Source: https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/earth-divided-in-ten-zones-of-equal-population/

And look at that, America is THE BIGGEST!!!!

Fuck yeah!

USA!
USA!
USA!

I'd love to see this done horizontally

Antarctica must be fucking packed yo

I'm not gonna lie, I'm glad I don't live in Asia. That population density wouldn't do well with my anxiety

I bet you would sicko.

Depends on a lot of things, of course you probably wouldn't feel great in Beijing, but the population density of China is almost half the UK's.

On the other hand it's way easier to be invisible, and get lost in the crowd in big cities

Yeah that's my nightmare.

Yeah now I'm looking it up in more detail and I live close to Chicago and visit often and that doesn't bother me. The density of Chi is very similar to London or Manchester.

But damn yeah major cities in China, I'll be avoiding. I've been to NYC and that's pushing it but still enjoyable. But double that in any major city in China? No thank you.

I'm the opposite, I hate the isolation of urban sprawl and would love to live in a dencer city

The nice thing about the more developed countries in Asia is that you can still live outside the city but have great public transportation to get there if you need/want to. So you get the space you want and still have easy access to urban life. Even if it’s a bit far out, high speed rail is available.

I don't believe there's a single way to arrange those zones, but instead that it becomes a consequence of some arbitrary choice of where to place the first one.

As such, I would like to see two versions of this concept: one in which the zone placement is chosen to maximize the size disparity, and another in which it's chosen to minimize it.

wow. Newfoundland and Labrador and Greenland have so many more density than rest of North America!

they placed the first and last zones over the pacific, in the shape of their globe projection. Seems fair.

Africa's doing a lot of the heavy lifting there.

I think any choice of initial conditions would be equally fair, but I'm still curious about how much variation there could be.

Slightly different slicing in a Voronoi diagram:

Shit that's so nice. It's what I dream of the Midwest having one day. A pipedream none the less.

Perfection.

Same not a fan of urban sprawl at all. But I live in Milwaukee and that's the density I feel comfortable with.

yeah was thinking this. I mean right away you would thing you would draw the first border just left of iceland to sorta divide between new/old world. But then I look and it seems like this was done but in the pacific which makes a certain amount of sense given the larger pacific ocean and the cleaner break you get. Looks like it was made to keep the us all in one chunk as it takes part of russia in order to get all the alutian islands.

im in your neighbor to the south and this is just right for me but I wish I lived in the dense downtown area. I don't think I could handle new york though.

something close to what you mean: https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/563-pop-by-lat-and-pop-by-long

I was also thinking how much Russia is piggybacking on its neighbors here

I mean, occam's razor says they just started at the international date line because that is the far left of most commonly used map projections and went left to right, I wouldn't be too confident reading any intent into this placement

Edit: now realizing that this is exactly what you were saying...

I was thinking more about this and realized that once you decide the first segment, the rest are deterministic. Because the adjacent segments cannot be larger or smaller than containing 10% of the population.

Further, once you define the east or west edge of the first segment, the other edge is also deterministic.

In theory you could calculate every possible arrangement of zones to a certain accuracy, such as to every degree of 360. There's only as many possible combinations as there are starting positions for the first longitude you pick.

Yeah but you know that even if they got it perfect, that one prick’d get on a plane or a boat or something and screw it all up

I think she meant put the slices vertically on the horizontal map