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Earth divided in ten zones of equal population (europe.pub)
submitted 3 days ago by to c/mildlyinteresting@lemmy.world
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Source: https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/earth-divided-in-ten-zones-of-equal-population/

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[–] 35 points 3 days ago (5 children)

I don't believe there's a single way to arrange those zones, but instead that it becomes a consequence of some arbitrary choice of where to place the first one.

As such, I would like to see two versions of this concept: one in which the zone placement is chosen to maximize the size disparity, and another in which it's chosen to minimize it.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 days ago*

    Edit: now realizing that this is exactly what you were saying...

    I was thinking more about this and realized that once you decide the first segment, the rest are deterministic. Because the adjacent segments cannot be larger or smaller than containing 10% of the population.

    Further, once you define the east or west edge of the first segment, the other edge is also deterministic.

    In theory you could calculate every possible arrangement of zones to a certain accuracy, such as to every degree of 360. There's only as many possible combinations as there are starting positions for the first longitude you pick.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 days ago (1 child)

    yeah was thinking this. I mean right away you would thing you would draw the first border just left of iceland to sorta divide between new/old world. But then I look and it seems like this was done but in the pacific which makes a certain amount of sense given the larger pacific ocean and the cleaner break you get. Looks like it was made to keep the us all in one chunk as it takes part of russia in order to get all the alutian islands.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 days ago

    I mean, occam's razor says they just started at the international date line because that is the far left of most commonly used map projections and went left to right, I wouldn't be too confident reading any intent into this placement

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