2020.09.30 edition
State bills. For years, Open States has allowed you to “track bills, review upcoming legislation, and see how your local representatives are voting in your state.” The volunteer-driven project provides bulk downloads of nearly all its data, plus an API. More recently, it has started tracking coronavirus-related legislation, with data on more than 3,300 bills across the country. [h/t Amy Cesal]
Centuries of federal debt. The US Treasury’s “Debt to the Penny” dataset reports the total amount of outstanding public debt issued by the federal government — updated daily and going back to April 1, 1993. As of Monday, that number was $26,811,409,726,497.33. Another of the Treasury’s datasets provides annual debt figures going back to 1789. [h/t Sam Hunley]
Wind. The Global Wind Atlas aims “to help policymakers, planners, and investors identify high-wind areas for wind power generation virtually anywhere in the world.” The internationally-funded project provides a range of global and country-specific datasets, including wind speeds at various heights, as well as a description of its methodology and an FAQ. [h/t Anton Rühling]
Cross-border friendliness. The Social Connectedness Index, a collaboration between Facebook and academic researchers, quantifies “the intensity of connectedness between locations” by measuring the frequency of Facebook-friendships linking their residents. The index represents this measurement on a scale from 1 to 1,000,000,000; the publicly available datasets provide it for every pair of countries, every pair of US counties, every county-country pair, and between subnational regions around the world. Related: An illustrative Twitter thread demonstrating the data. [h/t Johannes Stroebel]
Prime numbers. Mathematician Chris K. Caldwell maintains a searchable, downloadable database of the largest prime numbers known to humankind — plus who discovered them, when, and how. Related: Smaller primes.