7 billion people on 1 page | Hacker News Reader

7 billion people on 1 page

7billionworld.com

77 pointsmorphics68 comments

Reminds me of a (dumb) idea I had for a social networking site that was inspired by the million dollar homepage: show 1 million user accounts on one page, no scrolling. Every user can choose the color of their pixel. With zooming in or multiple pages, that could be extended to everyone, but I thought a million people would be pretty cool. Isn't quite as cool with the few dozen people that showed up though. http://humbit.com/humbit.php

I was playing around with Humbit and actually it is pretty cool =). But it is not that useful and gets boring after a few minutes. You could make it more dynamic or something to make users want to use it more.

That ship left a long time ago, but thanks!

Neat idea. My only issue is I have a hard time between a 'user' and dust on my screen. lol

Yea, no kidding. It helps if you wipe off your screen, make sure the brightness is up, dim the lights, pour yourself a glass of wine, etc.

Soooo...... am I the only one who noticed Africa was annotated with a black coloured human, and Asia with a yellow one.

Haha yeah me too. It's like Power Rangers all over again.

Explained in the FAQ: http://www.7billionworld.com/faq.php

They seem to be confused. From wikipedia:

>As can be read in the Olympic Charter, the Olympic symbol represents the union of the five regions of the world and the meeting of athletes from throughout the world at the Olympic Games. However, no continent is represented by any specific ring. Prior to 1951, the official handbook stated that each colour corresponded to a particular continent: blue for Europe, yellow for Asia, black for Africa, green for Australia and Oceania and red for America (North and South considered as a single continent); this was removed because there was no evidence that Coubertin had intended it (the quote above was probably an afterthought).

If you stop to think about it for a moment, if that were the case, it would make the olympic logo seem quite racist.

Is there a particular color Africans or Asians prefer to associate themselves with moreso than the colors chosen there? Just curious. I don't see how associating a certain continent with a certain color would be racist.

A lot of racial slurs are based on a caricature of people's skin colors. Selecting a color that has historically had that problem and then intentionally assigning it to the target of those caricatures seems, if not malicious, at least completely oblivious.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan-African_colours

At least some of the folks who claim to speak for Africa say "black" represents the people.

This seems a liiiiiiitle bit overly sensitive to me.

I don't know all those green people in Oceania might get together with the blue people and err nm.

Gasp, turquoise people. There would be no stopping them.

Everyone could fit in a cube 1.1 miles on a side.

Let's say each person gets a 72 inch tall, 30 inch wide, 20 inch deep box. That's about 28 cubic feet per person. If you stacked all 7B of these next to each other in a cube, you'd have a cube with a side of just 1.1 miles.

http://instacalc.com/11188

A lot of people would not fit in boxes of that size (6'x2'6"x1'8"). But, if you where thinking of an average that might work.

They'd fit if you got creative. You could always put pieces of them in someone else's box. :)

7 billion people in cramped boxes, some of them with limbs amputated and some of them with body parts in their box, with no ventilation, waste disposal or food supply. Sounds like a great xkcd what-if. That reminds me that you can fit 7 billion people on Rhode Island, but the geopolitical effects of that would be less than beneficial.

the "what-if XKCD" related to something like this actually happening is kind of amusing: http://what-if.xkcd.com/8/

Would be cool if new people kept popping on top at the average rate people are born. also a good opportunity to stop such cruel segregation practices, and just mix up the folks at the rate they are born. The new generations should know no race.

To keep things squared, you'd have to cross out people at the rate they die as well.

And although the colors may suggest otherwise, the 5 continents division is not based on race but rather on location.

With addition of birth rate and death rate, the site may become a simulation application. Maybe also adding a text field to input those rate to check if we are increasing or decreasing.

I just opened the page up in code inspector and deleted an element, am I going to jail?

Depends on the colour of the element you deleted...

But it didn't actually affect the original page, so...

In Chrome, the scrollbar disappears after about 3/4 the way down. Interesting, anyone know why?

I didn't scroll down far enough to "see everyone", but according to the legend, there are no people in Antarctica. Since it's neutral territory, I guess those people are naturally residents of one of the other continents, but it still seems sad in some way.

EDIT: I guess I would have also split north and south America into two continents ... sorry I didn't notice before!

EDIT2: I should also note that one of the goals on my bucket list was to travel to all 7 continents. I've found out that getting to Antarctica is hard without specific skills (and in some cases, specific employers ... who knew there were polar service companies: http://rpsc.raytheon.com/). I guess my best bet is to become wealthy enough to fund an expedition of my own ... but then I'd have a hard time justifying the cost.

national geographic has a trip there that's only 12k~ a person http://www.nationalgeographicexpeditions.com/expeditions/ant...

Wow ... thanks for the link (now bookmarked)!

> On this page you can see every single one of us. One by one.

If you want to count them one by one at 1 per sec, you'll need ~220 years.

Edit: I just noted that it was already mentioned in the counting all of us section...

Some people might find blue europeans, red americans and green australians racist.

Hehe. You are right. Those are actually the official olympic colors of the continents, se they will get away with it.

Load time is impressive

Yeah! and my colleagues worried about me converting divs into tables. I guess tables are legitimate :)

I thought the same thing. +1

The magic is repeating background images, I believe.

http://www.7billionworld.com/howbig.php

Very cool. It would be nice if the colours varied slightly so you had some reference point when scrolling. At the moment I scroll down and the page looks static.

I would love it if (based on the estimated birth rate) I could put in the date, time and place of my birth and find myself.

That would be cool.

Iwas thinking that I would like to be able to click on a person and a popup asking for my details would arise. I could populate it with me.

(Just like: Name | DOB | Place of birth | Place of residence)

Awesome. I'm a sucker for a good visualization. What about adding a fixed nav to toggle the image size... sort of a zoom in/out effect?

Just wondered how the population stats are measured? I.E. How do we actually know that there is this amount of people in the world?

Asia 4,221,013,428 Africa 1,056,035,237 Americas 947,209,798 Europe 738,356,924 Oceania 37,384,613

World 7,000,000,000

We don't, and even if we did, it changes on a minute-by-minute basis. This calls for a bit of suspension of disbelief.

It's interesting how they did it. I was assuming some javascript trick but it's really quite simple and elegant:

    #as1 {
      background-image: url('seven_asia.gif');
      height: 2110500px;
      width: 640000px;
    }

Thats how it loaded so dang fast.

i'm assuming i shouldn't try to print this at work?

Too late.

LIES! There's a link at the bottom of the first page that says "More..."

It's an indication to scroll to the right.

It's an indication to scroll to the right that masquerades as link to see more, then leaves you annoyed that it didn't work if you're actually foolish enough to try and click on a link to see more wee little people icons.

It's at this point that you realize you have better things to do with your life anyway.

Nah, I just scrolled to the right and forgot about any meaning or reason.

"How big is this page?

Huge! The exact size depends on the screen resolution on your PC, but the page is almost 1 mile (1.6 Km) high and 800 feet (250 m) wide."

Wow - pretty crazy.

175,000 lines x 40,000 columns of a 16x20 pixel image.

That's a pretty impressive optimization in the browser, I'm fairly sure I don't have that much RAM.

This idea could be improved by allowing people to "claim" their spot by logging into Facebook or Twitter, adding a face to an otherwise large number.

Charge them $2 each. That's worth a couple of millions at the very least.

This page makes my vertical scrollbar disappear when I go beyond ~70% of the page downwards. Chrome 24 on Windows 7, pretty common setup I'd say.

Me too, time for a chrome bug report.

Sadly, I can't get them all to do the Harlem Shake.

Who thought it was a good idea to color-code Asians with yellow?

ikr... and Africans are obviously colour-coded as black. They might as well have coloured Europeans in white (but I guess that wouldn't show up well on the already white background). I think there's a little bit of ethnicity generalization going on here which isn't really appropriate.

Anyone able to find me? I tried. It's really hard.

reminds me of http://www.theonemillioneuromap.com ... in a way.

For the 1€ price tag per pin you think loading that website would take fewer than one million seconds.

Hmmm there's not a lotta people in Oceania

Hey! I'm there! A little "blue" though.

Tables! Gasp, my eyes!

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