Thanks to NASA ...

You will observe that getting a Mac has neither endowed me with a steadier mouse hand, nor greater graphic design skills. Do not tempt me with Wacom tablets of inordinate cost.

mobbsy: looking at this map of city lights, the Pennines are much more an obstacle to the growth of the Liverpool conglomeration towards the Nottingham-Sheffield and Birmingham conglomerations than anything much in the Frankfurt region manages.

meirion: I don't have any very useful citation information for the database I'm using, but I suspect Manchester is counted as tiny (400k) because the city itself insisted on not being counted as part of the Mersey-and-parts-east blob; Liverpool (city) is marked as 450k, Liverpool (area) as 3.6 million