Saturday, August 29, 2009


The question of evil and where it lurks has been largely ignored by the scientific community, which is why a recently released study titled “The Spatial Distribution of the Seven Deadly Sins Within Nevada” is groundbreaking: Never before has a state’s fall from grace been so precisely graphed and plotted.

Geographers from Kansas State University have used certain statistical measurements to quantify Nevada’s sins and come up with a county-by-county map purporting to show various degrees of lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy and pride in the Silver State. By culling statistics from nationwide databanks of things like sexually transmitted disease infection rates (lust) or killings per capita (wrath), the researchers came up with a sin index. This is a precision party trick — rigorous mapping of ridiculous data.

Their findings were presented Tuesday at the Association of American Geographers’ annual meeting at the Riviera, where Kansas State geography research associate Thomas Vought fielded questions while standing next to a poster of his research. Seven maps of Nevada, in seven different colors, for seven different sins.

The darker a county, the more evil it is.

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