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Comment by nostromo | Hacker News Reader

backgroundify! (removed branding, resized to 1920x1200): http://s3.amazonaws.com/fb-world-image/fb-worldmap.jpg

The US / Canadian border in the West is interesting. It seems between west of the great lakes and east of Seattle there isn't much connection across the border.

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Partially this is likely due to the relatively low populations - Manitoba and Saskatchewan have a combined population of ~2.5 million.

Alberta bumps up to ~3.7 million, and the connections start to increase.

Added Countries: http://ow.ly/3pLxP

I really wanted to look at the map in the context of where actual countries were so I threw together a Google Maps overlay. I couldn't believe how accurately the connections followed country lines, it was amazing!

zoomed http://zoom.it/9qx1

Could just be a graphing anomaly, or that there aren't many people living on either side of the border in those areas.

On the other hand, if you were to think of the kind of people in each country who wouldn't have any friends at all in the other country, wouldn't they probably live around there?

I've been in that area. I think it is real.

It is a lot easier to move around and work on one side of the border or the other, which leads to people naturally not meeting people on the other side.

In the east there are so many more people and there is so much cross border traffic due to trade (particularly from the auto industry) that a lot more cross border connections exist.

I've been to the Eastern part of the border: Stanstead, Quebec/Vermont. Over there, some of the buildings are right on the border. One of the guys I worked with lived in apartments which had their parking lot technically in the US.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanstead,_Quebec#Geography

Check out the library:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haskell_Free_Library_and_Opera_...

http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,948520,00.html

As for the west coast, let's not forget about the geographical anomaly known as "Point Roberts":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point_Roberts#Geography

The other transnational gap I can notice is the India-Pakistan border.

That big gap between the two is actually the Thar Desert.

Indeed but remember that gaps only appear on the if there's a lack strong lack of social connected between the regions. So it's entirely geographic.

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