Notable boomers...

Notable boomers...  The premise of this New York Times article is to wonder where prominent baby boomers come from.  The graphic at right (click to embiggen), from the article, shows the “notable” baby boomers as a per capita fraction of that state's baby boomer population (defined by the state they were born in).

At first glance, breadth of the distribution (nearly 4 to 1) and the locations of the highs and lows reflect what you might expect: highs near population centers and universities, lows in rural areas. 

If you look a little closer, there are some major anomalies.  Why are Utah and Wyoming (with mostly rural populations) higher than average?  Why are Colorado and Virginia (with mostly urban populations) lower than average?

So I dug into it a little deeper.  The first thing that jumped out at me: the definition of “notable” and the distribution of why they are notable.  Someone is considered notable for this article's purposes if they have a page in Wikipedia.  Well, that's an interesting definition – and subject to all sorts of bias.  Then when you look at the notable persons' occupations (conveniently listed at the top of that graphic) you see that more than three quarters of them are “notable” for their participation in the arts, entertainment, sports, or politics.

Now I'm not sure who you would consider notable, but for me that list would not include any sports figures, nor the vast majority of politicians, nor any entertainers, nor any but a tiny number of artists.  The people whom I would consider “notable” would be scientists, business people, politicians, and artists who made significant contributions – something quite hard to define – of one kind or another.  I'd be quite interested to see a distribution like that...