Awesome Map

The Atlantic Cities features the Census Dot Map, which maps a dot for every person in the United States:

Brandon Martin-Anderson, a graduate student at MIT's Changing Places lab, was tired of seeing maps of U.S. population density cluttered by roads, bridges, county borders and other impediments.
Fortunately for us, he has the technological expertise to transform block data from the 2010 Census into points on a map. One point per person, and nothing else. (Martin-Anderson explains the process in more depth here.)
At times, the result is clean and beautiful to the point of abstraction, but when you know what you're looking at, it's a remarkably legible map. And while it resembles, broadly, Chris Howard's political map of density that appeared after the presidential election, Martin-Anderon's map can be magnified at any point. Users can watch each of the country's metro areas dissolve from black to white. Even stripped of the features (roads, rivers) that shape human settlement, density has its own logic.

The area that has struck me on photos of the earth at night, besides the Bakken gas flares, is the corridor from Atlanta to Charlotte to Winston-Salem to Research Triangle.  I hadn't realized hos much that area has grown. It looks to have the potential to grow into a southern extension of the northeast corridor.  And yes, there is a reason for the coasts to ignore flyover country.  Past the 98th meridian, there ain't much out there until you hit the Central Valley.