Posts Tagged ‘global population’
“You can’t be at the pole and the equator at the same time”*…
Harvard grad student Bill Rankin, the proprietor of the fascinating Radical Cartography, has created maps that display the sum of all population living at each degree of latitude or longitude (circa 2000). As one can see above, there’s a decided northerly bias: roughly 88 percent of the world’s population lives in the Northern Hemisphere; about half, north of 27 degrees north. As Rankin observes, “taking the northern and southern hemispheres together, on average the world’s population lives 24 degrees from the equator.”
As for longitude, there’s a wholly-unsurprising skew to Asia…
[TotH to Geekosystem]
* Vincent van Gogh
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As we search for the strength in numbers, we might send exploratory birthday greetings to Claude-Joseph Désiré Charnay; he was born on this date in 1828. An archaeologist and an inveterate traveller, Charnay is remembered both for his explorations of Mexico and Central America, and for his pioneering use of photography to document his journeys. Using the then-newly available wet collodion process (which was, coincidentally, invented by Frederick Scott Archer, who died on this date in 1857), Charney became expert at producing large photographic plates in difficult field conditions; he thus created an early photographic record of various cultures (and with Le Plongeon, various archaeological sites) around the world.
Striking the right balance…
From National Geographic, an elegant plea for global balance…
As we reframe our sense of our place in the world, we might wish an expansive Happy Birthday to Walter E. Diemer; he was born on this date in 1904. Diemer was working as an accountant for the Fleer Chewing Gum Co., when in 1928 he accidentally invented bubble gum while experimenting in his spare time with recipes for a chewing gum base. Fleer sold a test batch in a Philadelphia grocery store, which sold out in one afternoon. Diemer (who later became senior vice president of of the company) then taught Fleer salesmen how to blow bubbles, so they could demonstrate the product as they traveled from store to store selling the penny-a-piece gum. Almost 3/4 of a century later, Diemer still could not believe that “all the bubble gum in the world came from my five-pound batch…” The pink color of Diemer’s first batch is still standard.
Diemer and his Dubble Bubble (image source)
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