Tag Archives: XML

Going Bananas #1: Superman Was Born In Kentucky!

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Who knows? Could be the tropic heat or something that I eat, that makes me gonzo (I’m Going Bananas, Madonna)

This is the first post of a new category called “Going Bananas” in which I will post totally crazy experiments. My aim is to try some techniques without taking care of making serious things. These are experiments without rhyme or reason (or, as we say in Spanish, sin pies ni cabeza). So here we go.

Some days ago, my friend Juanjo show me how to download a webpage and to extract a table in R. He did an amazing script to locate on a map all spanish football stadiums in just a handful of lines. And this is what what I will do in this experiment with a slight difference. I will not locate stadiums: I will try to locate the 118 chemical elements discovered up today. How to do it? It is extremely easy: as I did it in this previous post, using geocode function of ggmap package you can locate any address, even if it is the name of a chemical element.

It must be taking into account that almost all names of the elements come from greek or from latin as you can see here. This is the result of locating in the world the 118 chemical elements:

Bananas01

Some conclusions:

  • Only 88 elements (a 75%) have a place on Earth.
  • 40 of the elements with a place on Earth (a 45%) are located in the United States of America, very far from Greek-Latin cultures, by the way
  • Only 16 of them are located in Europe (a 16%)
  • South-Africa and Philipines have almost all the elements outside of EEUU and Europe.
  • And last but not least, Krypton is in Kentucky, as you can see here:

Bananas02

Clark Kent, Krypton, Kentucky … there are a lot of misteries surrounding Superman … and a lot of K letters!!!!

library(RCurl)
library(XML)
library(ggmap)
library (plotGoogleMaps)
webpage=getURL("http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_elements", .opts = opts)
table=readHTMLTable(webpage)[[1]]
table=table[nchar(as.character(table$Element))>2,c("Sym", "Element")]
for (i in 1:nrow(table)) {
 valor=geocode(as.character(table$Element[i]))
 table$lon[i]=valor$lon;table$lat[i]=valor$lat}
table2paint=na.omit(table[, c("lat", "lon", "Sym", "Element")])
coordinates(table2paint)=~lon+lat
proj4string(table2paint)=CRS('+proj=longlat +datum=WGS84')
plotGoogleMaps(table2paint, col="yellow", control.width="0%", control.height="0%", mapTypeId='ROADMAP', legend=FALSE)