World Population by Time Zone
Cory Doctorow, scifi author and BoingBoing co-founder, once wrote a scifi novel called Eastern Standard Tribe (available free). It was fun read but what I enjoyed most was his idea that people would belong to a "tribe" based on their time zone. In Doctorow's world, your loyalties lie not with the country of your birth but with the people who are up when you are.
This evening I was thinking about this novel and idly wondered which tribe would be the biggest? In other words, which time zone is the most highly populated?
Looking at a map, the answer was obvious: it had to be UTC+8 which includes not only China but Malaysia, the Philippines, and more.
Still, the fun of such a frivolous question is less in the answer than in the answering, so I fired up Mathematica and a few calculations later generated this graph.
I cheated a little by using a simplifying assumption: if a country has multiple time zones, I divide its population evenly between them. This inaccuracy doesn't change the fact that our top three are... <drumroll>
- UTC+8: China and others
- UTC+5.5: India and others
- UTC+1: Western Europe and a good chunk of Africa
According to Mathematica, there are 39 different time zones ranging from UTC-11.5 to UTC+14. I wonder if anyone has visited them all? Now that would be a glorious adventure! :-)
Posted
almost 2 years
ago
2 responses
briansuda
said
Paul Clip
said
Brian,
Thanks a lot for your comment, I appreciate you taking up the challenge of making these results more accurate!
I think there's something to be said for the geonames data though. When I add all your population numbers together they only come to 2,746,443,084, far below the earth's pop.
FWIW my stats, when summed, come to 6,926,242,503.
This allowed me to grab the city's population and timezone. This gives me more accurate results per time zone than simply dividing the country's population over the number of timezones.
I only got 38 timezones and 1 of those is null.
array(38) {
[1]=>
int(453405509)
[4]=>
int(16148664)
["4.5"]=>
int(6566168)
[-4]=>
int(20405357)
[13]=>
int(3891624)
[-3]=>
int(76074295)
[-2]=>
int(86563541)
[""]=>
int(1170)
[-11]=>
int(32972)
[8]=>
int(389081095)
["10.5"]=>
int(1711432)
["9.5"]=>
int(189580)
[10]=>
int(8414368)
[11]=>
int(14767834)
[2]=>
int(248920607)
[6]=>
int(43014568)
[0]=>
int(125839835)
[3]=>
int(165858133)
[-5]=>
int(194527172)
[-6]=>
int(149243547)
[-8]=>
int(48973771)
[-7]=>
int(27286339)
["-3.5"]=>
int(244494)
["6.5"]=>
int(12052142)
[-10]=>
int(1570203)
[5]=>
int(80552953)
[-1]=>
int(364193)
[7]=>
int(89389874)
[9]=>
int(155950211)
["5.5"]=>
int(261789654)
["3.5"]=>
int(38740621)
[12]=>
int(118327)
[14]=>
int(3710)
["11.5"]=>
int(880)
["5.75"]=>
int(3636530)
["13.75"]=>
int(6288)
[-9]=>
int(593817)
["-4.5"]=>
int(20511606)
}