The 2020 Iditarod Trail Sled Dog race will be remembered as the year the coronavirus upended the final days of the race and saw checkpoints lock down as the race finished in Nome. But it will also go down as of the most unforgiving for mushers: of the 57 mushers who began the race in Willow, 22 scratched and went home early.
2020’s scratch rate of 38.5% ranks fourth highest in 48 years of racing.
The 2019 fire season has been destructive and long-lasting. More than 2.5 million acres have been burned across 707 fires as of September 9, 2019, according to the Alaska Interagency Coordination Center .
Below are videos showing the mapped fire perimeters growth over the course of the summer (until the end of August).
Statewide Fires
Swan Lake Fire
The Swan Lake fire has burned since the start of summer and sent a lot of smoke across southcentral Alaska.
Image: from the 1989 annual report.
From 1983 to 2015, every woman, man, kid, and baby received an Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend check with an amount calculated by a 1982 law. It was rarely questioned publicly until the last five years because of ample petroleum revenues and several years of cushion thanks to the billions in the Constitutional Budget Reserve (now just fumes.)
A former APFC website via waybackmachine.
Thanks in part to a booming stock market that prescribes a big dividend (around $3,000 per citizen), a reckoning for the 1982 calculation has begun.
When March arrives in Alaska, there are two things on everyone’s mind:
The sun is back (and out until 10 p.m.). The Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race is on. To celebrate this year, I built a project that fuses a map of high resolution satellite imagery with an enormous amount of checkpoint data and a few 3D effects. Ultimately a proof-of-concept that got far out of hand.
I have covered the race for Alaska public radio a couple times by travelling from checkpoint to checkpoint in a a small two-person airplane, a 50-year-old Piper Supercub.
The government spends billions of dollars per year on a dizzying array of gear and specialized services: office furniture, cloud computing, breakfast cereal, and advanced weapons systems are among destinations of taxpayer funds. I created a project to explore how a half-trillion dollars of federal funds go to Washington D.C. contractors and competitors in 50 states.
This analysis, based on data published on Enigma Public, explores the geography of this contract spending among beltway firms and the thousands of regional and small-town competitors.
