Californians Are Sporting Gods

I came across 2 maps today that seem to advise that Californians are the athletic giants of the United States. Business Insider created this map of the gilt medals won past times athletes from each province inwards all the modern Olympic games (since 1924).

The States With The Most Olympic Gold Medals map, at offset glance, appears to examine that "California is the nearly athletic province inwards the country". This is backed upwards past times this map of college football game players from Mode.

The Mode Where Football Players Call Home map visualize where college football game players come upwards from. The map for sure shows that a lot of college footballers come upwards from California.

However both these maps are expert examples of why yous should normalize for population when creating these sort of heatmaps. California is the nearly populous province inwards the USA. Therefore if nosotros practice whatsoever sort of heatmap, whether for crime, the nearly millionaires or the nearly people living inwards poverty, if nosotros don't normalize for population density as well as thence nosotros would await California to charge per unit of measurement fairly highly - only because it has the nearly people.

In fact later on a quick search on Google I establish this obesity heatmap of the USA. So nosotros directly detect ourselves inwards the foreign province of affairs where Californians are at the same fourth dimension both fat as well as sporting gods.

Actually the Where Football Players Come From map does allow us to stance a 'per capita' map. Here's the map for the discover of college footballers from each province later on the information is normalized for population.

Perhaps Californians aren't such sporting gods later on all.