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31 Comments

  1. I don’t like the color scale design.  This makes a huge difference between greater or less than 1M

  2. turb0_encapsulator on

    why don’t they combine some of those ridiculously small counties? it must be redundant and inefficient. 63 people?

  3. bobbysleeves on

    There is no county with a population of 40 Million lol, could’ve easily capped it around 10, and even then, LA County has just over 10 million people and the next most populous county doesn’t even reach 5.5M

  4. ComprehensiveOwl9727 on

    It’s always crazy to me as a North Texan that those 4 counties that are Dallas/Forth Worth have nearly as many people as Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, and the Dakotas combined.

  5. For Connecticut you can use county equivalents like Councils of Government. Functionally similar to Boroughs in Alaska or Parishes in Louisiana for statistical purposes.

  6. effrightscorp on

    This is a really bad color scale, I can’t differentiate between the greyish purple and no data very easily. I wouldn’t have even realized there were no data sections if it weren’t for CT

  7. EclecticEuTECHtic on

    This is a consequence of the Plains states having geographically smaller counties than further west states.

  8. circ-u-la-ted on

    I didn’t realize it was called the Bible Belt because a god killed all the people there

  9. Is this not primarily the result of the fact that counties in Nevada, Idaho, Montana, etc., are 5, 10, even 20 times larger than counties in the “no-man’s land”? This “population valley” disappears when you look at population density.

  10. I think the size of counties ruins this. The counties from western utah across Nevada are extremely desolate desert and largely uninhabited. But they’re huge compared to those counties showing up as lowest population on here. Population density is almost certainly the more relevant statistic. Or maybe something like largest city.

  11. This is distorting the data, I think, by mapping by county population instead of just population density. For example, Wyoming is just as much a “No Man’s Land” as the “valley” you’ve indicated, but because its counties are larger (in area, and thus in population) than the counties of western TX, OK, KS, NE, and SD, it doesn’t show up that way on your coloring method. The same is true with Utah, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico — if you look at any population density map of the US, you’ll see the valley is about a thousand miles wide with, like, four cities in it.

  12. Sigh, yet another Reddit map that’s secretly just a population chart. It would be better to plot the data per capita to make it more useful.

    😉

  13. The white/gray area represents something like 5% of the entire worldwide crop production zone.

  14. TraditionalParsnip0 on

    I feel like it would make more sense if it was normalized to population per unit area, no?

  15. I’ve noticed that on every single map of the U.S., for basically any possible statistic you can imagine, this exact line is a stark divider – it’s bizarre, what it is and why is it such a constant force in everything? It’s like you’re in a different country from one side of that thin line to the other

  16. greenday1237 on

    I feel like 10k-1M is such an insane range that it tells me nothing, it’s like if I had a map of earth and was like the blue parts mean 100-1 billion live here

  17. New Mexican here. About a third of us live in Bernalillo County, the home of Albuquerque. That’s the only dark blue splotch in the state.