Mapthematics Forums

African Union backs campaign to replace Mercator map that distorts Africa's size I don't know how much impact this will have, but I'm happy to see more people advocate for Equal Earth. I like how it looks and I think the creators succeeded in making an equal-area projection that can appeal to gener...

Thanks! I think it gives better results than any other existing cartogram algorithm, though the runtime is a lot longer. This case is pretty extreme compared to a population cartogram, so it's a good stress test. The issue with peninsulas is from the limited resolution of the mesh. It's possible to ...

Yeah, it is a cartogram where every state (i.e., "sovereignt" as defined by the Natural Earth database) is given a population of 1. I used my cartogram algorithm with a few microstates excluded because they caused floating point errors.

I've just made an amazing discovery. There are many existing projections that claim to be equal-area, but actually aren't. For example, the Equal Earth projection inflates Russia to be nearly twice the area of China, not equal as advertised. I knew I had to fix this state of affairs, so I went to wo...

@quadliboc Thank you!

That link still doesn't work. Did you mean to post http://www.quadibloc.com/maps/images/conhem2.gif?

Heat maps are definitely good for showing which parts of the world are dense. What they're less good at is showing total population counts for regions, or communicating things like "most people live in Asia". Dot distribution maps can communicate these things (if there's no overlap!) eithe...

True, dynamically sizing the cells doesn't immediately help the overlap problem, because the dot counts in populated areas would be about the same. What it would do is handle sparse areas better, which would enable us to make each dot represent more, which would help dense areas. Ultimately there's ...

The dots already are so small that making them even smaller would not be a good idea. Increasing the quantity each dot represents would, most likely, make many dots disappear completely, showing many parts of the U.S. empty. But still, there are overlaps. This map seems to be done on a per-county b...

Dots overlapping each other makes it impossible to count the number of dots in a region. When dots fully blanket an area, very different densities can look exactly the same. Though I can only see the abstract, this article seems to investigate this and conclude that dot numbers get underestimated by...

Is there anyone making decent dot maps of world population? It seems like it should be out there, but the maps I've found use a non–equal-area projection and/or let dots overlap each other, which are obvious dealbreakers for this type of map. Is there anyone doing this properly?