The + button doesn't work on Firefox (143.0.1; Linux; flatpak; x86-64). The - button works and so do other ways of zooming in (scrolling, double click).
zip codes are not geographic areas, they are a collection of mail delivery points. Sometimes those points are not geographically contiguous or may overlap
For those that may be interested, this is my project to easily get a list of every zipcode + city/state combo. It is available as JSON you can easily directly work with, or even try a service like this: https://usps-zip-codes.deno.dev/90210.
I have a pet peeve for having to enter my zip code after I've already had to type in the city and state. There wasn't any easily downloadable file that had every ZIP code though. I keep hoping more sites will ask for ZIP first and then just auto fill it using data like this. /wishfulthinking
i prefer my device to autofill data i've chosen to save for that purpose into a dumb form 99% of the time over the "start typing your address to locate..." functionality i see on checkout screens these days. maybe someday when they're faster/more transparent, sure, but for now the functionality you reference exists and is not great.
Thanks for the heads up on the newer https://postalpro.usps.com/ZIP_Locale_Detail file. I converted my script over to being a Python script that uses ZIP_Locale_Detail.xlsx as the source and doesn't require API access anymore.
My new file contains all of the ZIP + city/state combo from that file now.
To make this more than "this is just the xkcd population map joke" https://xkcd.com/1138/ , better title could be "Distribution Search of Zip Codes in the United States".
Point here is to type 0, 1, 2, etc. in the search box to see how zip codes with that prefix are geographically distributed.
I read an interesting story where this distribution comes from the manual mail sorting days... before computer sorting, postal workers could read the first digit and drop it into one of 10 boxes based on what part of the country it was going to, and so on for each additional digit.
Other countries have said "ah f it, it's all computers these days anyways, lets just make all addresses arbitrary random codes with no correlation between code distance and geographic distance. A database lookup at computer speed is a database lookup no matter what."
ZIP codes are such interesting identifiers. Their intended use was for facilitating more efficient mail sorting, they were not for providing any sort of human-friendly location data. Yet we still end up using them in so many parts of our lives for identity verification, navigation, population statistics, ...
They remind me of Social Security numbers in a way, where an identifier created for one narrow use (internal Social Security use only) ended up becoming a de facto standard (national identification number) due to the absense of a suitable alternative.
If you'd like to go further down the ZIP code rabbit hole, a few interesting codes to research are `00501`, `48222`, and `12345`. :)
Another interesting one is `10022-7463` which is commonly communicated as "10022-SHOE" because of how the letters are represented on a U.S. telephone keypad. This is the floor the houses the shoe department of a store, Saks Fifth Avenue.
Going to date myself a bit here but way back in the day (early 2000's ish) we had to pay a LOT of money to get a zipcode database lol. Early ecomm and site builds sometimes needed em and man was the data rough.
This is cool but just took me down memory lane a bit.
This map lists Portsmouth, NH as having the zip code 00210 - 00215, which... aren't valid zip codes. It does also show Portsmouth with the correct zip of 03801 - 03804.
I wonder how that happened, and if there are any other weird errors?
Honestly this is exactly the outcome I had wanted when I started smacking in codes starting with 000, then 001, and 002 actually had a little blip stayed highlighted so I investigated further.
I did not find this map very useful but interesting as a visual reference. Here is one with zip code boundaries on a map: https://www.unitedstateszipcodes.org/
0-3 is pretty interesting for how strongly you can see the outlines of some individual states. This becomes less and less clear as the numbers go higher.
I'd be very interested in a version of this for Canadian postal code, which have the form K1A 0B1, alternating letters and digits. The first letter is either a province or 1/2 territories, or for Ontario and Quebec is a portion of the province or a metro area. (Vancouver could reasonably be offended at not getting its own first letter.)
Santa Claus's postal code H0H 0H0 would be read as being in the Montreal area (starting with an H), but being rural (second character is a 0). H0 is an almost completely empty prefix, except for an indigenous reserve.
Neat visualization. There is a street performer in my town that has them all memorized (and many international zip codes as well) and makes a fun show of it, asking people what zip code they are from and putting them on a map. Sometimes it takes him a second to recall the exact town name but he always knows instantly what city they are close to, helped no doubt by the locality of the mapping. Example video:
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 51.3 ms ] threadStill cool!
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1K5oDtVAYzk
I have a pet peeve for having to enter my zip code after I've already had to type in the city and state. There wasn't any easily downloadable file that had every ZIP code though. I keep hoping more sites will ask for ZIP first and then just auto fill it using data like this. /wishfulthinking
https://github.com/pseudosavant/usps-zip-codes
My new file contains all of the ZIP + city/state combo from that file now.
https://www.printmag.com/designer-interviews/paula-scher-map...
Point here is to type 0, 1, 2, etc. in the search box to see how zip codes with that prefix are geographically distributed.
I read an interesting story where this distribution comes from the manual mail sorting days... before computer sorting, postal workers could read the first digit and drop it into one of 10 boxes based on what part of the country it was going to, and so on for each additional digit.
Other countries have said "ah f it, it's all computers these days anyways, lets just make all addresses arbitrary random codes with no correlation between code distance and geographic distance. A database lookup at computer speed is a database lookup no matter what."
They remind me of Social Security numbers in a way, where an identifier created for one narrow use (internal Social Security use only) ended up becoming a de facto standard (national identification number) due to the absense of a suitable alternative.
If you'd like to go further down the ZIP code rabbit hole, a few interesting codes to research are `00501`, `48222`, and `12345`. :)
Fab visualization.
- https://www.benfry.com/zipdecode/
- https://hw.leftium.com/#/item/446666
Of course, the results are pretty similar.
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Another interesting ZIP code visualization: https://eagereyes.org/zipscribble-maps/united-states
Santa Claus's postal code H0H 0H0 would be read as being in the Montreal area (starting with an H), but being rural (second character is a 0). H0 is an almost completely empty prefix, except for an indigenous reserve.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSFt38IS0QU