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

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

#91

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.

And a good example of why the 10 degree grid is arbitrary and meaningless - Denver is an hour south with a metro population in the millions. But it didn't make the arbitrary cutoff at 40N.

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

#92
post #90
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for pointing this out. I will correct it. (edit: Fixed. Thanks again.)

No problem!

I really like the idea of Idaho and Montana as the Inner Mongolia of the United States.

Clearly, Mongolia itself is analogous to Canada.

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

#93
post #19

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.

If you did it, I'd enjoy seeing it.

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

#94
post #92
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No problem!

I really like the idea of Idaho and Montana as the Inner Mongolia of the United States. Clearly, Mongolia itself is analogous to Canada.

Yeah, definitely some parallel there, though Canada is more like Mongolia and Siberia combined.

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

#95
post #83

Unless I'm missing something, this map might be pretty or impressive that it can be made, but it is entirely meaningless. Meaningless in that I don't know of significant meaning of breaking down the globe into 10° chunks whatsoever. This doesn't tell you anything about the cities shown, nor the area in which those cities exist. There is zero meaning in this map because no meaning can be derived from the filter proces…

Not everything needs to have utility. Some things are just for fun. Utility is important, but fun is important too.

That's a fair point I respect. It does seem that it would be easy to have this fun in a way which is also useful, with literally any filtering system which had a relationship to the data. Equal work, equal fun, more than zero use.

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

#96
post #39

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.

Meanwhile, neither Sweden’s nor Norway’s capital is in the map. But two smaller Norwegian cities are. I think this just teaches you the issue with discretization.

Cue to Sucuriju in Brazil, that has less than 1k inhabitants.

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

#97
post #33

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.

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...

But it's very sparsely populated, not even in the top 100:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...

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

#99
post #19

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.

This isn't exactly what you asked for, but it seems pretty relevant to your stated interests: https://www.jasondavies.com/maps/voronoi/capitals/

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

#100
A lot of comments about metros areas and the like, such as how Jacksonville shows up because of city limits being larger than atlanta, but if you start getting I to trying to define what a city's metro area is, you run into a lot of issues with giant powerful cities like NY. Can you really count the population of Newark, New Jersey as part of NYC, NY? Even though newark is firmly within the NYC metro area, it's a separate city in a different state with it's own government etc. And what do you do about the bay? Is San Francisco part of san Jose? What about twin cities, like dallas and fort worth? This probably makes the most sense as a way of doing this map since at least it's clear cut.
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