Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The largest city in each 10x10 degree latitude/longitude box

blog.plover.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 164 posts

Re: The largest city in each 10x10 degree latitude/longitude box

#61

Post by AshleyGrant »

l72 wrote: post #33
blueblisters wrote: post #30

TIL Atlanta, GA has fewer people than Jacksonville, FL. The Atlanta metropolitan area has a lot more people.

This is the problem with how we define cities. Jacksonville is technically the largest city in all of Florida too, but that is because it annexed almost all of its suburbs, so the whole "metro" area is just on city, which is quite different then most other American cities.

Jacksonville is the largest city by land area in the continental United States, not just Florida. https://web.archive.org/web/20021017211112/http://www.census...

Re: The largest city in each 10x10 degree latitude/longitude box

#62

Post by ghaff »

hpkuarg wrote: post #50
ghaff wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And they both go to show that statements/calculations about things like urban density are heavily influenced by historically and culturally determined political boundaries and definitions. Even look at the US Census Bureau 80% urban metric that a lot of people like to quote. Lots of small towns with farmlands and orchards (like where I live) are "urban" by this particular definition. And they are "urban" relative to…

There must be a way to come up with an (almost) universally applicable metric of city-ness, regardless of the adminstrative boundaries, that can be applied to situations like this map. Something like, the area in which the population density is above a certain threshold, and the population that lives in that area.

FiveThirtyEight has done some work in that area for purposes of splitting urban/rural from a political perspective. The article also mentions a couple other examples of something similar.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-urban-or-rural-is-y...

Re: The largest city in each 10x10 degree latitude/longitude box

#63

Post by ghaff »

mc32 wrote: post #56
ghaff wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And they both go to show that statements/calculations about things like urban density are heavily influenced by historically and culturally determined political boundaries and definitions. Even look at the US Census Bureau 80% urban metric that a lot of people like to quote. Lots of small towns with farmlands and orchards (like where I live) are "urban" by this particular definition. And they are "urban" relative to…

I agree with that. Lumping rural hamlets into urban definitions kind of muddies things. Urban, town, rural/agricultural, wilderness would add a bit more granularity and would give more conceptual fidelity.

Although it's often even messier than that. Look at the density of Manhattan vs. NYC as a whole. Or core Paris vs. Paris as a whole. Much less the many American cities with fairly dense but small downtowns but that sprawl far into the distance.

Re: The largest city in each 10x10 degree latitude/longitude box

#64

Post by xvedejas »

Tempest1981 wrote: post #44
incompatible wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A map projection that preserves area would be better, otherwise there's an excessive number of cities in the far northern hemisphere, and a lack of detail in the tropics.

I like xkcd's description of Mercator: https://xkcd.com/977/

Mercator can be a very useful map. Angles are not distorted. It's also very good at low distortion at small scales. As you zoom in on a point, the area distortion diminishes. Once your area of interest is around 300km wide, the area distortion is only about one part in one thousand. It converges very quickly on a "true" representation of the earth.

Mercator's ubiquity isn't due to people who "aren't into maps" but rather because its strengths are really powerful in many use cases. Imagine the confusing situation if, in your favorite Maps app, North weren't always directly up, intersections met at wrong angles, and square buildings didn't always look square.

Re: The largest city in each 10x10 degree latitude/longitude box

#66

Post by jtbayly »

chrisseaton wrote: post #41
NopeNotToday wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's not making a mathematical definition of the areas. 'area' or 'box' is a simple description that everyone can understand. And the map projection used does form squares.

> And the map projection used does form squares. Some of those squares have zero-length edges.

Which is really cool. Also very confusing!

Re: The largest city in each 10x10 degree latitude/longitude box

#67

Post by allengeorge »

chrisoverzero wrote: post #34
Waterluvian wrote: post #6

I love how this says something about the biases that exist in making legible maps. Toronto isn’t even shown. Any time to read a map, remember that at different scales, there’s an editorial opinion, whether direct or algorithmic, on what you see.

It’s not particularly biased to say that New York is larger than Toronto, in my opinion.

I think the OP got confused - as I did - on the position of Toronto on the lakes. We both didn’t realize that Toronto is in the same box as New York.

Re: The largest city in each 10x10 degree latitude/longitude box

#68

Post by areyousure »

mjd wrote: post #60
caf wrote: post #25

I quibble with the description of the shapes bounded by 10 degrees of longitude and latitude as "rectangles" - they're not even planar shapes, and their adjacent sides certainly aren't at right angles. Some of them don't even have four sides. This bears considering when looking at the map, because some of those regions are much, much smaller than others.

Since you want to quibble, I'll just point out that the word “rectangles” does not appear in the article.

https://i.imgur.com/El0JhG0.png
Post reply on HN