How Americans Carpe Their Diems

This is not reallya map. Or maybe you could say it's a kind of time-map. But whatever, I'm posting it anyways:



From the NY Times, it shows how Americans spend their days. It's based on the American Time Use Survey, which asked thousands of people to record how they spent every minute of the day. It, if interacted with, breaks down into demographic sub-categories for potentially many minutes of data-representational fun. The Times observes some things:

• The average American spends 2/3 of their day sleeping, eating, working, and watching TV
• Unemployed people spend more than two hours a day doing laundry and yard work
• People who aren't in the labor force watch four hours of TV a day
• Hispanics are as likely as whites to be eating at noon, but whites are much more likely than Hispanics to be eating at 6:30

I also notice that at 8:50pm, 39% of Americans are watching TV; at no time are more than 33% working. And at no time are more than 7% of people socializing. That seems low!

H/t to CC.

Sun Clock

Happy solstice, everybody! Before you head out to jump your bonfires and search for your magic fern blossoms, you may want to check to see whether it is night or day. To that end, this map can help:



There are a bunch of versions of this out there, but this one's especially attractive. This image, from timeanddate.com, shows the division of night and day on the Earth's surface at 5:45am UTC, June 20, 2009 - this morning, the precise moment of the summer solstice.

What would be cool is if I could embed a sun clock in this post so that it would always be current. It seems like the sort of thing that ought to be possible, but unfortunately I am dumb, so I can't figure out how to do it. And, unlike the proverbial broken clock, this one will only be accurate once a year; still, you can click on it to see the present night/day situation.

Come to think of it, the next summer solstice will happen at a different time of day, so this clock won't ever be entirely accurate again. Shoot.