
Population Mountains - pier25
https://pudding.cool/2018/12/3d-cities-story/index.html
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lucideer
Firstly, wow! This is fantastic. And highly addictive.

But... hrmmm... the small town of Nowogródek Pomorski in north-western Poland
(population 450) appears to have the tallest spikes in all of Europe. I wonder
what that's about.

Actually, the anomalies (or "noise" as the article calls them) seem some of
the most interesting parts of the map—it certainly makes it very easy to
readily identify patterns in the GHSL in terms of consistent/predictable -vs-
possibly unreliable data.

~~~
pjc50
That has to be some sort of arithmetic error, e.g. all of the 450 people
assigned to a single square meter degenerate polygon in the underlying GIS
data.

~~~
lucideer
Wouldn't add up as the spikes are taller than in large cities which would have
dense multistorey apartment blocks, and also there's quite a few spikes—they
continue in a line along a major road, so I'm guessing they're likely the
result of some convoluted story like corrupted gps points in csvs being
corrected to the nearest boundary of a polygon by some intermediate processing
or some similar craziness.

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mc32
It's scary how populous the island of Java has become. Between Java and
northern India, the way the map represents people, it looks like the land is
overrun by people. Of course there are other high density areas but much of
Africa and the Americas and obvs Siberia look like they have ample open lands
without much people.

I hope economic growth and education kick in and allow some of these rapidly
growing populations to stabilize. circa 100 million in the Pearl river delta
--imagine a drought there.

~~~
aaronbrethorst
Or rising water levels from climate change.
[https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/04/07/world/asia/cl...](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/04/07/world/asia/climate-
change-china.html)

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symplee
Interactive version:
[https://pudding.cool/2018/10/city_3d/](https://pudding.cool/2018/10/city_3d/)

Hold Ctrl while clicking/dragging to change 3D z-axis and rotation.

~~~
danielsf
I made this. MVP comment.

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pjc50
Makes it very clear what underlies the "this circle contains half the world's
population": [https://brilliantmaps.com/population-
circle/](https://brilliantmaps.com/population-circle/)

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peterburkimsher
The visualisation is really nice!

Is there any text or CSV formatted version of the source data? When I went to
the GHSL website [1], it says:

Format: the grid data are distributed as raster files in TIF format. The ZIP
files contain raster files together with pyramids (i.e., TIF and OVR files).

I made MOBAC [2] profiles for every country in the world, but that's using
administrative boundaries (country borders). I'd rather increase the zoom
level in built-up areas automatically.

[https://github.com/peterburk/mobacProfiles](https://github.com/peterburk/mobacProfiles)

[1]
[https://ghslsys.jrc.ec.europa.eu/faq.php](https://ghslsys.jrc.ec.europa.eu/faq.php)

[2] [https://mobac.sourceforge.io](https://mobac.sourceforge.io)

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astazangasta
This is a fun visualization but it seems to me it achieves the opposite of
what it hopes to - it hides much of the population from view. Vast regions of
the world with low population density appear empty - but they aren't empty,
they simply have low population density. In aggregate these regions might have
more population than the cities, but this visualization highlights dense
regions. An individual pixel with a height of 60 in a city might be surrounded
by 800 pixels with a height of 1. This is visually indistinguishable from 800
pixels with a height of 0, eliding an obvious difference in meaning.

~~~
dredmorbius
Over half the world's population is now urban.

[http://www.un.org/en/development/desa/news/population/world-...](http://www.un.org/en/development/desa/news/population/world-
urbanization-prospects-2014.html)

Cartgrams represent this fairly well.

United States:
[https://sites.google.com/site/xiangyilin1309/_/rsrc/14727681...](https://sites.google.com/site/xiangyilin1309/_/rsrc/1472768169130/cartogram/USPop2007_Cartogram.png)

Australia: [https://i.imgur.com/qIojvsU.png](https://i.imgur.com/qIojvsU.png)

China: [https://i0.wp.com/www.p-wood.co/wp-
content/uploads/2016/08/C...](https://i0.wp.com/www.p-wood.co/wp-
content/uploads/2016/08/Cartogram-Provinces.jpg?resize=1%2C1&ssl=1)

World -- population & gdp: [http://www.viewsoftheworld.net/wp-
content/uploads/2016/05/Th...](http://www.viewsoftheworld.net/wp-
content/uploads/2016/05/TheWorldIn2016.png)

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raihansaputra
I know a big part of this is getting the population data. But in the rare
chance you do get your hands on geospatial data like this, Uber's Kepler tool
is an easy way to start analyzing and visualizing the data with great results.

[https://kepler.gl/#/demo](https://kepler.gl/#/demo)

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ernesth
Doesn't '1,000,000 square meters' mean the same thing as '1 km²'?

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majewsky
Yes.

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Xcelerate
I'm amazed at how flat Atlanta is compared to other cities. Even having lived
there, I didn't realize the population density was _that_ much lower than
cities in the Northeast and on the West Coast.

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speleo
This is great! I'm so excited for the wave of geo-spacial data demos using
Mapbox's amazing API and their turf.js computation library that accompanies
it.

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jbattle
I'd love to see this animated over time

~~~
dredmorbius
Approaching that:

[https://youtube.com/watch?v=SObnO6jnAD8](https://youtube.com/watch?v=SObnO6jnAD8)

[https://youtube.com/watch?v=PUwmA3Q0_OE](https://youtube.com/watch?v=PUwmA3Q0_OE)

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andyidsinga
Dang - this is a really cool viz.

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korbonits
This is addicting <3

