The religion maps

Here is a set of maps of religious affiliation in the United States by county. (Michael Bacon says that they're "all over the blogosphere", but I guess I'm not as much on the ball as he is, since I just saw them now.)

Anyway, the maps are not so surprising except for the first one, which is extremely surprising if you imagine that American organized religiosity falls along red state/blue state lines, because it doesn't. There's basically a belt of heavy religious affiliation running north-south through the middle of the country from North Dakota to Texas, and a big unsurprising splotch of Mormons in Utah and eastern Idaho (though the rest of the Great Basin is pretty secular); but mildly liberal Minnesota and swing-state Missouri are about as religious as heavily Republican Nebraska, and Massachusetts far more so than Pat Robertson's stomping grounds in Tidewater Virginia! What's going on? Where did the Southeastern Bible Belt go?

I think Bacon's got it basically right: it's all about the dominance of different churches. In the Southeast, the Southern Baptists overwhelmingly dominate religious discourse and consequently are very powerful in spite of the overall moderate degree of religious practice. In most of the rest of the country, Catholics have a plurality, though in most places that's a mild illusion: Protestants are probably the majority, but are fragmented into different denominations. In the Northeast, the Catholics have a particularly strong presence (and generally have values that don't comfortably fall into American liberal/conservative categories), but there's a lot of other stuff going on too; around Boston there's a lot of activity in the extremely liberal UU and UCC churches, for instance.

I also think it's interesting that that actual Bible Belt running north/south through the middle is not made up of any one particular church; it's Lutherans up north, Southern Baptists in Oklahoma and Texas, and Catholics nearer the Mexican border.

TurboTax

After many years of stubbornly sticking to paper forms, possibly augmented by a spreadsheet, I finally had sufficient presence of mind to get myself a copy of TurboTax this year.

On the whole, I like it! I was always worried that it'd be some multi-hour linear wizard interrogation, in which you're bolted to the rails and have to answer "no" to a thousand irrelevant questions about hog farm depreciation, but it's not like that; you can actually skip around to different parts of your tax return without destroying its state. If you abandon one of the little sub-interrogations in progress, you may have to replay two or three screens when you come back, but your previous answers are all there as the default. I realize that this kind of thing really ought to be considered a sign of minimal competence rather than something worthy of a medal, but it's amazing how much stuff out there doesn't rise to this level, especially on the web.

The Internet makes tax software much more pleasant, too; the way it can retrieve all your W-2 information directly from your employer is pretty cool. I'm sure that if I used Quicken it would be even more effortless.

As a Mac program, it's OK. The one major hiccup I noticed (unfortunately, it happened very early and made a first impression) was that when I clicked on the blue link for the recommended introductory "tour" of the software (actually an HTML file opened in an external browser), it opened it in the Classic version of Internet Explorer. That's not cool.

The major defects have more to do with the inertia of the bureaucracies involved. It's weird that E-filing taxes still involves multi-day approval turnarounds and fees to middlemen, but I don't think that's Intuit's fault.