Hey,
I've always liked looking at the maps, and mousing over the states. I live near Chicago IL, so naturally I've found most of my caches in Illinois - about 10,000. Wisconsin (~2,800) and Indiana (~1,700) are a distant second and third. So, my map of the US has a dark green IL, a medium toned WI & IN, and things fade off, on a linear scale, down to Alabama (2 finds!). There's not a lot of differentiation in the color at the bottom of the scale. For example, there's a slight difference on my map between Louisiana - 23 finds - and Texas - 328 finds. Rather than choosing colors along the continuum of tones linearly, there might be more contrast if the find counts were scaled logarithmically. Then the scale would be .3 to 4, in base 10.
This table illustrates how more of the scale would be used:
State
Finds
Linear
Log(Finds)
Log Scale
IL
10282
1.00
4.01
1.00
WI
2823
0.27
3.45
0.85
IN
1737
0.17
3.24
0.79
TX
328
0.03
2.52
0.60
LA
23
0.00
1.36
0.29
AL
2
0.00
0.30
0.00
Thanks!
Scott / sgauss