Vancouver movies 7 September 2017 This guy explains it best: Vancouver never plays itself in movies. So who does Vancouver play? Mostly Seattle, apparently. But also Honduras, Las Vegas, Albany and Siberia, among other places. I took the data from Movie Maps, which has a fairly comprehensive list of every scene filmed in Vancouver. I have a series of YouTube videos where I go through how I made this map, from start to finish. ...
The definitive GDP map 3 September 2017 I got tired of seeing these horrible maps: So I decided to combine them all into one to make the Definitive Arbitrarily-Classified GDP Map. Here are the bounds: Benchmark GDP (USD) Source California 2.60E+12 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_California US student debt 1.44E+12 https://studentloanhero.com/student-loan-debt-statistics/ Apple Inc market cap 8.15E+11 Google finance US military budget 5. ...
Roman roads of Britain 23 July 2017 -- Buy high-res file -- Notes: Here it is, by popular request. This was far more complicated than I had initially anticipated. Not only were there way more Roman Roads in Britain than I initially thought, but also their exact locations and extents are not very clear. In a few places I had to get rather creative with the historical evidence. ...
Roman Roads 3 June 2017 -- Buy high-res file -- It’s finally done. A subway-style diagram of the major Roman roads, based on the Empire of ca. 125 AD. Creating this required far more research than I had expected—there is not a single consistent source that was particularly good for this. Huge shoutout to: Stanford’s ORBIS model, The Pelagios Project, and the Antonine Itinerary (found a full PDF online but lost the url). ...
Will Moscow ever stop growing? 28 May 2017 Even as Russia struggles to grow its population, Moscow’s incredible growth seems unstoppable. Excluding St. Petersburg, Russia’s next 15 largest cities combined could comfortably fit inside Moscow and its suburbs. In a recent map, I looked at the growth and decline of post-Soviet cities. Across the entire post-Soviet space, there is one overwhelming winner – Moscow. For hundreds of years, the city had a stable population of about 200,000 people. ...
Development in Russia 23 April 2017 Версия на русском. Colorblind-friendly version. I got a hold of human development data for each Russian federal subject, contained in a report ( short version here) by Russia’s National Analytics Center. The report did have a map, but I didn’t particularly like how it was split between two PDF pages, let alone the wacky color scheme. Great opportunity to make a new and improved one! ...
Biggest Soviet cities 21 April 2017 Русские версии первой и второй карты. When I was looking for the Soviet Union’s largest cities, I couldn’t find any good list, let alone a map. Strange, I thought, considering that Russian Wikipedia seems to have incredibly detailed records of every Soviet city’s population. And yet, nobody had collected them in one place. I managed to find a report titled Статистика для всех (“Statistics For Everyone”) that summarizes the results of the 1989 Soviet Union Census. ...
Biggest Soviet cities 21 April 2017 Recently I had a random thought: why is it that some city articles on Wikipedia are called, for example, Nashville, Tennessee – while others are simply, Seattle or Dallas? Is Nashville simply not culturally significant enough to stand on its own, without the cumbersome state identifier? Wikipedia has extensive policy about the article names for geographical locations, among other things. And for every page of official policy, there are several pages of discussion. ...
How far is Hawaii from the nearest landmass? 3 March 2017 Originally I had said that the closest point on the North American mainland to Hawaii was near Flumeville, California. However, I was wrong! As it turns out, the southernmost tip of the Alaska Peninsula is actually about 12 miles (20 km) closer. Located near the town of False Pass, the tip of an unnamed peninsula overlooking Ikatan Bay is exactly 2,259. ...
Fun with city subreddits 6 February 2017 I’ve been playing with python to try to learn how to make maps using Matplotlib. As it turns out, it’s not all that complicated. Using Reddit’s API I scraped the top 300 posts from the largest city subreddits in the United States and Canada. After some data wrangling I end up with a Pandas dataframe with the coordinates of the city, as well as all the titles of the top 300 posts associated with that city’s reddit. ...