The new Pointillism

Brandon Martin-Anderson would have made Seurat proud; using US Census Bureau data (and a very large server), he recreated US and Canadian population patterns by representing each person as one dot.

What really struck me on this map is how the gridded road network in the Midwestern US dictates population settlement pattern, while natural features (such as the interior valleys in California) drive population settlement elsewhere. Of course major cities are obvious, but obvious too are the millions of people on the Florida coast who are at great risk of sea level rise from climate change (as well as more intense hurricanes).

What do you see?

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