Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2016/07/29/map-of-the-world-divided-into.html
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Yes, India and China have a shit ton of people.
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The 2nd map… just oh wow that one little red bit.
Ugh. I get the willies just thinking about being that crowded. The right level of crowded for me is about South Dakota.
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I am a very urban guy so I like living in the city but yeah that seems a bit crowded even for me. The only place I have been where I thought I could live with the nearest neighbor being a mile+ away was when I was in Arizona out in the desert areas.
lol, the U.S. has to share 
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Having just spent a week in Tokyo, where the intersections are packed solid with humans every time the ‘walk’ light comes on, I am appreciating the wide open spaces in Tucson where I live.
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Returning to Vancouver after just week in Hong Kong made me wonder if the city hadn’t been hit by some viral apocalypse. I mean, where the hell IS everybody? The streets are deserted. (And the downtown buildings had seemingly been squashed to half their remembered height.)
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It’s where your shirts come from.
How many shirts do you have? Well, there you go…
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I’m not sure how helpful that metric is-- those blue areas are some of the most sparsely populated areas (for humans) on Earth-- Greenland, Siberia, the Sahara Desert.
I find it interesting how this map shows our preconceptions about race and culture. The way, for instance, Russia is divided between the European and Asian halves, the way that Australia is grouped with the Americas rather than their Asian neighbors, and the way that Africa is given it’s own colour. Why not group Brazil, the Caribbean and West Africa? Why not group Southern Europe and the Middle East or Northern Europe and North America? There are all kinds of ways to get to a billion, and it’s hard to do it without exposing some kind of prejudice. What sort of prejudice does this map reinforce?
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Okay, Kamchatka is invading Irkutsk. Where’s the dice?
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And keep in mind, projections like Mercator greatly exaggerated the extreme northern and southern latitudes.
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So that red section could be where we put the anti-vaxxers, the client change deniers, the Tea Baggers, the GOP, the forced birthers, the fundies (from all the religions), the anti-science crowd, the flat earthers, etc, etc. Then we know what area to avoid!
Why do you hate China so much?
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Why group Brazil, the Caribbean and West Africa though? There’s definitely some measure of cultural and demographical connection as a consequence of slavery, but then again the same connection would include the U.S…
Your example would imply there’s more in common between Brazil and Ghana than Brazil and Argentina, or between Ghana and Brazil than Ghana and Kenya, which admittedly can be a though-provoking ‘prejudice’ to start from and probably not all wrong if you look deep enough. But definitely counter-intuitive and probably might warrant some further explanation if you don’t want it to appear just as arbitrary, only in some novel way.
Good point, and good question. What do you think? You seem to have your own ideas about this. To me it mostly looks like a lazy “eh, let’s lump the Americas together” kind of thing, but I might be missing some insights.
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Wouldn’t it make more sense to put Siberia (30-40 million people) with the rest of Russia?
So the house prices there do serve some function.
Exactly. I think that’s actually the point.
