(Roughly) Daily

From our old friend (see, e.g., here and here) Flowing Data‘s Nathan Yau…

I read that there are more golf courses than there are McDonald’s locations in the United States, which seemed surprising. There are about 16,000 golf courses and 13,000 McDonald’s locations. How could this be? Obviously, there are a lot of McDonald’s locations, but where are all these golf courses? Some maps made it clear.

[The yellow circles in the map above show] the distribution of McDonald’s locations across the conterminous United States. As you might expect, they concentrate around cities.

An area in East Los Angeles has 110 locations within a 10-mile radius, which makes it the most dense area. This makes sense because McDonald’s was founded in southern California. The second most is an area just outside Chicago with 88 locations. This also makes sense, because McDonald’s headquarters are in Chicago.

At first glance, [the distribution of] golf courses [the green circles in the map above] looks similar to the McDonald’s one. There is a higher concentration around cities, but golf courses are more widespread, especially in the Midwest.

This makes more sense now. You can have a golf course in an area where there aren’t that many people, because people will travel to play golf. Few people are going to travel specifically for McDonald’s.

…

The high number of golf courses along the Florida coast and in the northeast jump out to me, someone who has never played a round of golf. I also noticed it’s fairly common for smaller golf courses to sit next to each other, whereas you’re not going to see neighboring McDonald’s restaurants, which seems to contribute to the higher totals for the former…

Amazing but true: “McDonald’s Locations vs. Golf Courses,” from @flowingdata.

* Ray Kroc (founder of McDonalds-as-we-know-it)

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As we get down with data, we might recall that it was on this date in 1945 that Byron Nelson teed off in the first round of the 1945 Miami International Four Ball Tournament. For five months– from that swing through August 4– he was untouchable: Nelson won that tournament and his next 10, a record 11 events in a row, and shot 50 consecutive rounds under par.