A study analyzing Twitter data paints the country by preference for two of its favorite pastimes: beer or church. The study, which was done by geography nerds at Floating Sheep, looks at all geo-tagged tweets from a one week period and extracts tweets containing the words “church” and/or “beer”.
At first glance the map looks as one might expect. The southeast United States glows red with the wholesome, while everyone living in New England, the Rust Belt and just about everyone west of Saint Louis chooses to attend to the the Church of the Almighty Brew. San Franciscans are most verbose in their beery prayers, followed closely by Boston. Which makes sense, because you’d have to be drunk to make it through a Boston winter or listen to a San Franciscan drone endlessly on about how progressive they are.
Upon closer inspection, however, there are a few anomalies. The entirety of the Washington Metro Area tweets piously, with the tiny exception of the District itself— which is populated by a hoard of drunken louts. Which is weird, because I always thought of the D.C. suburbs as soulless places filled with the legions of the damned. Speaking of which, almost all of Maryland goes in the church column, again with the exception of Baltimore.
Still, the whole D.C. area can take solace in not being Dallas, which won the dubious distinction as the “my tweets are holier than thous” twitter hub of the country with a whopping 178 church related tweets. One more reason to never move to Dallas.
