Thursday, January 24, 2013

I found my dot

Brandon Martin-Anderson took data from the 2010 USA census and the 2011 Canada census to create a population map. He shows the two countries with a tiny dot for every single person. That's almost 342M dots. Most population maps put a dot for each thousand people, or so. When scaled to view both nations the map clearly shows high and low population densities. I can pick out major cities. I find it interesting that across much of the Plains States the clusters of dots representing the small towns appear to form lines. The cool thing about this map is that I can zoom in. I can't quite get to the street level that I can with Google Maps, but I did get to the community level and was able to pick out which dot must represent me. I verified it by then turning on the street names.

I do wonder about the date a bit. I zoomed in on my parent's home. I was a bit surprised by the number of dots in the big park across from their house. Do people claim the park as an address? Is the census data wrong? Did the mapmaker misinterpret data? I can't tell. It's a cool map anyway.

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