Shearing time: Let's go hyper-local Arizona

The original post of this name and URL was written in 2010. My 2026 update begins at the "Click here for more" jump.

It's that time of year again. In September, Navajo sheep herders start coming down from the mountains north of Valley of the Sun. I hope they're psychologically well-prepared for news of the big city:

• a broken dam due to burst bladders at Tempe Town Lake ("bladders"?)
• $1,000,000 price on the head of Maricopa County's Sheriff Joe by the usual Mexican cartels/drug lords
• the ever popular (no, not really, only to me and Sheriff Joe Arpaio!) Arizona Senate Bill 1070, also known as Arizona Immigration Reform.

To commemorate shearing season, this post provides an extravaganza of gentle sheepy imagery, from varied sources. Well, I admit, from two sources: a Zazzle merchant and Amazon.com. The images were so nice, I thought you might enjoy looking at them too.

Hmm... I need to find a better source for illustrations than re-purposed advertisement images, especially since I don't participate in any online ad program. I'm definitely not a Zazzle or Amazon-affiliate website.

A sweet sheep

Consider this a follow-up to my post referencing findings by the Floating Sheep blog.

I love the floating sheep project

Fun with Correlations and Obesity

Cartographer-geographer-demographer Matthew Zook PhD explores correlations (at the U.S. state level) between the number of internet references to beer, Christianity and obesity and much more, all neatly pulled together in the floatingsheep Working Papers Collection. 

He recently posted a follow-up on the obesity theme, running the same data for correlation between "obesity" and "feminist" and other meaning-laden words.

via floatingsheep.org

Although I realize that correlation does not imply causation, I always enjoy this kind of thing. Have a look at the full article, More Fun with Correlations.  

While you're there, peruse the sweetly sheepy Floating Sheep Manifesto. "What would a floating sheep map be about?"  Neo-geography?  The geography of user-generated online content?  Yes, something like that.

Why FloatingSheep?

The answer is part of a not-so-long, windy path. Footnote 4 of the Manifesto leads to this explanation page, with various rationales. My favorite is the most sheepish:

We have noticed that the standard Google Map placemarks look a bit like floating sheep (albeit red ones without heads, legs, tails or much in the way of fleece) hovering over the countryside. We simply are extending this observation to its natural conclusion. 

They really do love sheep as much as I do!

I shouldn't reproduce such a long excerpt, but the URL persistence isn't one of the Internet's strengths, I have found. Via IronSheep 2012: The New York City Sheep Evacuation Map:

When we heard there would be extra points for including sheep in our maps, we knew we had to do it. But how? Where were the sheep in our data? After spending far too much time brainstorming possibilities for a map of the whole US, we decide to focus on New York City because there were so many more datasets available.

In our Exploratory Data Analysis phase we searched the Flickr and Twitter data looking for mentions of "sheep". We didn't find any interesting patterns in the data, other than clusters of points around the Sheep Meadow in Central Park, and Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn. We knew that somewhere between these two locations we would find our inspiration.

Thinking about Sheep Meadow in Central Park, we recalled a story in the news recently about legislators from Alaska and Wyoming proposed reintroducing wolves into Central Park. Since wolves are the natural enemy of sheep, perhaps our fluffy, hooved friends (if there actually are any in Sheep Meadow) would need to be relocated if this were to happen. Perhaps Sheepshead Bay could be their new home?

We were also incredibly tempted (who wouldn't be?) by some of the more peculiar datasets available, namely the zombies and alien sightings. We posited, for some reason, these three groups are all threats to our precious sheep. Thus, we had our assignment: determine the best route to evacuate sheep from Sheep Meadow to Sheepshead Bay, avoiding any concentrations of aliens and zombies.

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"This is an essay about maps. But it is not just about maps." https://t.co/4jhN9sTCqY pic.twitter.com/XYxvO8iigt

— Floatingsheep.org (@floating_sheep) March 1, 2016