In January I described a project idea for finding out which state is the most normal. Tonight I will pick up where I left off. Data Collection I am going to start by gathering data for each of the 50 states in a CSV – I also posted it as a google doc if you want to follow along. Eventually I suspect I will have to translate this into JSON before loading it into the visualization – but this is an easy way to get started. The first place I am going to try to get data is the US Census. Thankfully they have an API that I can use to get some population & demographic facts: http://www.census.gov/developers/ Unfortunately, the existance of an API is the only thing to get excited about. I got nowhere tonight. The US Census API is horrible to work with. I could be blind, but it took me an

The idea started as I was driving back from a caving trip in southern Utah. My friend Mark & I drove through Colorad City, Arizona, known for its community of polygamists. “Wow” we thought “this is not a normal town.” Like I mentioned, we had just spend a few days in Utah, a state known for its disproportionate percentage of followers of the Mormon faith. And as we drove back we crossed through Nevada, a state that you are always aware when you enter on account of the immediate presence of large casinos on the border. Not exactly normal. As we pondered what it was that we meant by ‘normal’ we realized that our beloved home of California certainly wouldn’t fit the mold. “So,” we asked ourselves “which state is the normal one?” If the states were family members in a bizarre sitcom – which one would be the main