Prepare to Waste Some Time
Via Hit and Run, this is an incredible site for stat-geeks to fool around. Top 101 city lists.
#1 Average Sunshine! I have also lived in the 4th least sunny city. Sunnier is better. Seattle is not among the rainiest in terms of total inches, because it never rains very hard. If you could measure rainy as "number of hours per month that rain is falling", Seattle would be right up there. In places like Houston, you get a lot more volume of rain, but you get a whole years worth in just a couple of hours.
Other interesting ones:
- Size of government: Largest local government salary and wages per resident. Every man, woman, and child in Cambridge MA spends $3,532 a year towards the salary of a City of Cambridge government employee.
- Property taxes per resident (look at the map, all but 8 of 101 in the northeast)
- Living your whole life in the same spot
- The average woman in St. Louis weighs over 165 pounds?
- Counties with a net exodus are still dominated by the upper midwest, but look at people moving out of coastal California!
- I have often argued that the numbers of people without health insurance are skewed by new and illegal immigrants. Check out this map of places with the most uninsured - they all seem to border Mexico
- Chicago was named the windy city because of its politics, not because of actual wind
I just wish they had a better explanation of the metric and the data source for each