Thanks to NASA ...

[fivemack]

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

Comments

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Sometimes Wacom tablets of not-so-inordinate cost may be had through eBay. FWIW.

[fanf]

How are they defining conurbations? Surely the London area is bigger than Paris (judging by the lights).

One of the odd things about Paris (qua Paris) is that its population has been rougly constant at 2M for about 250 years, since they decided to fix the boundary at what is now the Peripherique. It wasn't until the creation of Greater London in this century, reinforced by the M25, that London has acquired a strong boundary. If Paris is allowed to include its sprawling non-Parisian suburbs, I think London should too. After all, the Underground goes all the way to Amersham.