See Where a Random Person Lives

Have you ever spun a globe to pick a random location? It sucks. Most of the time, your finger will land on some barely populated region or, worse, the middle of an ocean. What if there were a better way?

Below is a tool that picks a random city weighted by population. That is, the probability of picking a given location is proportional to the number of people that live there. Another way to say this: each click selects a person uniformly at random and shows you where they live. Hopefully this gives more weight to more interesting places!

I think it's also fun for just getting a feel for where people actually live. For instance, if you look at 100 locations, how many of them are places you've heard of?

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Details: The population data is taken from GeoNames. It consists of all cities with population at least 500, which is about 229,000 cities. If you wanted to vacation in a rural area with a dozen residents, I'm afraid you'll have to find it yourself.