Don’t let anyone tell you that geographers aren’t cool! A group of three geographers from Texas State University and Arizona State University decided to test the old adage, “Kansas is flat as a pancake”. To quote the authors: “To the authors, this adage seems to qualitatively capture some characteristic of a topographic geodetic survey 2. This obvious question “how flat is a pancake” spurned our analytical interest, and we set out to find the ‘flatness’ of both a pancake and one particular state: Kansas.” Their method is reasonably sound and deliciously geographic! The results clearly show that a pancake has a flatness quotient of .957, whereas Kansas has a quotient of .9997 – what the authors call “damn flat”.

Man I love geography!