Six Deadly Sins and One Sin that You Can Just Refer to as “The Burning”

Geographers from Kansas State University have used certain statistical measurements to quantify Nevada’s sins and come up with a county-by-county map purporting to show various degrees of lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy and pride in the Silver State. By culling statistics from nationwide databanks of things like sexually transmitted disease infection rates (lust) or killings per capita (wrath), the researchers came up with a sin index. This is a precision party trick — rigorous mapping of ridiculous data.

Their findings were presented Tuesday at the Association of American Geographers’ annual meeting at the Riviera, where Kansas State geography research associate Thomas Vought fielded questions while standing next to a poster of his research.…

While Vought and his colleagues spent four weeks on the detailed Nevada study, they also ran the numbers on some 3,000 counties across the country, a nationwide survey of sin.

Turns out Nevada is unremarkable when compared with other states.


My home state of North Carolina is an irritated chancre of red on the national map of lust. It's no wonder. When you define Lust as “the number of sexually transmitted diseases — HIV, AIDS, syphilis, chlamydia and gonorrhea — reported per capita” and include Fayetteville, NC in your results, you're going to get that result, by which I mean you're going to get an iridescent tattoo of the Good Old North State burned into your retinas.

I can't believe I have to explain that.