Perhaps you should limit it to capital cities or states with a certain population size. Including all the European microstates does not seem appropriate to me; Andorra, Monaco, San Marino and the Vatican have very varying degrees of independence and geopolitical significance.
Fixed. It was originally Amsterdam, but I was experimenting with resolving ambiguous capitals by using the de facto seat of government, based on other feedback here (e.g. South Africa originally had multiple capitals). I've switched back to the more familiar atlas capital in ambiguous cases.
Indeed. It is rare to encounter a webgl/gpu visualization that doesn't rev up the fans at 100% while sitting idle, let alone to have this low latency handling input. Virtually all web demos I have seen run terribly because literally 0 attention is paid to actual rendering. The other day somebody submitted one here and admitted they didn't know backface culling was a thing. They also almost universally have no sort of frame pacing.
South Africa is split into 4 segments. Johannesburg is not a capital. Otherwise South Africa has 3 capital cities - administrative (Pretoria), legislative (Cape Town) and judicial (Bloemfontein) - but Pretoria is informally considered the "main" capital.
The Vatican is surrounded on all sides by Rome. It is on the boundary of Municipio I (historical center) and Municipio XIII (Aurelia), however. So is Municipio I considered the "actual" capital of Italy?
Also, the Vatican is the Holy See (as in seat), not Holy Sea (as in water)...
Excellent point. I've removed Vatican City from the map for now, as it is entirely enclosed by another capital city (Rome) and so its Voronoi cell will be tiny.
It would be interesting to see a map which was not minimizing [distance to capital] but instead minimized [distance to capital]/sqrt([national population]). The latter would be more robust against Sybil attacks.
I was wondering what kind of metric could be used to visualize a nation’s ability to project power. Maybe some ratio involving the furthest distance from the capital city to the nation’s border?
I’m curious why the sqrt of the population in the denominator?
the choice of which city makes it into a dot seems very arbitrary, just for my corner of the woods, I see Genova and Lyons are omitted even they they are larger than their dot-neighbours on this map...
I would love to see some stats with this. What countries gain/loss the most? Which countries are the last changed? What areas are the now the most countries away from their original country?
For largest absolute net gain of land area, I guess Mongolia wins the cake, getting a very large slice of Siberia while losing almost no land. For a percentage net gain of land area, maybe one of the European microstates, or East Timor.
Largest absolute net loss of land area is Russia for sure. Largest percent loss is... probably Russia? Again, losing Siberia is a large fraction of its land, and nobody else seems to be so screwed by the distance.
Excluding overseas territories, there's three borders between Yakutia-cum-Japan and its current capital, Moscow, and another case of that in the far western reaches of Brazil. If you include overseas territories, well, French Polynesia is currently almost literally antipodal from Paris, and I don't really know how you would count 'most countries away' in that case, but you can't really get further than that.
Now the corollary. For each country, given existing borders, place the capital directly in the geographic area centroid? Population centroid? Which capitals move most?
Hmm, looks like it models capital cities as a single point, and therefore assigns much more territory to Vatican City than would a model that took into account Rome's city boundaries
BC's intact too, if I'm reading this correctly. We lose some far north to Iceland and the very southern tip of Ontario to the US, and that seems to be it as far as I can tell. And as a trade we get New England, a good chunk of Washington, and the northern Plains and a bit of the Midwest. Not bad, really!
The funny thing about this is that it's almost realistic
But in fact of course geography plays a big part
That "non-existent" country between France and Spain would actually be the center of Occitan/Langues d'Oc. (Well, it's actually the location of Andorra)
It is also in the middle of the Pyrenees so of course that is going to push population out to the sides
Same thing for where the areas "bleed over" water regions or some rivers
Just for a bit of context, this site is from over a decade ago, at which point almost everyone outside of Ukraine used the old spelling of Kiev, despite the official transliteration change to Kyiv from 1995 [0]. Ukraine ended up having to run the KyivNotKiev [1] campaign to get other countries to adopt the new spelling, which mostly gradually happened over the last few years. But I think it's a bit much to expect every resource out there to retroactively update their spelling.
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