I’ve had a lifelong fascination with maps, and working with R definitely enables my map habit. Perhaps there’s something about being an immigrant that made me particularly introspective, since from a very early age I was aware that I was “from” one place on the map and now lived at this “other place.”
Some of my earliest family memories are of my father calling out a random city such as Reykjavik and my sister and I scrambling in response to be the first to find it on one of the many world atlases distributed throughout our house. They’re very fond memories, since playing Find the Wacky-Sounding City is a fantastic way to spend time with your kids.
One of my other favorite things to do is express my love of humor and my love of maps through ggplot. I love building facetious maps to amuse my Twitter followers, and recently discovered a lovely little data set containing states where it is illegal to have fireworks delivered.
So I wrote a little R function for the Fourth of July that put together a joke map and delivers a zinger:
Not exactly groundbreaking R code, I know, but quite handy. I was able to simply call the function with dataset I had found at fireworks.us and have a little chuckle.
Enjoy the code, and have fun generating imaginary internet points! As I get older, I’ve also been working on my Dad joke superpowers, so I’ll leave you with my latest masterpiece:
I love maps too! Do you do all your mapping in R? I’ve used R to mine data, but then I usually map projects in qGIS.
I don’t usually do mapping very professionally, it really is something I do for fun or as part of a knitR workflow. However, now that I’ve started to look at qGIS, I can see that this addiction could get a lot deeper 🙂
Wyoming should be red. Because of the Republican party. That would be funnier.
lol! i know. i didn’t want to be political and instead went for a more absurd joke. You are, of course, more than welcome to repost a better version of this joke wherever you wish 🙂