101 Cities Ranked on Just About Everything

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Data geeks rejoice. Or kiss your afternoon goodbye. Particularly interesting are the little Google Maps mashups that accompany each list. A few of my favorites, after spending way too much time poking around the lists last night:

• You can find native-born Czechs all over the place. Not so much with the Portuguese.

Eight percent of people in Palo Alto, California have a doctoral degree. No one in East L.A. does.

• If you're looking for women, try St. Joseph, Minnesota. If you're looking for fat women, try St. Louis, Missouri.

• The map showing the places where people are most likely to drink alcohol looks a lot like the map showing the healthiest counties. And the map showing the places were people were least likely to drink looks a lot like the map showing the least healthy counties.

• I suspect that the word legal is missing from this list. Also interesting to note how many cities from this list are located in the counties on the other one.

Flagstaff, Arizona is one of the 101 coldest cities in the country.

• If you like to drink, move to Austin.

New Orleans is getting safer. Flint, Allentown, and Oakland are getting scarier.

• Seattle isn't actually among the 101 rainiest cities, but it is one of the cloudiest.

• African immigrants seem to settle in and around Washington, D.C. (which also boasts the most delicious Ethiopian restaurants in the world). The odd exception is Clarkston, Georgia, which has the highest proportion of native-born East Africans in the country.

One in four of the 88,000 people in Westminster, California is native-born Vietnamese.

Feel free to add your own nuggets of gee-whiz demographic wisdom in the comments section.