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Comment by anon4 | Hacker News Reader

That map looks just like a population map of the USA and UK, plus assorted English speakers from western Europe. Combined with the fact that the sound seems to grow stronger indoors, I think the source is inside their own heads. Not in the sense that they're crazy, though. Maybe as people get older and their inner ear changes slightly, the signals that are being sent when everything is silent also change, but the brain doesn't. So they interpret the "silent" signal as "the hum".

My first test would be stuffing their ears and putting them in a perfectly isolated acoustic chamber to see if they still hear it. I'm pretty sure they would.

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Relevant XKCD ("Heatmap"):

http://xkcd.com/1138/

Yes, exactly. Every time I see one of these I wish they would plot the per-capita occurrences as a heat-map instead, which would actually be useful. (A bit more work sure, but certainly doable.)

https://www.google.com/search?q=cartogram&tbm=isch

Those are neat, but from what I can tell a cartogram is something different from what I'm describing. From wikipedia: "A cartogram is a map in which some thematic mapping variable – such as travel time, population, or Gross National Product – is substituted for land area or distance." So they're basically distorted maps, where the distortions are proportional to a variable.

(It might help to include some explanation in your comment.)

Yeah, the most common cartogram in those pictures is population.

Therefore, each pixel of the cartogram contains an equal number of people in it.

If you bin your heatmap into pixels with equal number of people in them, then HOT regions in the final image will correspond not merely to the number of people who live in an area (like in the xkcd), but to the percentage of a constant number of people.

You can still recognize the underlying geography, because the population density isn't CRAZY skewed.

Here are some well-documented cartograms that give you a feel for what they can do:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/itsallpolitics/2012/11/01/163632378...

My thought was: they draw a map like this, if thats any indication of there ability to scientific/rational thinking, no wonder they never find the origin of (their particular) Hum. Also if you ask the internet if they too, see a pink elephant on the moon every 2th full moon, theres going to be a lot of responses telling you that they too, see a pink elephant on the moon every 2th full moon.

My own idea is to divide the amount of hum sufferers with the amount of population of the place, and THEN make a heatmap...

Maybe you need to cull places where there are too few people and 1 hum sufferer might already cause lots of heat, but I expect the result would be a proper amount of hum sufferers compared to total population of the place, maybe this way you can trace sources of those hums.

Also I bet lots of people don't talk about this publicy, because people say they are crazy or the sound is inside their head, I mentioned a high-frequency buzzing sound I hear on my apartment, and people already threw lots of disparaging and senseless remarks to me (even with me being very explicit that the sound comes from outside, because I cannot hear it when I close my windows or go to window-less rooms)

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