Kansas Flatter Than A Pancake
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!
3 Replies to “Kansas Flatter Than A Pancake”
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This is excellent! 🙂
Guess that makes it flatter than snot too. LOL 😀
This story is quite old, and while a funny story, quite wrong. In an attempt to disprove this fallacy, I created a algorithm for measuring flatness and published the initial results here (http://www2.ku.edu/~kugis/gisday/2009/ppt/Campbell.htm). This analysis has been scaled up to the entire continental US and the results will be revealed at the Great Plains / Rocky Mountains division of the AAG conference (http://fast.ucdenver.edu/rmgpaag/) in October.