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Oliver Blanthornbovine3dom@masto.ai
Jun 26, 2026, 6:10 PM
more progress on my uniform population projection maps. have fixed the holes in the previous ones
this is showing population density as experienced by people - every square is approx 150k people, and the colour of that square tells you the density they live at (blue = dense, red = sparse)
i particularly enjoy how you can see how unusual the US is - the only country that comes close in terms of sprawl is Russia
now the next job is to understand why the mapping has gone up from 2MB to 150MB...
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Replies

Oliver Blanthornbovine3dom@masto.ai
Jun 26, 2026, 6:16 PM
the matching algorithm still fails in a few dense cities, and now that it works for the UK London pushes the north of england well into scotland, but there's not a huge amount i can do about that. london is really very big.
this image shows you places where the algorithm hasn't been able to distribute the population evenly - the blue cities on this map would have been larger on the other map if the solver hadn't failed
cc @markjd84.bsky.social - you'll probably enjoy this
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Oliver Blanthornbovine3dom@masto.ai
Jun 26, 2026, 6:41 PM
@webhat there's a bigger version here
https://github.com/bovine3dom/population-cartogram-projection/blob/07108f5dc989578313bb37f952a509d6e43acca0/make-lookup-table/hello.png?raw=true
but take it with a pinch of salt - the solver failed on some cities (see the second post) and the mapping is about 20 times larger than i was expecting. definitely a work in progress :)
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Oliver Blanthornbovine3dom@masto.ai
Jun 28, 2026, 6:07 PM
got it down to 20MB compressed and added a loading bar to make opening the page more bearable
https://compute.olie.science/expo/?data=2026-06-28/population_density.arrow#x=3.0901&y=46.4779&z=4.4189
feedback welcomed. if your feedback is "red and blue should be the other way around" go to https://compute.olie.science/expo/?data=2026-06-28/population_density.arrow&flip=true#x=3.0901&y=46.4779&z=4.4189 instead
fwiw, it won't work on iphones because apple illegally nerfs browsers there to push people towards their 30% app tax :)
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Oliver Blanthornbovine3dom@masto.ai
Jun 29, 2026, 3:31 PM
since i spent all day chipping away at performance, obviously what i should do now is use that performance to get higher resolution cartograms
here is germany. you can even pick out where GHS World Pop has decided that Grevenbroich is one of the densest cities on the planet.
my main question is why does it have to look so meaty and grotesque
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Oliver Blanthornbovine3dom@masto.ai
Jun 30, 2026, 1:43 PM
https://github.com/bovine3dom/population-cartogram-projection/blob/b824f12be96556c7432fc6db0d7fe0aa1745192e/make-lookup-table/europe.png?raw=true
changing the colour scheme did make it look less meaty
i particularly like the lightning streaking across the uk. and at this resolution monaco pops up
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Brendan Halpinbthalpin@mastodon.social
Jun 28, 2026, 7:25 PM
@bovine3dom @markjd84.bsky.social When I see pop-based projections like this, I always remember that William Cobbett used to refer to London as The Great Wen (wen: wart, growth)
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Oliver Blanthornbovine3dom@masto.ai
Jun 28, 2026, 7:36 PM
@bthalpin @markjd84.bsky.social i wonder what he would have thought of modern-day cairo https://compute.olie.science/expo/?data=2026-06-28/population_density.arrow#x=28.0122&y=28.0899&z=5.7456
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Tim Hergertcjust@infosec.exchange
Jun 26, 2026, 6:33 PM
@bovine3dom I love how Canada is just . . . non-existent here.
I'm certain that the phrase 'Canada has the least dense population in the world' would be a source of pride for many people there - and if you were to exclude the province of Alberta - you'd probably be mostly correct.
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Oliver Blanthornbovine3dom@masto.ai
Jun 26, 2026, 6:39 PM
@cjust mongolia is another good one :)
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Rémi Cardonaremi@urbanists.social
Jun 26, 2026, 8:25 PM
@cjust @bovine3dom was thinking immediately the same thing! The corridor barely shows up and the rest of Canada is a thin horizontal line.
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Oliver Blanthornbovine3dom@masto.ai
Jun 26, 2026, 8:34 PM
@remi i should mention that the layout isn't mine - it's max roser's https://ourworldindata.org/world-population-cartogram
all i have done is tried to match it up to real locations while remaining spatially coherent
@cjust
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webhatwebhat@infosec.exchange
Jun 26, 2026, 6:59 PM
@bovine3dom thank you, I'll check it out. I deleted my previous toot as I thought it was a little impolite to ask. Thank you for sharing 🫂💜
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Oliver Blanthornbovine3dom@masto.ai
Jun 26, 2026, 7:17 PM
@webhat not at all. thank you for wanting to zoom in :)
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Janne Morenjannem@fosstodon.org
Jun 26, 2026, 11:42 PM
@bovine3dom
Interesting how non-intuitive the result can be. Sweden is almost all high-density squares. I guess it's because the low density areas are so low density they just don't have the population to create many squares.
But I guess the total number of squares will always be the same for a given population, no matter how they're distributed.
So this shows that most people live where most people live. Which is only obvious once you say it out loud.
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Oliver Blanthornbovine3dom@masto.ai
Jun 27, 2026, 5:26 AM
@jannem are you sure you're reading it the right way round? blue is dense, red is sparse. i reckon Sweden is ~1/3 dense from eyeballing it. but your point still stands: people live where people live.
except in America where they live where bears live or something.
i think egypt is my favourite. if you glance at a satellite image you get the impression that it's extremely sparsely populated. but in terms of where people live it is incredibly dense
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Janne Morenjannem@fosstodon.org
Jun 27, 2026, 6:36 AM
@bovine3dom
Ah, I switched around the colors. Usually blue=less and red=more.
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Oliver Blanthornbovine3dom@masto.ai
Jun 27, 2026, 9:38 AM
@jannem yeah. people tell me this every time. to me it's like energy, red = low energy, blue = high energy. like a flame.
maybe one day i will acquiesce :)
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Stefan Lindbohmstefanlindbohm@mastodon.social
Jun 28, 2026, 7:55 PM
@bovine3dom Seems to work on my iPhone - what didn’t work in your testing? Saying this is a bit of a trigger for me because many devs use proprietary Chrome features and then say Safari ”is behind” which drives me nuts :D. But I would think you’re saying this for more reason than that right?
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Oliver Blanthornbovine3dom@masto.ai
Jun 28, 2026, 11:10 PM
@stefanlindbohm it is empirically true that safari is behind in terms of implementing the web specs https://wpt.fyi/interop-2026?stable but no that's not what i am talking about
safari on iphones has very stingy memory (and maybe CPU?) limits per tab and generally crashes my websites anytime i make something cool. so i always ask people to test it for me
i asked two people this time and they both said the tab died. although you're now the third person who has said it works for them...
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Stefan Lindbohmstefanlindbohm@mastodon.social
Jun 30, 2026, 4:10 PM
@bovine3dom Maybe more to do with hardware than a hard limit then? It does make sense that Safari has more conservative limits though, they seem to be adamant to make it a lightweight browser. That’s good and bad I guess.
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Oliver Blanthornbovine3dom@masto.ai
Jun 30, 2026, 4:33 PM
@stefanlindbohm i would mind their bad choices about the browser less if they didn't also make it a crime to make your own browser for iOS
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Stefan Lindbohmstefanlindbohm@mastodon.social
Jun 30, 2026, 4:36 PM
@bovine3dom Yep, that’s stupid. I evidently generally prefer Apple’s choices but the bad side that has gotten A LOT worse recently is their arrogance/anticompetitive stuff.
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Stefan Lindbohmstefanlindbohm@mastodon.social
Jun 28, 2026, 7:57 PM
@bovine3dom This dual view is suuuper cool and makes it a lot easier to understand what each map does. I’ll probably spend some time scrolling around on this 🤓
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Oliver Blanthornbovine3dom@masto.ai
Jun 28, 2026, 11:14 PM
@stefanlindbohm you can click on cells in either pane to see exactly which cells they correspond to in the other pane
for some reason it only pans one way and i need to make the hexagon highlight stand out more. but if you squint you should be able to pick them out
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Will Deakinwnd@fosstodon.org
Jun 29, 2026, 3:55 PM
@bovine3dom the colour scheme? Perhaps try something other than Viridis or flip the scale.
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Oliver Blanthornbovine3dom@masto.ai
Jun 29, 2026, 4:04 PM
@wnd I think it would look like meat even in greyscale
it's oddly sinewy and fatty
... also i kind of hate viridis :)
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Will Deakinwnd@fosstodon.org
Jun 29, 2026, 6:12 PM
@bovine3dom use Viridis and it will look like a set of galactic super clusters.
There is also cividis, inferno or plasma if Viridis doesn't do it for you...
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Raphaël Vraphv@social.edu.nl
Jun 29, 2026, 4:01 PM
@bovine3dom Grevenbroich? I guess they counted the open pit coal mines around as negative km²??
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