World Capitals Voronoi

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.

I find zooming on this world capitals one to be quite slow for some reason, mostly well below 10fps, and it’s rendering all frames rather than skipping to keep up (the wrong decision, I reckon). Panning is excellent; and zooming is fine on /maps/voronoi/, which has only a dozen or so points, which I guess must be few enough not to slow it down. I’m curious what’s going on, but not enough to delve into the code myself.

Actually, even /maps/voronoi/ lags if you zoom in really far, and in a way that can break the scroll capture—I presume the code is non-passively watching scroll events and calling preventDefault(), but once it’s lagging hard enough the browser takes matters into its own hands and says you didn’t act fast enough.

It feels quite choppy on mobile, but I think it could be fixed by adding touch-action: none

Fixed!

Came here to say this.

Regardless of how one selects states there will always be comments saying it was done wrong. Don't fall into this trap, just stick with one of the UN lists as has already been done here (looks like members+recognized observer states) and accept not everyone can be perfectly pleased with what is considered a state or not.

Interactive data filters would definitely be fun on its own account though. E.g. the population slider or by having a button making it the largest cities above x population instead of countries/capitals or so on with centers of states. It looks like there are several different maps on this site, such things may make it more a single experience with more overall value than the separated parts. Still cool as it is though :) just one possibility to go further with it.

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.

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.

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?

Not quite - it's somewhat like South Africa in that certain institutions are in Colombo and others in Kotte (specifically the legislature is in Kotte). In addition, Kotte and Colombo are nearly adjacent.

I've updated the map to use only one de facto capital city per region.

Las Malvinas son Uruguayo.

Funny enough, Mexico's borders on this globe ain't far off from where they were before the Mexican-American War.

The bad news is that we lose Windsor in this trade. The good news is that we pick up Seattle and Minneapolis.

Well, it has claims on all of China in reality, being the rump state.

Eyeballing the map:

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.

If they added Cardiff and Edinburgh I think the map would be more realistic

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.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_Kyiv

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KyivNotKiev

Kiev is a perfectly valid English spelling.

Fixed!

It's not arbitrary. They are the capitals. Capitals are not necessarily the largest cities.

Although ethnically they're closer to Sri Lanka than North India

Yes, this is the point, right?

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!