20 February 2019 Buy high-res file -- The world of power grids. Very revealing if you map it out. “Interconnected” means there is an AC connection and it’s synced. There may be some mistakes on the map, a lot of info is proprietary/hard to get. Grey areas have no high voltage lines, as is sort of implied. Of course the reality is way more complicated than this map, even within “interconnected” areas there is a patchwork of partial connections. ...
13 February 2019 Buy high-res file -- Antarctica—0.00008 people per sq. km! McMurdo is by far the largest community on Antarctica with 1200 people in the summer and 250 in the winter. It’s located at the southernmost ice pack-free point on the continent. King George Island is home to a dozen smaller stations whose populations add up. In many cases the stations are so close to one another that they are basically one community (e. ...
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. ...
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. ...