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TIL Atlanta, GA has fewer people than Jacksonville, FL. The Atlanta metropolitan area has a lot more people.
Yeah I looked at the map and was dumbfounded. Jacksonville? It's not even half the size of the Atlanta metro area population!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Right. Havana is more populous than Miami because it includes 15 municipalities, covering 728 km2. Miami is just Miami proper, which is 145 km2. But the Miami urban area is 2900 km2, and has 5.5M people which would be larger than Havana (2.1M people). Miami is much denser than Havana (4,299.7/km2 vs 2,892.0/km2). But that's besides the point I guess. Every map maker makes arbitrary choices. And it made me curious why…
What I found particularly interesting is that Fort Collins (in Colorado) was the largest city in it's block with a population of only 167k people. Just goes to show how sparsely populated that region is around Wyoming/Northern CO/Montana.
> There is a Chinese version of this. The Chinese cities on the map include the big Chinese cities: Shanghai, Beijing, Chongqing, Shenzhen, Chengdu. Shenyang. A couple of cities in Mongolia, analogous to the appearance of Winnipeg on the U.S. map.
Baotou and Hohhot are both Inner Mongolian cities, i.e. Chinese cities.
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.
Interesting map! What I found particularly interesting is that Fort Collins (in Colorado) was the largest city in it's block with a population of only 167k people. Just goes to show how sparsely populated that region is around Wyoming/Northern CO/Montana.
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.
I think something more interesting might be like a voronoi diagram of all cities such that the city is in like the top 5 within a 1000 miles radius or something (or just that but without the voronoi part). This should preserve the fact that only the largest cities in some area are present, but eliminate the arbitrariness of the boundaries. I think you would want to compute this with a sweep line algorithm.
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.
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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 ra…
The article is cool that it takes a dive into the "odder" boxes and finds a flaw or two. The author also recognizes the arbitrary nature of the map. I imagine that almost any other filtering would be more interesting to geek out over though.
I am somewhat surprised by the popularity of this post here and on reddit, but then again that is sometimes how popularity works. The piece is presented well, just meaningless.