Research finally answers a question for all eternity.

Kansas IS flatter than a pancake.

Kansas Is Flatter Than a Pancake
by Mark Fonstad 1, William Pugatch 1, and Brandon Vogt 2

1. Department of Geography, Texas State University, San Marcos, Texas
2. Department of Geography, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona

In this report, we apply basic scientific techniques to answer the question “Is Kansas as flat as a pancake?”

Figure 1. (a) A well-cooked pancake; and (b) Kansas. 1
While driving across the American Midwest, it is common to hear travelers remark, “This state is as flat as a pancake.” 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.

A Technical Approach to Pancakes and Kansas
Barring the acquisition of either a Kansas-sized pancake or a pancake-sized Kansas, mathematical techniques are needed to do a proper comparison. Some readers may find the comparing of a pancake and Kansas to be analogous to the comparing of apples and oranges; we refer those readers to a 1995 publication by NASA’s Scott Sandford 3, who used spectrographic techniques to do a comparison of apples and oranges.

One common method of quantifying ‘flatness’ in geodesy is the ‘flattening’ ratio. The length of an ellipse’s (or arc’s) semi-major axis a is compared with its measured semi-minor axis b using the formula for flattening, f = (a – b) / a. A perfectly flat surface will have a flattening f of one, whereas an ellipsoid with equal axis lengths will have no flattening, and f will equal zero.

For example, the earth is slightly flattened at the poles due to the earth’s rotation, making its semi-major axis slightly longer than its semi-minor axis, giving a global f of 0.00335. For both Kansas and the pancake, we approximated the local ellipsoid with a second-order polynomial line fit to the cross-sections. These polynomial equations allowed us to estimate the local ellipsoid’s semi-major and semi-minor axes and thus we can calculate the flattening measure f.

http://www.improb.com/airchives/paperair/volume9/v9i3/kansas.html

Measuring the flatness of Kansas presented us with a greater challenge than measuring the flatness of the pancake. The state is so flat that the off-the-shelf software produced a flatness value for it of 1. This value was, as they say, too good to be true, so we did a more complex analysis, and after many hours of programming work, we were able to estimate that Kansas’s flatness is approximately 0.9997. That degree of flatness might be described, mathematically, as “damn flat.”


Kansas is depressing. God love all Democrats that live there, it should be in the party platform that, we, the Democrats are dedicated to bringing some mountains and trees to Kansas. Of course that would as doable as * promise to add 1.4 million new jobs by 2004.

Then who will get the last laugh?

I mean, hey, if global warming continues that would take care of Oklahoma and Texas and if the western half of the US drops into the ocean due to massive seismic upheavel, it could happen.

Oh well, a Kansan can dream anyway.....

Just like we dream of the day when we will vote to elect a Democratic President. (Heck, I'd take a Democratic Senator!)

:-)

:toast:

About a dozen years ago, I drove across Kansas (heading on loooong roadtrip) in painted-up VW Campmobile, my honey, two dogs, and a cat. Everywhere we went, people waved, tooted their horns, gave the thumb's-up sign, etc., when they were passing us. Except in Kansas. Literally, NO ONE is the entire state waved or gave some indication until we were about 5 miles from the border - a state cop gave us a quick thumb's up...

I have nothing against Kansasians, they just don't wave.