More geopandas thoughts

|

One of the reasons I got interested in PANDAS was not data wrangling but quick and simple geodata manipulation. That said, PANDAS is an amazing tool for wrangling.

The first question I had – how to place addresses into districts – geocode was pretty easy to do with Geopandas. Like most of PANDAS. I posted the answer to that a few weeks back.

But the next question in my mind is figuring out two additional problems:

1) Calculate the percentage of old districts in new districts

Basically, this would involve a join and some kind of math to calculate percentage of area. I’ve done something similar in QGIS in the past but I want to do this programmatically and as fast and simply as possible.

For example, how much of the various 2012 Senate Districts are in the 2022 Senate districts?

2) Take block or block group data and aggregate or average it together to calculate the amount an overlaid district contains

I think I’ve done something similar in QGIS but figuring out the specifics of the join and dissolve is what I need to figure out. Again, probably not a difficult problem especially in PANDAS.

For example, what is the Median Household income of an Election District?

August

|

The final month of summer has arrived. It’s the warmest and most mature month, and meadows run their wildest. The nights are not as long as previous months, and while it’s often hot and humid in the day, the nights start to have little hints of a fall chill that’s certain to come next month.

August is the time of Altamont fair and many people’s vacations. It will be time of sitting out and soaking up the sun, of long days out in the canoe, and climbing mountains in the early morning. They’ll be nights sitting around the campfire drinking beer and whisky, watching flames as the burn towards the sky.

Swimming Hole

August can be a lazy month. The last of the summertime season, the last time we are laid back before our youth go to school, and before things get more serious at work as people’s vacations end. The heat makes some outdoor activities challenging, so we choose to lay back.

There will be plenty of warm days in September, but it won’t be as much summer as the month of August will be. It will be different. September will see many of the final harvests of the year, our society’s agricultural bounty, and the signs of fall. Much hope and sadness we enter that month.