I would like to see this done more granularly (counties?) and again using population flows to weight edges (and thus introducing non-local edges). I’m somewhat surprised I’ve never seen this before and think it’d be very illustrative.
It'd be fun to see this for the whole world. It would also make it easy to compute the answers to common quiz questions involving doubly landlocked countries, countries with most borders, etc.
Curiously that doesn't seem to be accessible without logging in to Twitter, and I'm not inclined to do so at the moment; do you have another link to the game?
Did you open it in a tab that was not immediately made active?
There seems to be some sort of issue with Twitter whereby the javascript to fetch/render the tweet doesn't fire if you open it in a background tab and then visit the tab.
Refreshing the page causes the javascript to correctly fire and the tweet is displayed. This is due to Twitter no longer pre-rendering the page server side, its all done client side.
Also makes it impossible to use Twitter from a browser with javascript disabled.
I think Twitter might be throttling anonymous/not logged in users. On desktop, where I'm logged in I've never had an issue with retrieving content, on mobile, where I'm not, no matter the browser, it's hit or miss (I'd estimate around 30% of the time I need to refresh)
This is mostly an artifact of how eastern states states are smaller because most states on accession to the union were within an order of magnitude vs peers population wise and the east was much more densely populated.
I do wonder though if the west coast wouldn't be better managed if the states were split up a bit more population wise like in the east.
Adding bodies of water (great lakes, gulf, 2 oceans) may help fix the Rhode island issue and this one. Or perhaps make it worse (my expectation is they'd act as anchors of a sort)
Lake Superior is the largest freshwater body of water in the world. Claiming there isn’t a material difference between that and the Delaware River is weird.
When we are looking at a map of the US, they don’t draw the Delaware River. They do draw the Great Lakes.
Politically, since you can't walk from one to the other without crossing intervening political entities or relying on bulk transportation carriers, no.
Get in a row boat in Michigan. Row really hard. You can get to Minnesota without crossing any other border. And you'll come out the other side with ripped arms!
That may be the real key. Michigan to Minnesota stays within US territory. New York to Rhode Island and Providence Plantation stays within US territory. Texas to Alaska does not, no matter which mode of travel you chose. Texas to New York might. Shall we go there?
No, it’s a serious question as topologically they do border each other. So, are they arguing being able to sail from A to B is enough or must they be sailing across freshwater etc. Borders do get drawn across bodies of water all the time, but deciding if France and the UK border each other but Spain and Italy don’t is arbitrary.
Spain is the closest country to some parts of Italy. So, they limit each others economic exclusion zones. That said it’s close to 400 miles between them across open ocean. Further economic exclusion zones are a fairly recent and thus an arbitrary thing.
> Ah, then the post should have gone farther: every coastal state, including Alaska and Hawaii, should have been bordered by each other.
That's not how geopolitical borders work. A country's segments (e.g. states) could have borders between them, but that doesn't mean that each has border with each other.
They just all belong to the same entity (e.g. here, the US).
Sufficiently far out from land (IIRC 10 miles) the ocean becomes "international waters", and no country legally controls it. There's a border between the territorial waters of a given country and these international waters along the coast.
There's also noun/verb confusion. A state has borders (noun). A state can border another (verb). State A has a border, state B has a border, and A borders B.
California has a border with International Waters. Hawaii is directly surrounded by International Waters. California does not border Hawaii, though both have borders and border International Waters.
No difference, that grammatical change from plurar to singural wasn't part of my point. You can also read it as:
"A country's segments (e.g. states) could have borders between them, but that doesn't mean that each has borders with each other."
Another commenter explained what I meant well, but here's my explanation:
The US might have a border with Canada, but doesn't mean that Colorado also has a border with Canada.
Similarly, Alaska and Hawaii might be part of the US, and thus their borders are the US borders too, but that doesn't mean e.g. Hawaii borders Nebraska.
Now borders might be on land or on water, but they're still borders. As long as another entity is not in between (e.g. Canada, as is the case between e.g. US and Alaska, or the Ocean between the US and Hawaii).
The idea of optimizing a graph layout based on the subject matter that its modeling is a really interesting idea. I'm in the camp of always interested in more visual programming techniques / aids, so it would be really great for us to be able to visualize something as complex as a large program this way.
I've used dot+graphviz to visualize algorithms and data structures before. The syntax makes it really easy to get started with, just print out "x -> y;" in your inner loop or whatever.
Capitals can be very much eccentric in a state (the distance from Cheyenne, Wyoming to Helena, Montana is (eyeballing) about three times that to Denver, Colorado, for example, but I would say Wyoming borders Montana about as much as it borders Colorado)
Average distance of all pairs of points in the two states (hm, maybe not. That could behave weirdly for states that aren’t very ‘compact’) or geometric mean of the fraction of a state’s border shared with the neighboring state would be fairer. Or maybe, the geometric mean of the fraction of the area of State S is closest to state T and the fraction of the area of state T that is closest to S?
Alternatively, make the states clusters, add all cities on highways as vertices, and use highways stretches between cities as edges.
Force-directed layout has no guarantees that a planar graph will be drawn planar. It often comes out that way, given how the algorithm works, but not always. Especially nodes that are "trapped" between others may have trouble "escaping" to the other side of an edge at times, due to the forces involved.
It may help increasing the dimensions for Graphviz (I think its force-directed layout can work in up to 10 dimensions), but there's still a step involved that projects everything to 2D in the end, so it might still happen.
Yes, force-directed layout doesn't consider number of crossings. dot is the only graphviz program that reduces crossings, and because of the level assignment constraint, even small graphs like K_4 or K_2,2 have crossings that could be avoided by just routing edges differently.
In terms of drawing graphs of the U.S. states or data like that, it should be possible to, say, create a point at the centroid of every region, then connect the adjacent regions to form a mesh, then feed the mesh to neato with some options to relax the layout but retain the mesh. This is what the overlap removal algorithm does anyway. See https://www.graphviz.org/Documentation/GH10.pdf, at least the figures.
There's plenty of recent work that improves on some of the graphviz algorithms. It's a pity that without a convenient way to incorporate such inventions in a larger system, it tends to languish and not have as much impact or isn't easily available to people that could use it. Nocaj/Ortmann/Brandes work on untangling hairballs is another example: http://jgaa.info/accepted/recent/NocajOrtmannBrandes.pdf We even have this prototyped in a directory somewhere but it would be more work to merge it into the release.
https://f000.backblazeb2.com/file/rjp-hosted-files/bigneatot...
(Also the linked graphviz file has FL only linked to GA - surely it should have AL as well since AL is linked to FL?)