Christopher Hitchens's Slate column about North Korea is a good reminder of just how bad things are there (via Downtown Lad). Something struck me as odd, though. He links to a satellite photo showing the differences in nighttime lighting between north and south. The DPRK is way darker, as you'd expect...but it's so completely, unrelievedly dark that I have to wonder. Every single hospital blacked out, for instance? And you can see how blacking out military installations would help keep them from detection, but it also means that soldiers on lookout can't see what they're monitoring.

But even if we assume that the DPRK has managed to effect, through force and the unreliability of its power grid, a blackout of the whole country. the photo should still show at least some lights in Russia and China, right? Northeast Manchuria and Siberia aren't the most population-dense places on Earth...but look at the peninsula right under where it says 40N on the left. That's cut off right at the edge of Dalian, a Chinese city of 3 million people, which is at its tip. The outcropping below it is the Shandong Peninsula, which is also populous. While China may not have become a first-world country yet, I don't think its large northeastern cities are invisible at night. There was a similar photo that made the blog rounds a few years ago that looks more like what you'd expect.

Maybe I just know too little about what things are like in Chinese cities. The Federation of American Scientists, which houses the photo, doesn't seem likely to have doctored it. But the imaging seems to stop northwest of South Korea and Japan. There must be something here I'm missing.