Tuesday, 21 April 2009

How small is the modern world?

Found this linked to on New Scientist. It's a map of how far every point on the surface of the world is from a city (defined as population > 50k). Its pretty cool, firstly as a point of interest, secondly because its been keyed to magma colours so it looks like the earth is on fire.

More generally it is a wonderful description of how the world has accelerated technologically in the recent years, this sort of map 30 years ago would be very different and 100 years ago would be utterly different.

On a related topic this is a wonderful time sink and an amazing way of finding things out/settling disputes. It is a fairly simple but VERY powerful graphing device. Linked to world statistics it allows you to plot along several axis: x & y, point size, colour as well as time.

VERY interesting - although truly depressing in some ways (try watching a time lapse graph of the population of Rwanda).

Both well worth a look and gap minder is an amazing tool.

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