Google Maps, Internet and Population Density

Join me on a random Internet rabbit hole. While relaxing on my porch during sunset, I wondered: Does Google Maps do collective routing? I’ve always wondered this. Turns out, no. Google Maps optimizes for the current user only. It blends real time data collected from other users with historical data. But doing this for each individual at scale can help to balance traffic as a by-product. I ended up reading World scale inverse reinforcement learning in Google Maps, which I found intellectually humbling. Its fun to realize how deep things go when you look closely. Returning to my DuckDuckGo search results, I saw this image of global tweet density in a heat map. This is Twitter only, so not terribly useful — China is completely dark. But it reminds you how connected we all are, and reveals in which countries Twitter is popular. That image gave me a hankering for a proper global Internet heat map, and this one does the job. It was built by pinging every possible IP address and then…