A blogger named John Egan, who normally writes about the storage industry, uses an unlikely source for an unlikely (for him) blog post that puts Detroit front and center.

The source? Josh Lehner, an economist at the Oregon Office of Economic Analysis, who recently crunched federal data to rank the top 50 metro areas in the U.S. for their share of tech employment. The top, no surprise, was San Jose, Calif., where, thanks to all the geeks in Silicon Valley, 16 percent of the region’s workforce has a tech job.

Egan in turn went through the 50 and pulled out what he ranks as the top 10 surprises on the list, also ranked by the percentage of jobs that were considered tech. No. 1 is Baltimore, where 5.15 percent of the jobs are tech. Minneapolis-St. Paul was No. 2 at 5.08 percent.

And there was Detroit, No. 3 on the surprising tech hubs list, at 4.69 percent.

"Make all the wisecracks you want about the Motor City, but Detroit’s deep pool of tech talent is nothing to laugh at,” wrote Egan on his blog.

Rounding out the list were Charlotte, N.C., 4.68 percent; Columbus, Ohio, 4.57 percent; Hartford, Conn., 4.47 percent; Kansas City, Mo., 4.35 percent; Sacramento, Calif., 4.11 percent; Milwaukee, 3.98 percent; and St. Louis, 3.95 percent.

The average for a metropolitan area in the U.S. is 3.54 percent.

All of which reminds me of a blog post I wrote last year, about a blog written by Guy Turner, managing partner of Hyde Park Venture Partners in Chicago. He did a dive into the numbers and came to the stunning conclusion that there is s more venture capital per capita in Ann Arbor, a city more recently known for its great football teams — wait, that wouldn’t be recent, would it? — than there is in Silicon Valley.

According to Turner’s numbers, there is $1.3 billion in VC available in Ann Arbor, a town of 117,025, which gives it per-capita VC of $10,861. The Silicon Valley region is far bigger, with a population of 7 million and $45 billion in VC, which makes for a per-capital amount of $6,429.

Turner tracked another stat in his blog, the number of VC deals per 100,000 people, based on 2012 data. By that metric, Ann Arbor was fourth in the U.S., with 6.4. Boston had nine, Boulder, Colo., had 13.6, and Silicon Valley had 39.8, which will give a more accurate picture of the VC world here and there.

Still, 10 years ago, who would have envisioned Ann Arbor in the top five?