reduce to one of a very small number of basic patterns. There’s an XKCD comic about this for the USA, and Kieran Healy has also written about the two basic US maps
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »