This is a fun new website featuring 80+ years of artifacts & memorabilia related to Smokey Bear, the famous spokesbear for the US Forest Service.
In 1944, the USDA Forest Service, National Association of State Foresters, and Ad Council launched the first poster featuring Smokey Bear, asking Americans to recognize their personal responsibility in preventing unwanted wildfires.
Over eight decades, Smokey and his tagline, “Only You Can Prevent Wildfires,” have become a pillar in the protection of our nation’s wildlands and an American icon. He’s thrown out first pitches at baseball games, met presidents, been to space, and become a part of our lives and homes on games, hats, toys, and apparel.
During the course of writing this post, I visited Wikipedia and found out that there was an actual bear named Smokey:
The living symbol of Smokey Bear was a five-pound, three-month-old American black bear cub who was found in the spring of 1950 after the Capitan Gap fire, a wildfire that burned in the Capitan Mountains of New Mexico. Smokey had climbed a tree to escape the blaze, yet his paws and hind legs had been burned.
At first he was called Hotfoot Teddy, but he was later renamed Smokey, after the character created a few years prior.
This Smokey lived at the National Zoo in Washington DC, where he had his own zip code for the massive amounts of mail he got, died in 1976, and had obituaries published in many newspapers, including the Washington Post, the WSJ, and the NY Times.
Today I learned that ZIP Codes do not strictly represent geographic areas but rather “address groups or delivery routes”.
Despite the geographic derivation of most ZIP Codes, the codes themselves do not represent geographic regions; in general, they correspond to address groups or delivery routes. As a consequence, ZIP Code “areas” can overlap, be subsets of each other, or be artificial constructs with no geographic area (such as 095 for mail to the Navy, which is not geographically fixed). In similar fashion, in areas without regular postal routes (rural route areas) or no mail delivery (undeveloped areas), ZIP Codes are not assigned or are based on sparse delivery routes, and hence the boundary between ZIP Code areas is undefined.
The White House has its own ZIP Code (20500), as does the shoe floor of Saks Fifth Avenue in NYC (10022-SHOE). US mail to Santa Claus gets sent to the town of North Pole, Alaska (99705) but in Canada, Santa gets his own postal code (H0H 0H0). And Smokey Bear has his own ZIP Code (20252) because he gets so much mail.
ZIP Codes are therefore not that reliable when doing geospatial analysis of data:
Even though there are different place associations that probably mean more to you as an individual, such as a neighborhood, street, or the block you live on, the zip code is, in many organizations, the geographic unit of choice. It is used to make major decisions for marketing, opening or closing stores, providing services, and making decisions that can have a massive financial impact.
The problem is that zip codes are not a good representation of real human behavior, and when used in data analysis, often mask real, underlying insights, and may ultimately lead to bad outcomes. To understand why this is, we first need to understand a little more about the zip code itself.
For instance, in Miami’s 33139 ZIP Code the difference between the highest median income (as measured in much more granular US Census Block Groups) and lowest median income is over $240,000. So you can imagine it would be difficult to know or even assume anything in general about those residents based on their ZIP Code alone.
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