2018.01.10 edition
Offshore drilling. The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management and the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement — two of the agencies that replaced the troubled U.S. Minerals Management Service in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon spill — publish a few dozen bulk datasets related to their oversight of offshore drilling operations. Among them: lease owners, production metrics, company details, pipeline permits and locations, incident investigations, and platform structures. Related: “American Idle: Decommissioning costs sink offshore drillers into latest crisis,” a 2017 Debtwire investigation that used the platform data. [h/t Alex Plough]
Local health metrics. The CDC’s 500 Cities Project provides “city and census tract-level data, obtained using small area estimation methods, for 27 chronic disease measures for the 500 largest American cities.” The metrics range from cancer prevalence to binge drinking to dental health to undersleeping. The latest data release was published in December and covers more than 28,000 Census tracts. [h/t Kate Rabinowitz]
130+ years of prosecutor politicians. With the help of research assistants, legal historian Jed Shugerman has compiled a “tentative database” of prosecutor politicians — presidents, Supreme Court justices, circuit court justices, governors, state attorneys general, and senators who served as prosecutors earlier in their careers. Shugerman’s spreadsheet goes back to 1880 and lists the dates served in office, political party, other offices held, and “relevant prosecutorial background” for each politician. [h/t Geoff Hing]
Snow depth. The National Water and Climate Center maintains a series of interactive snow maps. Their snow depth map is based on data from nearly one thousand monitoring stations around the country — mostly in western states, but also a handful in the Southwest, Northeast, and Midwest. To download data from a map, click on “Selected Stations” in the top-left corner, and then click “Export Data as CSV.” [h/t Charlie Loyd’s collection of “near-realtime Earth observation resources” + Noah Veltman]
San Diego burritos. Scott Cole is a neuroscience PhD student at UC San Diego who, in his spare time, is leading a project to rate the region’s burritos on a 10-dimensional scale.