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See for yourself.

Propublica plotted a "cancer map" of elevated cancer risks, and you can see how it drops off as you go away from certain points.

https://projects.propublica.org/toxmap/

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Interesting. One question totally non-sequiter to the toxicity conversation, but why do people that use maps orient the image in a direction other than North being up so that they have to add a label to the image indicating the direction of North?

For local navigation (e.g. your phone screen, laying a map on a table, etc) it's generally considered best practice to orient the map so that North is North. For abstract purposes North is up is the standard. I can't think of a good reason to do otherwise unless you're trying to illustrate a point specifically about local navigation (e.g. orienting a map so that the headwaters of a navigable river are at the top).

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