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Stats, Maps n Pix
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4M ago
It's time to bring the curtain down on Stats, Maps n Pix now, after 1.5 million page views and 150 posts. I'll leave the blog archived here, but if you're looking for me, you can always find me via my business website.  When I started this blog as a replacement for my original one I was still working at a university doing academic stuff and it kind of fitted in with that. But now I'm not working in academia and instead I'm doing lots of interesting work with my company, Automatic Knowledge, so it's time to wrap it up here on the blog. Overall, it's now been 15 years of blogging from me so ..read more
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How many people live in the English green belt?
Stats, Maps n Pix
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5M ago
Over a decade ago I set out to understand exactly where England's green belt land was by getting my hands on the raw data. Eventually it became open data and there's an update every year, along with loads of stats. At the time of writing, the proportion of land in England designated as green belt* was 12.6% of the total. But nobody lives in the green belt, right? Or at least hardly anyone, right? Or at least not that many, right? If you search online you won't find an answer to this question so that's why I've been looking at it on and off for a few years and now I have what I think is a good ..read more
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GB railway stations + nearest station
Stats, Maps n Pix
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7M ago
I'm sharing a file of the location of all railway stations in Great Britain, put together from Table 1410 of the UK's Office of Rail and Road (ORR). So, clearly, a momentous occasion. I published something similar years ago and I see people still using it but the old one doesn't have new stations like Reston, Inverness Airport or Marsh Barton in it. Oh, and I also calculated the nearest station (as the crow flies) for each station, just out of curiosity. Here's the spreadsheet.  The real blockbuster of the summer I posted a few maps I made of this on my twitter, as a kind of ann ..read more
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Global terrain maps
Stats, Maps n Pix
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8M ago
A short post today, with some visuals. I used some Blue Marble imagery from NASA - one layer was topography and the other was the colour image of the earth for August - and then I used the prelease v2 of Aerialod to visualise it. I tweaked the Blue Marble colours slightly and the elevation and bathymetry is greatly exaggerated, for effect. I had a bit of fun with this. And this is the result. NASA Blue Marble + topography A few bumps in Europe and North Africa Some nice colours and interesting bumps here A view across most of North America ..read more
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A new UK constituency hex map
Stats, Maps n Pix
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9M ago
There are new constituency boundaries in the UK so we made a new hex map. This means that the ones used in previous elections have been replaced by a new set. There are still 650 constituencies but they are in many cases quite different so any election boffins/mappers will need to get used to them, and their new shapes and names, pretty quickly. Take a look at this interactive map if you want to compare them (will load slowly, is best on big screen). When is the next UK general election? Well, nobody knows the date but it has to be no later than 28 January 2025. Philip Brown and I knew al ..read more
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My QGIS YouTube channel
Stats, Maps n Pix
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9M ago
A short post today about the QGIS YouTube channel I just launched: called Map Academy. I have my Udemy courses online, and these are aimed at people who want a fully-fledged end-to-end QGIS course at intro or intermediate level. The Udemy courses are going pretty well and I have more than 6,000 students in 148 countries so far - with the top countries being the US, India, the UK, Germany, Canada, Nigeria, Turkey, Indonesia, Egypt and Brazil.  But I also wanted to put together some material for when people just want to know one thing, often when they're stuck. So that's what the channel is ..read more
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Intra-interstate populations
Stats, Maps n Pix
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1y ago
Another road-themed piece today, this time looking at US Interstates, and how many people live in between them. Why? Curiosity, plus it's a nice little data challenge using Census block population data from 2020. First off, let's start with the Beltway around Washington, D.C. - using 2020 Census data I get a total population of just under 2 million people (1,961,212), as you can see below. Web map of the whole US is here This is what the web map looks like. Click an area to get the population I loaded up a MapTiler streets backdrop layer in QGIS, created polygons from the&n ..read more
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The longest line (part 2)
Stats, Maps n Pix
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1y ago
In my last blog piece I wrote about my attempt to find a longer straight line in Great Britain that doesn't cross a public road than the one identified by Ordnance Survey in their 2019 blog. I did this using their OS Open Roads dataset, and I excluded public roads because that's what I think makes most sense. I found a longer line in a different area, though I definitely wouldn't recommend trying to walk it but I would recommend watching this video. I wasn't quite satisfied that my previous line was the definitive single longest line possible so I spent a bit more time on it and now I'm back t ..read more
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The longest straight line in Great Britain (without crossing a public road)
Stats, Maps n Pix
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1y ago
In short, I believe I've found a longer straight line without crossing a public road than the line identified by Ordnance Survey in 2019. Here's a web map of the route. Important stuff, clearly. Let me explain. This is a longer straight line than the one below Back in 2018 someone asked Ordnance Survey a question on Twitter, as follows: "what (and where) is the longest distance you can walk in a straight line in England/Wales/Scotland without crossing a road (defined as a paved surface for vehicular use)??" Note 'a paved surface for vehicular use'. This is the most important bit for ..read more
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Geometry generators in QGIS
Stats, Maps n Pix
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1y ago
So, you've heard about the mysterious ? geometry generator ?in QGIS and you want to know more? You're in the right place. No idea what I'm talking about but you do use QGIS? Well you're still probably in the right place because I'm going to explain things here, with examples you can try yourself. I've put this post together for anyone who really wants to know what a geometry generator in QGIS can do. So before going any further here's a map of US states where I have used a geometry generator style to move Alaska and Hawaii below the lower 48 states as they often appear on US maps. Re ..read more
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