Hi,

Thanks for your comment. The Great Lakes shorelines were not carved out in the 2008 census shapefile. In our production environment, we use ESRI state shapefile. With the same parameters discussed in the article, the map looks much better (see attached screenshot). Alternatively, you can use county shapefile (countyp020.tar.gz) from National Atlas and edit out the shorelines yourself. I highly recommend a free tool called fGIS to do the editing. I created a short video (also attached) to show how the editing can be easily done in fGIS. Thanks,

Peichung