Hacker News Reader

Comment by corrral | Hacker News Reader

Seems related to the fact that you can draw a surprisingly-small circle over part of Asia and have more people inside the circle, than out. Human geography is very uneven.

View on HN

I believe you are referring to the Valeriepieris circle

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valeriepieris_circle#/media/Fi...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valeriepieris_circle

Yep, that's the one. Ballpark 7% of the Earth's surface, or 15% of the land-surface area (guesstimate based on the whole circle being about 22% of the land surface area—but much of the circle is over water). Over 50% of the population.

One of the claims of the circle was that over half of it was water. So then your guesstimate can be lowered to less than 11% of land surface area.

Probably more related to the fact that if you look at the globe from above the Pacific, you see mostly water:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Globe_-_Pacific_Ocea...

Handy to know if ever challanged to draw a picture of earth as seen from space.

Precisely - more than anything else, this article reminded me just how much of our planet is covered by the Pacific Ocean.

Another factoid in this vein: more than half of Canada's population lives South of the USA's Northern border.

I think you should specify the northern border of the contiguous states. Otherwise, I bet 99% of Canada’s population lives south of Alaska northern border.

I hesitated to be more specific, but figured (probably wrongly so, should always be explicit when stating things like this) that it's implicitly obvious it's about the ~49th parallel border. In fact you can draw the line well below that border[0].

Another way to put it is that half of Canadian's population lives ~between Toronto and Montréal.

0: https://i1.wp.com/metrocosm.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/c...

Really cool map!

Based on the map, another way to put it, is:

Most Canadians live south of Seattle.

Lots of things on Earth are unevenly distributed. Mineral deposits, water, fertile land, mild climates…

Quite probably only if we're ignoring the z-axis (depth), at least when talking over minerals. I think it will be a game-changer if a few km of rock won't be a hindrance anymore. If that ever comes, that is.

Some elements are kind of well distributed but not others: gold for example, or minerals or hydrocarbons, or even wind.

There’s a huge amount of gold (and other stuff) dissolved in seawater. Something like 20 million tons of it. The trouble is that it’s too evenly distributed.

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/gold-ocean-sea-hoax-sc...

> elements

> Wind

I know you know and this is just stupid pedantry but it made me cackle

> Lots of things on Earth are unevenly distributed. Mineral deposits, water, fertile land, mild climates…

... the future.

Sure, but there's still a big difference between 50% and 99%. In this case it wasn't just about population, most landmass was also covered.

Well, right, it's the intuition/viewpoint that takes it to "huh, neat and a little surprising, but believable" rather than "no fucking way!" that's similar, I'd say. If you're familiar with one of these (or other, similar) bits of trivia, the other one's probably more believable on your first encounter with it, because you've already been exposed to the underlying insight that makes it possible.

Doesn't 80% of the world's population live within 100km of the sea as well. And I'd guess most of the remainder live close to major rivers and lakes.

Makes sense. Rivers are the original infra.

Are you proposing The Spiralx Donut?

One might be advised not to go chasing waterfalls, but those are also typically close to the same rivers and lakes.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com