For the purpose of assessing how densely populated places are, this map is extremely misleading. A rural area with one farmer in each block will look just the same as a city, and both will look more populated than part of a busy highway or waterway with no permanent residents. It's mixing up information about the discretization with information about the population. It reminds me of those global statistics maps that…
Nobody lives here: the 5 million US census blocks with zero population
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Re: Nobody lives here: the 5 million US census blocks with zero population
#72What happens around 98º W? From ND to TX the character of the map changes around 98º W.
Re: Nobody lives here: the 5 million US census blocks with zero population
#73Maybe I'm the only one, but is anyone else impressed about the amount of populated areas in the country? It makes me wonder how long we have until we start shoving each other into the oceans.
A long time. Even the populated areas could be a lot more dense, and we wouldn't have people pushing each other into the oceans. Hong Kong has a density of 6,620 people per square km. If the US was that dense, we could fit the entire population (317 million) in about 48,000 square km (the US has close to 10 million square km) Of course, we probably couldn't have that many people living in that dense an area. But we d…
http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_popula...
Re: Nobody lives here: the 5 million US census blocks with zero population
#74So what are the average sizes of these census blocks? Assuming an average is at all indicative of anything, I'd guess that it was perhaps around 1 km2 on average (going by number of census blocks). I can imagine that pieces of 1 km2 of land being totally uninhabited would be fairly easy to come across a lot of places.
And as the note about the ND-SD border mentions, there are artifacts in the map that arise from the shapes and distributions of the blocks. Whether there might be few or many other such artifacts, the cartographer gives us no information to ascertain.
Re: Nobody lives here: the 5 million US census blocks with zero population
#75What happens around 98º W? From ND to TX the character of the map changes around 98º W.
Re: Nobody lives here: the 5 million US census blocks with zero population
#76Maybe I'm the only one, but is anyone else impressed about the amount of populated areas in the country? It makes me wonder how long we have until we start shoving each other into the oceans.
The chart only shows presence or absence of human settlement. Just because there are people there doesn't mean there are a lot of people there. Outside of big urban areas like SF, LA, NYC, and Chicago, the US isn't a particularly crowded place. I was born in Shanghai, China and went back to visit family about 4 years ago. I also lived in Manhattan for 3.5 years. Times Square cannot even compare to the absolute crush…
Re: Nobody lives here: the 5 million US census blocks with zero population
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
I cleaned out all the junk, repaired the window shutters, hung some plastic to catch water drips, put a new sheet of plywood on a table, built a new "coffee" table, re-hung the door on it's hinges and generally tidied up. Remember, the daylight up here is already 6am-10pm, so there is tons of daylight for activities, and lots of the cabin work can be done in the evening, when the sun is setting but it's not yet dark…
I knew you had the sun on your side but I figured the lack of a Home Despot within snowshoe distance was going to be a killer. I know from experience that having to recycle/repurpose materials can triple the length of time it takes to complete any project and on top of that you have to factor in the working solo 50% time tax. I am impressed. Was the door rehanging due to some sort of winterizing or bear-proofing?
I suspect it was built in the '60s or '70s, likely a trappers cabin (most up here are). It was built with logs much too big to be from the Yukon though, so I think it must have been something important for them to import logs like that (likely from just down the road in Alaska). Which is confusing, because it wasn't on any important routes like you expect to find on, say, the Yukon river, or big lakes up here.
Judging from the materials, recent improvements and nails, books, clothes, stove, etc, I then suspect sometime in the 90's someone moved in for a summer and did a ton of work. New window shutters (built with screws indicating a cordless drill), new floorboards with paint, roof work, etc. etc. Also they conveniently left a bunch of brand new sheets of plywood and 2x4s out of the weather, and many thousands of nails. The only "visitors message" was from '98, written in pencil, which was conveniently left in a tin of nails for use in construction.
The door was very solid and clearly bolted and locked in many places long ago - the thing about locked doors on cabins in the Yukon is they tend to get smashed in by people, as this one had been. People up here prefer cabins be left unlocked so they can be used in emergencies in the winter (when it's -40) so 99.9% of cabins are not locked, and simply have a book that says "please use this cabin and treat it as your own - also leave a note in the guest book if you like". It's a great sense of community. So the door had been smashed in and was lying under a couple of feet of snow. The first night I was busy with everything else, so I just nailed up a sheet of plastic over the door in an attempt to make it air-tight. (I brought the plastic with me, having been told the cabin was a wreck)
After I dug out the door and got all the snow/ice off it, It was easy to line up the hinges and put a couple of big nails through to get it hanging right. It's possible it was knocked in by a bear (not common, but it happens), though I didn't see any evidence to suggest that.
Bears are awake now, but I didn't see any or any evidence of them yet this spring, and I covered ~40km on snowshoes
All in all, as you might be able to tell, it's a great sense of adventure to go to remote rivers and lakes and simply explore :) I'm working through the photos now, I'll post back here when they're online so you can see what I'm talking about.
Re: Nobody lives here: the 5 million US census blocks with zero population
#78Almost exactly 1/2 of the US population lives east of the Mississippi, which is almost exactly 1/3 of the land mass.
Re: Nobody lives here: the 5 million US census blocks with zero population
#79Re: Nobody lives here: the 5 million US census blocks with zero population
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
Surely Alaska is the least densely populated state. 1.7 million km2, with a population of around 730,000.
Yes, apparently Wyoming only "wins" on the lower 48 at 5.9 people per square mile, vs Alaska at 1.3 per sq mile. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_populati...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harney_County,_Oregon
Beautiful place in its own stark way - especially Steens Mountain. I wouldn't want to live there, though.