alt.hn

6/8/2026 at 3:20:08 PM

World Capitals Voronoi

 https://www.jasondavies.com/maps/voronoi/capitals/

by vincnetas

6/11/2026 at 1:50:55 AM

The framerate and latency on this visualization is absolute magic. Hover the mouse around over the sphere: https://www.jasondavies.com/maps/voronoi/

by pithon

6/11/2026 at 2:40:28 AM

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.

by canyp

6/11/2026 at 4:49:54 PM

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.

by chrismorgan

6/11/2026 at 6:42:33 AM

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

by sheept

6/11/2026 at 7:26:11 AM

Fixed!

by jasondavies

6/11/2026 at 6:41:25 AM

South Africa is split into 4 segments. Johannesburg is not a capital. Otherwise South Africa has 3 capital cities - administrative (Pretoria), legislative (Cape Town) and judicial (Bloemfontein) - but Pretoria is informally considered the "main" capital.

by the_origami_fox

6/11/2026 at 9:22:43 AM

Fixed!

by jasondavies

6/11/2026 at 8:30:51 AM

Came here to say this.

by rubenvanwyk

6/11/2026 at 11:30:15 AM

Perhaps you should limit it to capital cities or states with a certain population size. Including all the European microstates does not seem appropriate to me; Andorra, Monaco, San Marino and the Vatican have very varying degrees of independence and geopolitical significance.

by Beretta_Vexee

6/11/2026 at 1:22:03 PM

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.

by zamadatix

6/11/2026 at 9:42:18 AM

The Vatican is surrounded on all sides by Rome. It is on the boundary of Municipio I (historical center) and Municipio XIII (Aurelia), however. So is Municipio I considered the "actual" capital of Italy?

Also, the Vatican is the Holy See (as in seat), not Holy Sea (as in water)...

by pcrh

6/11/2026 at 9:58:36 AM

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.

by jasondavies

6/11/2026 at 10:43:02 AM

Very nice.

I guess most dutchies would disagree with the decision to pick De Hague as the Main Capital, though :-)

While all power is in De Hague , Amsterdam definitely is the Capital. De Hague is for complaining about, Amsterdam is for celebrating.

by maybewhenthesun

6/11/2026 at 10:54:59 AM

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.

by jasondavies

6/11/2026 at 4:38:19 AM

It would be interesting to see a map which was not minimizing [distance to capital] but instead minimized [distance to capital]/sqrt([national population]). The latter would be more robust against Sybil attacks.

by cperciva

6/11/2026 at 7:57:36 AM

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?

by mckn1ght

6/11/2026 at 3:04:23 PM

Square root of the population is because that's what it takes to normalize large vs small countries. Imagine slicing a country into quarters; each slice has a quarter of the population and half the radius.

by cperciva

6/11/2026 at 1:12:20 PM

I think that's supposed to be read as "or"? (I momentarily had the same confusion myself.)

by MarkusQ

6/11/2026 at 12:14:56 PM

It took me this map to realize the capital of Sri Lanka is Sri Jayawardenepura Kotte, and not Colombo as I thought for over 30 years.

Always interesting to find capital cities which are in fact not the most famous cities from that country. Makes for great trivia questions.

by spprashant

6/11/2026 at 12:41:54 PM

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.

by THX1137

6/10/2026 at 11:22:52 PM

Interesting, if a country has multiple capitals, it gets split even more!

by forthwall

6/11/2026 at 9:34:48 AM

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

by jasondavies

6/11/2026 at 7:32:17 AM

I think Montevideo’s slice of Antarctica is the craziest.

by keybored

6/11/2026 at 9:48:01 AM

Las Malvinas son Uruguayo.

by pcrh

6/11/2026 at 6:14:56 AM

The funny thing about this is that it's almost realistic

But in fact of course geography plays a big part

That "non-existent" country between France and Spain would actually be the center of Occitan/Langues d'Oc. (Well, it's actually the location of Andorra)

It is also in the middle of the Pyrenees so of course that is going to push population out to the sides

Same thing for where the areas "bleed over" water regions or some rivers

by raverbashing

6/11/2026 at 7:28:15 PM

Suppose right before this re-bordering takes place, the countries are given the chance to change the capitals' location. Suppose further that they all do it to maximize the area after re-bordering.

I wonder how much the result will differ?

by f137

6/11/2026 at 1:15:12 AM

Taipei claiming a big chunk of the PRC. Probably go down as well as Ottawa and Mexico City claiming big chunks of the USA

by mattoxic

6/11/2026 at 2:28:28 AM

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

by yellowapple

6/11/2026 at 12:23:18 PM

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

by nsavage

6/11/2026 at 1:25:56 PM

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

by orthoxerox

6/11/2026 at 4:53:53 AM

New Risk board released

by T_S_

6/11/2026 at 4:39:09 PM

Looks like it uses seven colors (including bodies of water). Can it be done with fewer colors? The four color theorem does not quite apply, as all bodies of water have to be the same color.

by dimview

6/12/2026 at 2:33:40 PM

Well, this was a creative way of solving Iran's blockade of the Strait of Hormuz!

by CGMthrowaway

6/11/2026 at 2:27:22 PM

@jasondavies, if you're still taking small enhancement requests - a fullscreen button (for the visualization, not the whole page) would be fabulous

by zamadatix

6/10/2026 at 11:28:17 PM

I would love to see some stats with this. What countries gain/loss the most? Which countries are the last changed? What areas are the now the most countries away from their original country?

by pimlottc

6/11/2026 at 12:05:49 AM

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.

by jcranmer

6/11/2026 at 3:19:54 AM

I dunno, New Zealand getting a big chunk of Antarctica is a pretty big percentage gain too.

by radpanda

6/11/2026 at 6:54:25 PM

I don't know who would be more upset - the UK for losing so much to Ireland or France for losing a little bit to the UK.

by zamadatix

6/11/2026 at 6:35:02 AM

Speedrun: Starting World War III, any%

by legostormtroopr

6/11/2026 at 8:14:52 AM

would be interesting to see one that takes into account things like railroads or terrain ruggedness

by gnoll_of_gozag

6/10/2026 at 11:27:32 PM

Dublin knabs a decent chunk of Great Britain, Copenhagen gets southern Sweden. Seems fair.

by martinclayton

6/11/2026 at 6:12:29 AM

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

by raverbashing

6/11/2026 at 1:25:03 PM

Join the Celtic Union, don't be shy!

by OisinMoran

6/11/2026 at 6:13:52 AM

the choice of which city makes it into a dot seems very arbitrary, just for my corner of the woods, I see Genova and Lyons are omitted even they they are larger than their dot-neighbours on this map...

by polotics

6/11/2026 at 9:22:04 AM

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

by yiyus

6/11/2026 at 1:08:46 AM

Ukraine's capital is misspelled "Kiev". Should be "Kyiv"

by Svoka

6/11/2026 at 8:30:00 AM

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

by falcor84

6/12/2026 at 6:03:22 AM

Thank you for westsplaining me my history.

It was always Kyiv. Your (personal or collective) ignorance and/or obsession over moscowite imperiealists doesn't change the name of my city.

by Svoka

6/11/2026 at 10:59:13 AM

Kiev is a perfectly valid English spelling.

by 4gotunameagain

6/12/2026 at 6:03:58 AM

Love when people try to explain me how to call my city.

by Svoka

6/13/2026 at 1:14:39 PM

Yeah, in English. Turns out you cannot choose how other languages refer to your country or your city, who would've guessed ?

Please only refer to Ethiopia as ܟ݁ܽܘܫ from now on. They know how their country is called.

by 4gotunameagain

6/11/2026 at 9:23:46 AM

Fixed!

by jasondavies

6/12/2026 at 6:02:13 AM

Thanks. Only correct response.

by Svoka

6/11/2026 at 4:40:39 AM

Now the corollary. For each country, given existing borders, place the capital directly in the geographic area centroid? Population centroid? Which capitals move most?

by mlsu

6/10/2026 at 11:54:49 PM

I find it very funny to imagine Keralam and Tamil Nadu part of Sri Lanka.

by Conscat

6/11/2026 at 9:26:02 AM

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

by rv1994

6/11/2026 at 1:09:15 AM

Madison, Canada. Now I just need to sell this to the Canadians.

by NathanielBaking

6/10/2026 at 11:14:28 PM

I want to see one a diagram which includes the oceans too

by jezzamon

6/11/2026 at 12:54:44 AM

Hmm, looks like it models capital cities as a single point, and therefore assigns much more territory to Vatican City than would a model that took into account Rome's city boundaries

by Georgelemental

6/11/2026 at 2:07:37 AM

Yes, this is the point, right?

by bensyverson

6/11/2026 at 9:55:33 AM

It says "determined by the closest capital city". The only area where Vatican City is closer than (some part of) Rome is within Vatican City.

by Liquid_Fire

6/11/2026 at 2:41:47 AM

It is the point, precisely.

by canyp

6/10/2026 at 11:15:27 PM

Huh, Canada seems roughly intact (except for BC).

by vulcan01

6/10/2026 at 11:43:58 PM

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!

by wk_end

6/8/2026 at 3:20:08 PM

If country boundaries were Voronoi diagrams with respect to their capitals.

by vincnetas

6/10/2026 at 11:05:18 PM

Great work.

by syats

6/10/2026 at 10:43:24 PM

I really enjoyed this.

by brunellus

6/10/2026 at 11:16:01 PM

Seems right, ship it.

by bwestergard

6/11/2026 at 12:04:53 PM

[flagged]

by yattapick