I spent most of my working career in the Dairy State (Wisconsin). It’s an idiosyncratic kind of place. A place where people literally don styrofoam cheese hats on weekends and happily refer to themselves as “cheeseheads.”

I do love cheese (and yogurt and milk), but not enough to become a naturalized Wisconsinite. Nope. No way, no how.

I’m also a bit of a hypochondriac. So I often worry about the damage my cheese intake is doing to my heart. (No, this doesn’t mean I will stop eating cheese. I just worry; changing my cheese-eating behavior requires too much self-control.)

So I decided instead of taking the easy route and mapping dairy farms across the US, or drawing a map of US dairy production on the side of a cow, I would instead combine my love for all things dairy and my fear of heart disease into a bivariate map. After all, nothing screams “celebration” like a bivariate dairy and heart disease map!

Today’s map explores whether any (very likely, almost absolutely, spurious) correlation  exists between dairy production and heart disease geographies. There are myriad reasons why these two things shouldn’t be statistically correlated, but I thought it would be interesting to see which counties have high dairy production and high heart disease, and also to figure out my odds of getting heart disease based on the places I’ve lived.

More importantly, in my mind, it would be cool to see if ChatGPT could pull off a passable bivariate map draft from a single prompt. (Note: it did! Though I added a follow-up prompt to add the zoom to state feature.)

You can look at US counties as a whole or zoom into your state. Counties are ranked for heart disease by both US and state placement.

A very odd, absolutely ridiculous map. But then again, the day it celebrates is as well. 🙂

View Map Here

Web Map GPT Prompt

Please take your time and create a bivariate, interactive webmap that I can host on my apache web server that does the following:
– shows all US counties (or similar in Alaska) in an equal area Albers or Lambert projection with Alaska and Hawaii in the lower-left part of the browser window

GIS Dataset Doctor GPT Prompt (to create the underlying dataset)

# Intention
Create a dataset of US counties that contains fairly reliable data regarding the following:
– diagnosed heart disease rates OR heart disease death rates
– cheese production OR total dairy production
– total possible agricultural area
– cheese (or dairy) production per agricultural area unit