[HN Gopher] Nobody lives here: Nearly 5M Census Blocks with zero...
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Nobody lives here: Nearly 5M Census Blocks with zero population
(2014)
Author : sndean
Score : 81 points
Date : 2021-01-18 19:17 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (tumblr.mapsbynik.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (tumblr.mapsbynik.com)
| walrus01 wrote:
| It would be interesting to see this compared as a 1:1 overlap
| with BLM land in the western states.
| sethhochberg wrote:
| For anybody not super familiar with US government departments
| and confused by reading this after seeing other headlines
| coming out of the country in recent years, BLM in this context
| is "Bureau of Land Management" and not "Black Lives Matter".
|
| The BLM is the federal department that oversees most
| governmental land that isn't managed by some other department.
| Broadly speaking, this is land which isn't run by a
| local/state/tribal government, may not have any particular use
| designated, and is (usually) uninhabited - or at least intended
| to be.
| walrus01 wrote:
| Indeed, for reference, truly vast swathes of the rural
| western states are federal government land. Not all is BLM,
| some is national park and such, but same concept applies for
| zero population in a census block.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_lands
| richardwhiuk wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LruaD7XhQ50 is a pretty
| nice intro to the topic.
| bananabreakfast wrote:
| While a lot of BLM land is uninhabited, it is not all like
| that and not necessarily intended that way either. For
| example, the entirety of California's coastline is BLM land.
|
| The BLM simply functions as the kitchen sink of land
| management at the federal level, catching everything that is
| not explicitly assigned to other agencies.
| jeffbee wrote:
| This is a very misleading statement. The area _off_ the
| coast of California constitutes the California Coastal
| National Monument. The actual land mass involved there is a
| mere 8800 acres and nobody lives there. The other national
| monuments in California add up to 2.5 million acres. BLM 's
| total holdings in California are about 15 million acres, of
| the state's 105 million acres. Most of what the BLM holds
| aside from national monuments are grazing lands that they
| lease out.
| thanhhaimai wrote:
| TL;DR: Blocks have zero population mostly because
|
| - physically restrictive (lake, swamps, mountains, deserts...)
|
| - legally/socially restrictive (commercial/industrial/military...
| zones)
| Razengan wrote:
| > _Water features such lakes, rivers, swamps and floodplains are
| revealed as places where it is hard for people to live._
|
| Interesting..
| Lendal wrote:
| Interesting that on this map, the only state boundary revealed by
| this data alone is North Dakota. Any ideas why that might be?
| quasse wrote:
| Looks like the author updated the article to address that:
|
| >Update: On a more detailed examination of those two states,
| I'm convinced the contrast here is due to differences in the
| sizes of the blocks. North Dakota's blocks are more
| consistently small (StDev of 3.3) while South Dakota's are more
| varied in area (StDev of 9.28). West of the Missouri River,
| South Dakota's blocks are substantially larger than those in
| ND, so a single inhabitant can appear to take up more space.
| Between the states, this provides a good lesson in how changing
| the size and shape of a geographic unit can alter perceptions
| of the landscape.
| thanhhaimai wrote:
| The author noted in the post that:
|
| > I'm convinced the contrast here is due to differences in the
| sizes of the blocks. North Dakota's blocks are more
| consistently small (StDev of 3.3) while South Dakota's are more
| varied in area (StDev of 9.28).
| caf wrote:
| The New Mexico / Colorado border is also somewhat visible.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| previous discussion:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14433805
| pier25 wrote:
| I wonder if Starlink will eventually have on impact on this,
| maybe 10 years from now.
|
| Some years ago we lived in an off the grid cabin in the mountains
| of Veracruz (Mexico) and the lack of connectivity was by far the
| main reason we left. We now live on the outskirts of a small city
| but I still really miss the absolute silence of living away from
| civilization.
| eloff wrote:
| Yup, that will be one less reason to live in a city. I've also
| theorized that work from home and self-driving vehicles are
| other trends that may counteract the trend towards urban
| living. If you have a self-driving vehicle (on the highway at
| least), longer commutes may be less of an issue if you can
| work, read, or watch tv (we're not there yet.) If you work from
| home, commute doesn't matter at all.
|
| That being said, I work from home, but I live in downtown to
| have easy access to activities, restaurants, and supermarkets
| without needing a car. The difference in rent is dwarfed by not
| having the cost or hassle of a vehicle.
| ghaff wrote:
| >self-driving vehicle (on the highway at least)
|
| I live about an hour outside a major city. I definitely will
| drive in (normally) for activities like theater. With a self-
| driving car--even just on the highways--I'd be _more_
| inclined to go in for an early evening get-together. But I
| wouldn 't be popping in multiple times a week even if I
| didn't mostly need to drive myself.
| cnorthwood wrote:
| If the population is truly zero, I wonder how many other
| infrastructure concerns will come first? Primarily road
| connections, but also electric grid and potable water. There
| are alternatives to the latter 2 but it is a significant impact
| uncoder0 wrote:
| I am betting that Starlink will have an impact on where people
| live. We have tons of beautiful empty land in this country but,
| modern life requires broadband and that's not well distributed
| yet.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _We have tons of beautiful empty land in this country_
|
| It's beautiful _because_ it is empty.
|
| I think we should fill up all the vacant lots and surface
| parking in the cities before we needlessly trample nature any
| more.
| curiousllama wrote:
| Agreed, but also...
|
| There's like SO MUCH empty land. Growing up in the US, I
| thought the most empty things got was Ohio. But turns out,
| we're more like Russia - with the empty siberian frontier -
| than we are like the UK or something.
|
| If everyone were evenly distributed, we'd still have <100
| people per sq mile
| jeffbee wrote:
| Ohio has about the same overall population density as
| Spain.
| adolph wrote:
| My knee jerk reaction was to comment that modern life also
| requires other things like healthcare; but then I thought
| twice in that maybe some of the lifestyle diseases that drive
| in some measure the important placed on healthcare
| availability, maybe those core maladies and deleterious
| choices are encouraged by living in close proximity to large
| numbers of folks.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Which "lifestyle diseases" are you thinking of? Both
| obesity and diabetes are markedly more common in rural
| America compared to urban America, but there is a
| confounding factor of poverty.
| ghaff wrote:
| Poverty is one thing. In a rural location, you also sort
| of have to make yourself go out for a walk/run/hike
| because you're not going to just organically walk from
| place to place. (ADDED: Aside from house/yard
| work/farming/etc.) I live in a semi-rural location
| (nothing like what we're talking about here) and there is
| basically no reason that I _have_ to do more than a
| minimum level of walking on a given day. (Leaving aside
| how big a difference that makes in the scheme of things.)
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| Highly likely. I do wonder what impact this will have on mail
| ordering. Currently rural deliveries are subsidized by the more
| densely populated areas. Because the ratio of subsidized rural
| dwellers to densely populated area dwellers is so lopsided in
| favor of density, the subsidy doesn't matter much. If that
| ratio changes, so might the economics of companies like Amazon
| being able to deliver anywhere, usually by piggybacking on the
| USPS's rural delivery infrastructure. That said, I've seen
| Amazon's own delivery vans in some pretty low density rural
| areas so maybe it works out somehow.
| DavidPeiffer wrote:
| Another interesting uninhabited zone is in Idaho. Summarized by
| Wikipedia:
|
| _The Zone of Death is the name given to the 50 sq mi (129.50
| km2) Idaho section of Yellowstone National Park in which, as a
| result of a purported loophole in the Constitution of the United
| States, a criminal could theoretically get away with any crime,
| up to and including murder._
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_of_Death_(Yellowstone)
| scottcha wrote:
| I worked in that area on a SCA trail crew in 1996, in the
| Bechlor ranger district, and its nothing we discussed then but
| looking as the ref it seems this loophole was only noted in
| 2008.
|
| The area is very remote and while in the park not often
| visited. Its very beautiful with meandering rivers through
| large grasslands as well as some canyons with the Tetons in the
| distance.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Good luck getting the government to honor that. I can't even
| get a local court and state trooper to follow their own rules
| of procedures defined in code or basic civil rights.
| genericone wrote:
| On android device, both portrait and landscape mode, the right
| side of the text is cutoff. Desktop view mode fixes it.
| culopatin wrote:
| Same as iPhone. I just moved from Android and after trying for
| 1min I couldn't figure out how to get desktop mode in Safari.
| Sometimes I find myself fighting things like that in iOS. I'm
| just supposed to guess.
| meowster wrote:
| I miss how websites used to work with the original iPhone.
| Websites looked like normal desktop sites, and you could
| double-tap on a block of text and the browser would zoom into
| that area.
|
| I just want normal websites, none of this mobile f*kery we
| have today.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| For whatever reason the "Request Desktop Site" option is
| hidden in Safari behind the icon in the address bar that
| suggests it should just be about controlling the font (small-
| cap-A, big-cap-A). I think it took me two years to finally
| remember that consistently instead of just being frustrated
| that I couldn't find it.
| eznzt wrote:
| Consider yourself lucky, a few years ago it was under the
| "share" button. Yes, really.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| Yep. And I had finally gotten used to that when they
| moved it. At least the "share" button in iOS is a bit of
| a catch all (sharing with messaging apps, email, make a
| bookmark, print it, add to home screen, copy, and more
| actions), so it at least made _some_ sense. Moving it
| behind a font control button makes _no_ sense.
| mkr-hn wrote:
| Tip you'll probably need soon: the address bar also functions
| as the "Find in page" feature.
| geraldcombs wrote:
| Apparently people only live on the east side of the Mississippi
| from ~ Cape Girardeau, MO to the gulf?
| geerlingguy wrote:
| Flood plains. Though... in some areas people live in them and
| complain to the Army Corps and local government every time they
| get flooded out.
| NiceWayToDoIT wrote:
| I am not sure how useful this map is, being uninhabited by humans
| does not mean useless. It also does not mean "hey, lets build
| something there".
|
| What about agricultural land, forests, water, forests, wild life
| ?
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(page generated 2021-01-18 23:00 UTC)