I posted this as a comment on that page, but it's worth showing here too. It's an interactive map of population on earth as a heatmap - basically both of those graphs mashed together, at very high resolution.
Both India and China have vast areas of relatively high-density rural population. If a part of the raw material for economic progress involves the shift of people from rural/farming to urban/professional lifestyles, then there's a huge potential here.
Looking at Europe, there seems to be much less data about Germany and the United Kingdom than France, Spain, Italy or Portugal. You can see this by the lack of contrast on the colours on the map.
Unfortunate choice of a histogram. Colouring the whole width in different saturation (or color) would have been a much better visualisation. Currently the upper graph suggests the population is in the US while the majority of that bump comes from India and asian countries.
I just went and found that too. Required a lot of clicking. It's a shame the people posting these blog posts don't dereference the intermediate pointers for us.
As of 1994,… 33.5% of the world’s population, lived within 100 vertical meters of sea level… The median person lived at an elevation of 194 m above sea level.
There's even a little bump on the histogram especially for Mexico City (2300m, 25m souls). Other than Mexico it's monotonic all the way up.
I'm amazed how many people live in the lowlands. I've never been able to be happy outside the mountains myself. There's this whole vast majority of my human brothers and sisters who cluster on the seacoasts with the opposite preference. I'm in the tiny group with Tibetan shepherds and Inca campesinos. Those aren't people I usually identify with.
The map viewer they use [1] is familiar, I've seen it on several other sites (same exact icons). Anybody knows if it's open source and what's the name of the project?
Obviously, the map portion itself feels a lot like earlier google maps iterations.
What sites have you seen the app on, specifically? They state in the help pane to have broken it into it's own self contained web-app to facilitate it's use by many different sites.
Well, there's going to be much less space further from the equator, as parallels on both directions from equator are getting shoter and shorter. The equator is 40,000 km long, but the parallel I live on (50th north) is just 25,000 kilometers long (if I'm correct).
I posted this as a comment on that page, but it's worth showing here too. It's an interactive map of population on earth as a heatmap - basically both of those graphs mashed together, at very high resolution.