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Except that this isn't, which is what makes it interesting.

I'm not sure it's interesting. It reflects something so complicated that it's hard to learn anything from. If you interpreted it as a heat map of racism, you'd conclude that the least racist region of the country is the mountain west outside of Idaho. Utah and Montana are almost spotless. It might be closer to interpret it as a heat map of "racist passion, overtly expressed" but even so I bet a lot of it has to do with the demographics of Twitter adoption. I guess sitting here guessing is kind of interesting, but I feel like I'm projecting my own assumptions onto it to try to figure out what it means rather than learning anything from it.

So this explains why LA disappeared since the counties there actually have some twitter active people living in it to help normalize it. When zoomed in, in the east there seems to be some halo effect at work were rural counties around bigger metros (Dallas, Atlanta, North Eastern Seaboard), with a lesser volume of tweets (low sample size) appear more active.

When zoomed out the 100th meridian population divide is as obvious as it could be. So At the global level normalization is pretty much not in effect. This might likely be caused by the not uniform distribution and size of counties in the US.

A better approach might be binning in equal area regions, with a threshold for low sample sizes.

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