If they’re not using Notes on Facebook, what *are* they doing on Facebook? I’m Facebook-friends with a few students (college age, not as young as these girls) and I almost never see status updates from them in my News Feed. That may be because they’ve blocked me somehow, but I see plenty of shared photos and event attendance notices. Other than photos and events, what do kids do on Facebook these days?

I attended one of those conferences in mid-Michigan circa the early 1990′s, and the experience was a long-term inspiration. I still remember the entomologist who brought her hissing cockroaches and talked about research on pest control, and the neurophysiologist who showed us MRIs from her research on the effects of PCP.

Of course, that was well before any of us met the Internet.

Regarding the data… I can’t help noticing that a lot of the blue states are prime sweet tea country. So it might make a difference what kind of soft drinks are consumed. A friend of mine’s dad stopped drinking sweet tea (without changing anything else in his diet) and lost twenty pounds.

Re size: you’re right, humans are bad at judging it. Still in some cases it can be every helpful– sized dots on maps, for example, often tell a much better story than heatmaps do. But like many powerful tools it must be used with care!