2015.12.23 edition
How America injures itself. Every year, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission tracks emergency rooms visits to approximately 100 hospitals. The commission uses the resulting National Electronic Injury Surveillance System data to estimate national injury statistics, but it also publishes anonymized information for each consumer product–related visit, including the associated product code (e.g., 1701: “Artificial Christmas trees”) and a short narrative (“71 YO WM FRACTURED HIP WHEN GOT DIZZY AND FELL TAKING DOWN CHRISTMAS TREE AT HOME”).
Farm to data-table. The USDA’s 2012 Census of Agriculture — the most recent vintage available — tallies agricultural activity at the national, state, and county levels. You can download detailed data from the agency’s Quick Stats tool. In 2012, Oregon harvested more Christmas trees than any other state: 6.4 million of them, or 37% of the census total.
Wikipedia traffic trends. The Wikimedia Foundation publishes hourly pageview counts for each of its articles. It’s a tremendous amount of data — about 90 megabytes, compressed, per hour. Luckily, there’s also a tool for browsing individual pages’ daily traffic stats. Last Wednesday, the English-language page for “Christmas tree” received 7,822 visits, its highest mark so far this year.
Little’s big tree maps. The Forest Service has digitized many of the tree species distribution maps from Elbert Little’s “Atlas of United States Trees,” first published in the 1970s. Shapefiles and PDFs are available for for more than 600 species — including Ilex opaca (American holly) and Pseudotsuga menziesii (Douglas fir).
The emjoiverse. The Unicode Consortium publishes a big ol’ HTML table of every emoji, how they look in various contexts, and when they entered the canon. The “Christmas tree” emoji occupies code point U+1F384, and was introduced in 2010. (“Menorah with nine branches” arrived in 2015.) [h/t Ben Collins]
Updates and corrections:
- Correction, 2015.12.23: The emailed edition erroneously cited Oregon’s 2007 Christmas tree harvest numbers (instead of those from 2012).