R help - Feb 2012 - World Heat/Rainbow Map

Dear All,
I would like to do the following: make a plot of the world and color a few
selected states.
Some states have an associated scalar (i.e a simple number) and I would like to
paint them using a heat map and show legend for the color map in the plot. One
or two states do not have any number associated to them and are simply
colored/filled according to a distinctive pattern that I choose.
To fix the ideas, imagine the following situation in which

(1) the US are striped (or filled with any pattern not in the heat map) and no
number is associated to them;
(2) China, France and UK have associated values 54, 32 and 14 and I would like
to "paint" them according to a heat map.
(3) The other states can be left blank, or I can pretend that there is a
"zero" associated to them.

I made some attempts with map(world), but so far I have been banging my head
against the wall.
Any suggestion is appreciated.
Cheers

Lorenzo

Figure 13.10 in "Lattice: Multivariate Data Visualization with R"
might give you some ideas
http://lmdvr.r-forge.r-project.org/figures/figures.html

On Sun, Feb 19, 2012 at 9:05 AM, Lorenzo Isella
<lorenzo.isella at gmail.com> wrote:
> Dear All,
> I would like to do the following: make a plot of the world and color a few
selected states.
> Some states have an associated scalar (i.e a simple number) and I would
like to paint them using a heat map and show legend for the color map in the
plot. One or two states do not have any number associated to them and are simply
colored/filled according to a distinctive pattern that I choose.
> To fix the ideas, imagine the following situation in which
>
> (1) the US are striped (or filled with any pattern not in the heat map) and
no number is associated to them;
> (2) China, France and UK have associated values 54, 32 and 14 and I would
like to "paint" them according to a heat map.
> (3) The other states can be left blank, or I can pretend that there is a
"zero" associated to them.
>
> I made some attempts with map(world), but so far I have been banging my
head against the wall.
> Any suggestion is appreciated.
> Cheers
>
> Lorenzo
>
> ______________________________________________
> R-help at r-project.org mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
> PLEASE do read the posting guide
http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.