Sorry, Albany, no Sweet Sixteen for you

March 28, 2019 7:00 PM

Just as the quest for the perfect NCAA Basketball tournament bracket is about to end for this year, you can still try your hand at the perfect population bracket. Which city will win? More importantly, how well can you do so that you can humblebrag about it in the ensuing thread? One of a zillion data visualizations available via the US Census Burueau's Data Visualization blog. [Previously]
posted by not_on_display (7 comments total)

This is fun - I'd like to see something similar for geographic sizes of municipalities. It would be pretty challenging given how unexpectedly expansive cities like Juneau, Butte, and Jacksonville are.

It also raises a question I've been curious about: How are MSAs (metropolitan statistical areas) defined for clusters of large municipalities where there's very little to distinguish where one ends and another begins and there's no significant break in population density?

Like, why isn't the Bay Area one MSA? Why is San Jose/Sunnyvale its own MSA but not Oakland/Fremont/Berkeley? Or take Riverside and the rest of the Inland Empire. It seems a bit of a stretch to call Riverside a high-density 'core' compared to its surroundings. Why is that separate from the the LA/Orange County MSA? Are these definitions just frozen in time, based on how separate and distinct cities were 70 years ago?
posted by theory at 8:10 PM on March 28, 2019

MSA's are defined by commuting patterns. They get revised after every census.
posted by postel's law at 8:41 PM on March 28, 2019 [2 favorites]

I got 52/63 for the metro areas, though it gets kind of easy when you already know what the top 4 are.

57/63 for the states, where I feel like I actually got more wrong but ok.
posted by LizBoBiz at 12:40 AM on March 29, 2019

In my first state try, Rhode Island was lucky to get a bye.
posted by GenjiandProust at 4:50 AM on March 29, 2019 [1 favorite]

What's weird to me is that it got easier in the sweet sixteen (15-1) than in the first round (21-11), when I'd imagine due to narrowing the bands it would have gotten harder. I suspect there's a familiarity effect in play when you subtract out some noise. About to do the third.
posted by gauche at 6:15 AM on March 29, 2019

There are two NCAA Division I basketball tournaments. The men's, which you reference, and the women's. Women are talking back, see Breanna Stewart's presser.
posted by Carol Anne at 6:34 AM on March 29, 2019 [3 favorites]

I am pretty happy with my score of 56 out of 63 in the states version of this. Who knew Tennessee was so populous?
posted by jessamyn at 9:22 AM on April 2, 2019 [1 favorite]