The autonomous administrative divisions in (the also wrong) Assam and elsewhere should be done too.
The Q-BAM Improvement and Core Thread
- Thread starter Iori
- Start date
This is excellent - great work! The old one was good, but I have to admit that I didn't like looking at places like Russia where its sorta just blobs with only 2 or 3 height levels. This one looks much much much better.
If you combine it with @Bob Hope's bathymetry and rivers, plus a little bit of aesthetics tweaking, I think it ends up looking really really nice.
The Russian censuses have been showing the Russian proportion of the population declining in several republics. I know there are some in the ethnic minority diaspora who make claims about their numbers being way higher but they generally tend to be the same people who think there's a mass support for independence in, say, Bashkortostan. Not reliable.
I mean who would have thought in 1985 Kazakstan or Azerbaijan would be independent in about 5 years right? People can be very unreliable, especially when the oppression falls apart
I was gonna reply to this with "well yeah but Azerbaijan was 80%+ Azeri in '89 so it can't really be compared to the modern minority republics" but then I checked and apparently the Kazakh SSR was only 40% Kazakh to 38% Russian in the 1989 census, so who knows! For comparison: according to the 2021 census Bashkortostan is 33% Bashkir, 25% Tatar and 38% Russian. Tatarstan is 54% Tatar.I mean who would have thought in 1985 Kazakstan or Azerbaijan would be independent in about 5 years right? People can be very unreliable, especially when the oppression falls apart
Has anyone ever tried to make a Q-BAM of the Human Footprint Index? I feel that this would also serve as a semi useful resource for maps like the Russian demographic one, since the regions which are hardly populated show up well in that dataset.
There are at least arcgis files from sources like Nasa available to work with.
As an aside, part of the reason I think this would be useful is that normal population maps are fallible and misleading. Large parts of cities which are devoted to industry or commerce are marked as uninhabited when using a census-based map for example, when in reality people spend just as much time there as they do at home. Plus, from my understanding, a lot of the data about human environmental impact and presence is collected remotely with things like light pollution watching from space. That captures data that totalitarian regimes can't really hide.
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It's also important to remember Urban centers always tend to muddle a lot of population and ethnicity against population density. That's why in China, Xinjiang, Qinghai, and Inner Mongolia especially, several counties have Han Chinese majorities, without occupying the vast majority of the land. That may be less of the case in Russia because those areas have way more habitable outskirts areas, but the same concept may still apply
Of course there is no way of knowing this at the moment considering the regimes nature but non-russian minorities in minority republics are accusing the goverment of using subtle counting tricks to hide the russian population decline, methods like counting the students when at school and classifying them all as russians while their parents are from another nationality so that they can disguise the huge drops in numbers of young russian children at those age groups, i know conditions are different but us census recorded a huge drop of non-hispanic white population from 64% to 58% in just 10 years and numbers show that in 2020 only 50 percent of the under 15 population is non-hispanic whites, these etnic declines started being noticed slowly with numbers of young children then turn into an avalanche as the older ones get old and die and not replaced
Been working on Russia once again, and I've switched over to the far east momentarily because the Amur was running through a mountain range on the topography map, as well as some other lakes and streams being in different locations.
Some parts still do feel a little weird to look at but that might just be the projections being different
The projection is not perfect because no matter how hard I tried there were always misaligned areas. The original projection is perfect, but Q-BAM happens to be off in all sorts of places, so the manual adjustment was a necessary step. However this is not perfect because it's basically impossible to make it perfect, so there will be a lot of areas where the alignment is off.
Okay.incl Omsk, Tomsk, and Novosibirsk Oblasts and Snake Island
I REALLY don't want to keep being "that" person, but this is somehow still wrong. I tried to use this today, and noticed that the Shaanxi-Shanxi border is actually not where it is supposed to be.
Here:
Marked in purple are the province boundaries that are still in error, and in red are the correct ones. If you're asking me how I know which one of these is correct, I invite you to look at a quick demonstration.
Here is a map of Qinghai, from wikipedia.
For your convenience I have done the overlay myself. I have lined up the prefectural boundaries in this map with the corresponding borders on the QBAM (which I do not dispute the accuracy of).
You can see fairly clearly that it does not line up with the purple lines, but is more or less an exact fit for the red lines.
In fact, the solution to all this nonsense has already been with us for months. Here!
Okay, this is the post that is the key to solving all of this. Literally just paste this onto the QBAM. Here, I've done it for you.
I would also like to point out that I am currently in the process of further improving the updated China patches I have already put out, because the outer provinces (Xizang, Xinjiang, Qinghai, Gansu, Ningxia Inner Mongolia, and the provinces in Manchuria) I produced still need some work. Inner Mongolia and the Manchurian provinces are the only ones still needing improvement so expect the "2.1" PRC patch the be here soon.
I have a working one for both 1900 and 1890, so I'll get onto some more when I have an opportunity later today!
Found something else missing in India, apparently the districts of Golaghat, Jorhat, and Sibsagar in Assam have been claimed by Nagaland ever since it's inception, but there's no indication of this on the map
The QBAM as of today, including all the recent patches from Sharklord (Russian east), Linbot (central China), and me (Daito Islands, Scottish coast/islands, Snake Island, Alboran Sea islands), as well as the Taiwanese native reservations from awhile back that weren't added previously:
