Here are some questions for you to think about. When you understand them, you will understand my point.

* is the brownish-red population scale a linear or log scale?
* does the eye perceive changes in brownish-red linearly or logarithmically?
* does brightness show up on a photograph linearly, logarithmically, or exponentially in wattage?
* do multiple mostly co-located small lights of combined wattage W show up as bright or brighter than a single light of wattage W?
* does local vegetation impede the transmission of light to a satellite? how about the local vegetation at a particular time of year?
* do all societies of similar advancement levels value lighting to similar degrees?
* does amount of lighting increase linearly with population density?

That is why this post is nothing more than a stupid parlor trick. Get a clue, and look at something like per-capita electricity consumption, if you want to go down this route.

It’s so obvious that you guys have never taken any statistical analysis courses.

To bring in current events, this fascinating satellite image of the Korean peninsula at night offers a close-up view reflecting one of the interesting discrepancies between the above world maps: the clear delineation of electrical resources between these two rival states. Though the population density of South Korea is more than twice that of North Korea (something which the world population density map doesn’t really reveal), this nevertheless seems an incredible divide.

European colonizers talked about bringing more metaphorical forms of light to the world (e.g. by spreading Christianity).

More recently, communications technologies and networks (e.g. fibre optic cables) have been presented as forms of light (which is somewhat fitting in the case of the fibre optic cables, since light is transmitted through them).

Yet, all of that ‘North’ ‘Western’ -ization also has coincided with more lighting — in the sense of light bulbs, and what not;
so it’s somewhat true that Anglo and Euro societies are seeking to spread light across the world.

If we take into account all of that globalizing, it brings some new perspective to discussions about ‘whiteness.’

Surely lighting is one fundamental feature of modern societies. While these social applications of technologies and energy are just one feature of modern life, that lighting is very pervasive (and taken-for-granted).

Lighting in Africa certainly doesn’t correspond with population density — though South Africa is somewhat of an exception (which basically is an Afrikaaner (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afrikaaner) legacy, of course), and the northern-most areas are exceptions too. In Asia and northern Oceania, Japan seems to be the only country with proportionate lighting. (Perhaps South Korea is less out-of-synch as well? It’s difficult to tell.) Eastern Europe clearly has relatively less of that modern lighting as well.
Some areas of Latin America also stand out (but not in a way that I’m finding easy to summarize). The Caribbean seems like another area with less lighting — though it’s difficult to tell how the Caribbean fits in (in this case, because of the size of the islands and the scale of the maps — whereas the Caribbean often is difficult to comprehend because of its complex hybridity). Southern Ireland also seems like a place where there may be noteworthy discrepancies.

(I had e-mailed in a grab bag of international graphics. I probably didn’t write anything about the lighting at night image in that e-mail.)

For awhile now I have had a vague notion that the image of the world lit up at night captures international disparities (to some extent). The juxtapositioning of the images in this blog post helps me to follow-up those hazy thoughts — which I’m trying to sort through as I’m typing out this comment.

Cheers.