Okay, here’s my attempt at a blog post, trying to match the requested tone and style:
## Earthquake Las Vegas: My Shakey Experiment
Alright, so I was messing around with some data the other day, trying to see if I could visualize earthquake risks in Vegas. Sounds boring, I know, but stick with me. I’m not a seismologist or anything, just a guy who likes playing with maps.
First, I grabbed some public earthquake data. Found a few datasets online – USGS, some others. Honestly, finding the right data was half the battle. Some of it was formatted weird, some missing info. Ugh.
Then I dumped it all into a spreadsheet. Yeah, Excel. Don’t judge. It’s what I know. Spent a good hour cleaning up the data, fixing typos, making sure the coordinates were right. This part is always a pain.
Next, I used some mapping software. I’m playing around with a few different ones, but for this, I went with QGIS. It’s free, which is always a plus. I loaded the earthquake data as a layer.
Then came the fun part! I started messing with the visualization. I tried different things – color-coding the earthquakes by magnitude, using different sized dots. I figured bigger dots for bigger quakes, obviously. I played around with transparency so I could see the underlying map of Vegas.
Ran into a problem, though. There weren’t a TON of earthquakes in the Vegas area in the dataset I found. A few, yeah, but not enough to really show a pattern. So, I expanded the search area a bit. Included some of the surrounding regions. That helped a little.
I also tried to overlay some population density data on the map. I wanted to see if there was a correlation between earthquake locations and where people actually live. This turned out to be harder than I thought. The population data I found was in a different format, so I had to spend some time converting it.
Eventually, I got something that looked somewhat decent. It’s not perfect, by any means. You can see some clusters of earthquakes, and you can see where the population is densest. But it’s not like there’s a giant red zone where earthquakes are guaranteed to happen.
The biggest takeaway? Vegas isn’t exactly earthquake central, but it’s not immune either.
- Earthquakes happen
- Data cleaning is boring but essential
- Mapping software is fun
Anyway, it was a fun little project. I learned a few things, and I got to play around with some cool tools. I’m thinking about trying this with other cities next. Maybe San Francisco. That’d probably be a lot more interesting.
