News You Can Bruise for 2003 December 22 (entry 1)

(2) Mon Dec 22 2003 16:37 Why Programmers Hate Government: Exhibit 3: It's a Christmas miracle! In this episode, programmers and government put aside their differences and enjoy a cool comma-delimited file containing ZIP code information. What are those mysterious last two numbers after the latitude and longitude?

Comments:

Posted by zztzed at Tue Dec 23 2003 13:11

Apparently, they're population and "allocation factor".

Posted by Seth Schoen at Wed Dec 31 2003 05:07

Hmmm, I wonder why the allocation factors only sum to 51.0.

Oh, I get it. The allocation factors within each state sum to 1.0 and there are 51 states.