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- Hacker News
- I got 1419 miles by putting the pin just east of Presidio, TX. The Gulf of Mexico doesn't have many Americans in it on the way out to the Florida Keys.
1,570 miles by pinning the lower Keweenaw Peninsula which null-counts a great circle route through Canada.
by nerdsniper - Having been to Presidio on a trip to Big Bend I'm not surprisedby kylecazar
- Doesn't work outside the US sadly.by jstanley
- Yeah I wanted to see if they special cased Wacken. One campground later, 85% done.by tetha
- Indeed, it doesn't seem to think that the fairly large cities of Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Regina, Winnipeg, and Thunder Bay have a population of approximately zero. Anywhere in northern Montana has the "beam" shoot all the way over to Maine before reaching 100K, which isn't quite right since it passes through a couple medium Canadian cities and dozens of prairie towns.
I think this tool would be much more interesting in the western US if they had incorporated Canadian census data as well.
by yabones - It does say that it only works in contiguous US (so no Alaska nor Hawaii nor "abroad" :D ), but seems it also works in Bahamas, for some reason, which as far as I know, isn't part of the contiguous US (yet?).
- heh, from my address in downtown Chicago, I get 2.34 miles in the shortest direction and > 3000 miles (aka don't reach 100k within the US) in the longest direction (slices of lake michigan passing through unpopulated stretches of the UP. Canada is not included, but not sure it would help much...by cozzyd
- Even if you are colliding with 20 people a minute thats still 3.5 straight days of running into people. Even if gentle thats probably heavy bruising, and any conflict or discourse is gonna slow down that 20-people rate.
I imagine theres probably only a few cities where you could pull this off.
Anyways I know the article isnt this literal, this was just my first thought from the title and I had a chuckle lol.
by minimaltom - Neat! I've got a slice that's under 10 miles long going south into town, but I've also got 14 slices to the north (the ones that don't intersect with a couple up-state cities) that are over 3000 miles long.
Vancouver is similarly interesting, a lot of great-circle 2000+ mile segments that reach over towards New England, but everything west or north is invalid.
Would be neat if instead of a single yellow petal to 100k, each petal was a color gradient to 1k, 2k, 10k, 20k, 100k, 200k, or 1M people!
- Cities on the water make fun shapes for obvious reasons. Atlantic City, Seattle, Chicago, Galveston, New Orleans. The slices can go very far or even be omitted due to not hitting the contiguous US. Chicago's is probably the most interesting, they cross Lake Michigan before getting sufficient density to stop.by wging
- I live in the one of the densest parts of lower Manhattan, and often explain that when I take a walk around the neighborhood, I pass 100,000+ people.
This map pretty much proves it!
by asah - It's rough not having Canada's population in here. There's way more than 100k people in all directions north from Buffalo and it doesn't feel accurate.by qrush
- Is this resident population or ambient?
I've been building a UK-wide 24-hour population dataset lately, and it's really opened my eyes to how much population data is best-guess-estimate - including census figures - and quite how difficult it is to say with any certainly how many people "touched" a location on any given day.
by mootothemax - I must be slightly confused about what claims this visualization is making. Are these 5 degree rays supposed to be indicating non-overlapping triangles where each triangle contains 100k population? If so, a full circle (with no triangles missing) would be a population of 7.2 million. And yet, clicking around Los Angeles County you can easily find multiple completely non-overlapping full circles, despite the county population being under 10 million.by tshaddox
- Yes, I don’t quite understand this eitherby anon48293
- Yeah, this can't possibly be right. Los Angeles, the city, has less than 4 million people, and there are complete "circles" of presumably 7.2 million people entirely within its boundaries.
If you set the petal population threshold to a low value, like 10k or 20k, and drag it to a densely populated area like Koreatown, you'll get a degenerate "circle" with 0 feet in every direction.
- That seems like the distance to go from having 100k people in front of you to having 100k people behind you. The distance you'd have to go to run into them properly would depend critically on the width of the vehicle you're in. With about 30k people running the Boston marathon and 60k people running the NY marathon, if you can source a vehicle wide enough to cover the course, it seems like you could pull it off in just a bit over 52.4 miles... assuming that the bodies didn't produce enough drag to slow you down so much that runners were managing to stay ahead of you on the course. (And assuming that marathon runners prioritize completion of the course over running sideways away from obvious danger, but they're marathon runners, that seems like a safe assumption.)by addaon
- Careful… Reddit might try and find you.by lostlogin
- Ah interesting, I seen the title "run into" as "bump into" or in this context, get to where 100k people are. I don't know any US addresses far from population centers so I pumped in Area 51!
Clarity needed on the title or description!
by baw-bag - > That seems like the distance to go from having 100k people in front of you to having 100k people behind you
0 metres. Just turn round.
To pass within say 5m of someone you just need to set up shop at a busy train platform and wait. With 1000 people passing every 2 minutes it won’t take long to pass 100k (well presumably about 3 hours)
by hdgvhicv