The MIT graduate student, Brandon Martin-Anderson, has built
an interactive online map that displays one dot for every resident of the
United States and Canada. U.S. Census has been doing them for years but he may
the first to assign one dot for each person.
As counted by the most recent censuses that's 341,817,095 black
smudges on the map; gradually dissolve into dot clusters and then individual
dots as you zoom in. The map contains no identifying labels, roads or
geographical features, so it can be hard to pinpoint locations.
The project took him about a week's worth of full-time
coding. He wrote a Python script to
generate points from census block-level counts of people and then wrote another
script to sort the dots.
Martin-Anderson, a researcher at the MIT Media Lab, says he
wanted "an image of human settlement patterns unmediated by proxies"
such as arterial roads or city and state boundaries.
He says "the reason why it (the map) keeps getting
shared around is that it intersects with everyone's personal narrative and People
want to be a piece of something larger".
Coincidentally, Foursquare, the location-based networking
app, published a similar interactive map last week that shows the locations of
500 million user check-ins around the world.
