Bloomington Indiana. I don't think so.
Who knew that Orlando, FL had a cluster of businesses selling analytical (laboratory) instruments?
It's kind of gone now, at least in Manhattan, but when I was a kid there was enough small manufacturing and specialized retail left here that there were bizarre little neighborhood business clusters. I mean, obvious things like the flower district on 6th in the twenties are still there, but there used to be an inexplicable aggregation of novelty and joke goods stores -- plastic dog vomit, X-Ray glasses, hand shockers -- near the Flatiron Building. I'm not sure if all the lamp and lighting stores are still where they used to be (and I actually can't remember for sure -- 2d Ave between 3d and maybe 7th St? I'm within five blocks but I can't really remember.)
Wasn't the Novelty District shut down in the wake of the Gremlin attack on Clamp Tower?
Buttons and sewing notions generally, wholesale, near KoreaTown in the west thirties. That's got to be a holdover from when the Garment District on 7th in the thirties was more active -- I'm not sure at all how much of that is left.
Sweet, I found the eastern Massachusetts candy cluster. It's not what it once was; there used to be dozens of candy factories in Cambridge alone.
That Necco wafer factory reeked. Chemical banana, as far as the nose could smell.
I thought junior mints were still made in Cambridge, but I might be wrong.
I recall going through Dorchester Lower Mills when I was a kid and the smell of chocolate from the Baker Chocolate factory (now apartments) was overwhelming.
Apparently, Urbana is very similar to Champaign. Who'd have thunk it? But not as similar as Champaign is to Iowa City.
Is the map not showing up for anyone in the Cluster Mapping site?
Totally unrelated, but I'm looking for a thread about open relationships and the like that was on not long ago. Anyone remember what it was called?
This thing says "Chula Vista, Oceanside, and Boston [! fuck you]" which are not places that otherwise have much in common with each other, much less where I live. Chula Vista might be reasonable.
Actually, I thought Chula Vista was poorer than it is. That's not a good comparison either.
12: You might have better luck if you append "...laydeez" onto the end of your request.
Is this too soon for a thread derail? Throwing caution to the wind as who knows when next I'll be at a non-work computer and able to comment.
Offered for your collective amusement, spotted backstage at a local community college theatre a few weeks ago* was a flyer announcing:
"GUYS!!!
FREE STD TESTING
to those who qualify"
Accompanied by a generic drawing of some dude sitting in a chair/desk combo totally concentrating on his book. How embarrassing for Mr. Stock Drawing!
Re: the criteria, of course, immediately begin speculating about the "fun-o-meter" used to identify "those who qualify". Swiftly followed by imagining the outraged distress of those who are deemed not to qualify: "But I'm totally sleeping around!!! How can you say I don't qualify???!!!"
*On pointing the flyer out to the fellow parents who have been hanging out like 12 feet from it for HOURS turns out none of them had noticed it. ???
Also, not quite so amusing but it was hilarious in action - plate-style tutus and pointe shoes are fundamentally incompatible with walking down flights of stairs. Kind of destroys the whole gracefulness illusion when a fleet of teenagers are duckwalking very oh so very carefully downstairs, radically cantilevered over in a vain attempt to figure out where the hell the next riser is.
1: What that's actually saying is that you don't have any close matches. 91 is not a particularly high match, and Bloomington has two closer matches than Missoula (Moscow, Manhattan) and many at 91 (Amherst, Ithaca, Logan, Stillwater, and two Oxfords).
Manhattan came up for me as a series of Boswash locations and Atlanta. (My geography's horrible. What actually came up was DeKalb County, which left me completely blank, until I guessed that it must mean Atlanta.)
I wonder what the "most unique" place in America is by this definition. Pittsburgh's closest match is 88 (Nashville) which is the first one I've found under 90.
Austin also gets 88 (Durham). But Baltimore comes in at 86 (Miami).
Ah, the first is similar to something I've played around with building someday in my mind. My idea (working title Geoclone from snowclone since it can help you find "the X of Y" geographically-speaking) is more of an all-purpose mapping tool in which the user can choose which data elements (from a large set of weather, socioeconomic, whatever) to include in a similarity calculation and then map. If you choose just one element and map its absolute value rather than relative to another location it reduces to a straight contour (or other type of display) map. Would have a number of canned calculations (user adjustable weights) to find the X of Y climatologically, politically etc.
So the town I grew up in in NJ is really similar to a whole bunch of towns in Suffolk Co., LI. Who could have guessed?
23: This thing doesn't let you say whether you're a Jets or Giants fan?!
13: Huh. In general, California cities near the coast seem to return lots of matches, some of which seem more plausible than others. I guess this is due to the suburbs being so spread-out. Also, what people perceive as similarity can be quite different from demographic similarity. People notice specific features of a city, like neighborhoods and businesses, that often are not big enough to show up in these demographic statistics, unless it's something huge like a state university.
Some of these are fun: the top match for Pasadena is Berkeley (93% similarity), and apparently nothing is like Davis (nothing scores above 88% similarity).
I'm still looking for the "mayor smoked crack (drunken stupor)" option.
26: does it report Canadian cities?
Huh, that was more explicit-making than I thought it was. Guess I should pay more attention to breaking news.
Breaking news is great, sometimes.
I was surprised at how much missile and defense work was clustered in California.
Also interesting that the category of defense and aerospace are always linked on the map. Anyway, looks like a lot of the defense budget gets funneled into California.
Off the specific topic but on the topic of local news, I did not expect to see our friendly neighborhood gay bar pictured and featured on the HuffPo, but apparently it's a hotbed of activity when it comes to getting people educated about their new state healthcare options. Huh.
Did everyone else know that the defense industry was clustered in coastal California? Am I that ignorant?
33: There's a mean neighborhood gay bar that you can walk into and hear nothing but scare stories about how Obamacare will kill everybody and sign petitions demanding the government be shut down.
I actually don't know how to interpret a lot of the data on the cluster mapping site, but it's a nice way to find out about smaller cities in the US. For instance, Boise has an IT sector! And if you choose your statistics misleadingly*, Boise beats Silicon Valley in 121-112 in "patents per 10,000 employees."
*By averaging over the whole economy, not just IT. The numbers for just the IT sector are 625-289. Lying with statistics is an important skill, right?
According to the cluster maps, Maine and a bit of Southern Texas completely monopolize the footwear industry.
Who knew?
34: During WWII, a lot of defense plants were built in southern California. Douglas and Convair used to be big there, but have become less important over time.
Aerospace/defense was the major industry in Southern California through the end of the cold war, and the loss of that industry was the reason why the early 90s recession hit California especially hard. It was kind of sad, but not surprising, to see only about 45k employees left in the LA MSA.
That Necco wafer factory reeked.
The neighborhood we moved into this year fills daily with the scent of baking cookies. I traced it to the Peking Noodle Factory, which admitted over the phone that they make fortune cookies.
For having to put up with the scent, you should be allowed to write the message for some of the cookies.
Those fortunes would be so much better if some were even ambiguous rather than cloying--
"Be careful tomorrow"
"False hearts and empty minds bring downfall"
"Abolish the old"
One of Douglas Hofstadter's books spends a while discussing the "what is the X of Y?" problem as an case study for one or another Hofstadter-y point. Eugene is the Urbana of Oregon, for example. The other one that sticks in my mind is the complex claim that East St. Louis, Illinois is the Gary, Indiana of Missouri.
Not the East Chicago, Illinois of Missouri?
From my childhood, I came up with the sequence:
Akron is the Cleveland of Cleveland
Canton is the Akron of Akron
and Massillon is the Canton of Canton.
47: That is surprisingly true. 48, Gary has a similar interstate/highway system to East St Louis. East St Louis smells better than either.
The case for Gary = East St. Louis is that they're both the poor neighbor city across the state line from the big city.
Wilkes-Barre is the Canton of Scranton.
Akron is the Scranton of Canton.
There is no Cleveland of Scranton, but Allentown and Bethlehem combine to make up the Cleveland of Wilkes-Barre.
Wouldn't New York City be the Cleveland of Scranton?
I think New York City being the Cleveland of anything is a category error.
54: Orange is the Easton of Beaumont/Port Arthur
Lebanon is the Reading to Lancaster's Philadelphia.
Cleveland has intra-urban rail transit, a team everybody I know hates, and is on the water. I sometimes can't even tell it apart from NYC.
Ylvis is the Judas Priest of Norwegian youtube video comedy.
55's right that NYC's the Cleveland of Scranton. Allentown/Bethlehem/Easton is the Milwaukee of Philly.
59: You've watched The Avengers too many times.
That Necco wafer factory reeked.
I used to go running through a grim industrial park in Piscataway, NJ, and part of it smelled like a field of flowers. The part near a Chanel plant.
I don't even see movies, unless I get dragged to them.
New York City is the Billings of Albany?
Albany has no Missoula.
Burlington may be the Missoula of Montpelier.
49 is extra great because our next-door neighbor is from Massillon, though all obnoxious comparisons are to the pre-divorce snooty neighborhood across the river and far from downtown.
Marin City is the East Palo Alto of Sausalito.
I don't even see movies, unless I get dragged to them.
You don't want to know how he experiences the ones he's dragged out of
Somewhat related to the cluster map, Mother Jones offer this map "Which Companies Dominate Your State's Politics?"--it's actually the top category* for 2012 election cycle campaign contributions. Health, Real Estate and Energy account for a large majority.
*I'm not quite sure what to make of: *In California and Maryland, we have included the industry with the second-highest total of contributions, because the designation of the top industries in those states requires additional reporting.
70: On this page, for California, above finance is "general business", and above that is labor (though that's not excluding donations to ballot initiatives as MoJo did).