Where the 3 million left out of health insurance live

Last week, the New York Times analyzed data from Enroll America and the data group Civis Analytics to determine how to find the still uninsured to help get them signed up for health insurance in the next enrollment period for Obamacare, which starts November 15. What this analysis found, though, was the remarkable difference in the uninsured rate in states that expanded Medicaid versus those that didn't, and the Times is following up on that story.

According to their analysis of the data, about three million people — mostly concentrated in the South — remain without insurance coverage because of the refusal by Republican lawmakers to accept the expansion. Based on the Enroll America/Civis Analytics data, the uninsured rate would drop by two percentage points nationally if the 24 hold-out states took the expansion. The rates in those states, though, would drop dramatically.

More from Daily Kos.

How many total ancestors do you have?

From the Daily Kos:

Genealogists identify ancestors by following paper trails preserved in archives, €”traditional and digital. Although the goals of genealogists vary, a large pedigree chart is one measure of success. Yet even the most fruitful family trees are unlikely to yield more than a few thousand ancestors.... Yet, as the mathematically-inclined will be quick to point out, one can never find the names of more than a tiny fraction.

So, is an answer possible? I think the beginning of an answer is possible, within certain limits. This is a question for what might be called theoretical genealogy. Like any question of this magnitude, no matter what the discipline, it requires some agreement on definitions. An ancestor is someone who could theoretically been the source of some of your DNA. I say "theoretically," because most of your ancestors could not actually have passed DNA on to you. The probability is too low, since your number of ancestors greatly exceeds your number of genes. So we are counting parents, plus grandparents, plus great-grandparents, etc., until we reach an arbitrary beginning. 10,000 BCE should do nicely, as it puts us at the very beginning of the Anthropocene, the planet's first geologic era caused by us.

The 50 Equal United States of America

Here's a cool map from artist and urban planner Neil Freeman, who engaged in a thought experiment to rectify a serious problem with the electoral college: namely, that California has 66 times the population of Wyoming but only 18 times the electoral votes. Of course, this size disparity is an even bigger problem in the Senate, though Freeman's radical plan would remedy both—by redrawing the 50 states to make them all equipopulous.

You'll definitely want to click through to Freeman's site to see his impressive full-size map (and there's an even more detailed version that you can buy in poster form). Freeman also explains how he came up with these states.

More from the Daily Kos.

2011 Congressional District County Components

From Daily Kos

CDs-by-County: I think you're all going to love this. Thanks to yet more hard work by jeffmd, we now have a new chart for you: congressional districts by county. Click the link and you'll find a tab for each state laying out which counties are in which congressional district. But there's a lot more. Jeff has also figured out how many people in each county (or part thereof) are in a given district (that's column C), what percentage of each CD is made up by each county or county-part (column D), and finally, what percentage of each county is in a given CD (column E). Since counties are an easily understood and frequently used layer of political organization (for example, party endorsements are often made at the county level), this kind of information is very useful, since it lets you see how much sway a particular county has in a particular congressional district.

(I've changed the example from Arizona to New York)
For instance, if you open the New York tab, you'll see that 198,289 residents of Broome County live in NY-22, and those folks in Broome make up almost 28% of the congressional district's total population. But if you look at column E, you'll see that only 98.85% of Broome is place inside the 22nd—that means it's split among more than one district. Scrolling down (or searching on the word "Broome"), you'll see that there's also a teeny-tiny fraction of the county in NY-19 (just 2,311 people).