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Proof Is In: Kansas Is Flatter Than A Pancake
plotdot writes "When motorists drive across Kansas with its expansive, fertile fields of grain, they most often observe that the state is flat as a pancake. Now, three scientists have proved that observation wrong. The May/June issue of Annals of Improbable Research
(AIR) carries a story by Mark Fonstad, William Pugatch, and Brandon Vogt proving that Kansas is actually flatter than a pancake."
the Annals of Improbable Research group do. Quite interesting if your extremly bored i might say.
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Pancake sales in Kansas increase by 20% because the Citizens of Kansas now feel in some way superior to the pancakes!
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I think that "flatness" was incorrectly measured in this case. What should have been used as the flatness measure is the RMS of the discrete slopes in the measurements at a sampling interval measured at the lowest of the two sampling intervals (if the pancake laser raster contained 500 measurements, then only 500 measurements (derived?) of the USGS cross section would be considered).
Fitting an ellipse just tells you if the state is eccentric. If the state was a completely upwards tilted plane, either it's perflectly flat, or it's moderately (but constantly) non-flat. I assume it's the latter. Now imagine a state containing nothing but up-and-down hills of the same gradient as before. According to the ellipsoid measure, the state could be considered flatter, when in fact it is should be less flat because of the changes in grade.
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Its not exactly hilly like a costal California city might be, but most of it isn't too flat. I live in the Kansas City area; there's plenty of hills around. And when I'm not in KC I'm attending school at KSU, where it is also not flat. The region is called the Flint Hills. Not the Flint Plains, nor the Flint Flatter-than-Pancakes. Hills.
Of course, do be warned, I've never lived on a pancake, so my anecdotal evidence might be flawed =).
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"But then again that's as useful as complaining it's not news for nerds, stuff that matters."
Who but a nerd would correct somebody about the flatness of Kansas when compared to a fluffy brekfast food?
Declaring kansas flatter than a pancake based upon a comparison to ONE pancake hardly seems fair. A mean value for the flatness of a pancake should have been derived from multiple pancakes and a standard deviation value given. Besides, you get hash browns and a side of variable meat with the 3-pancake special at IHOP.
I'm reminded of a scene in one of Donald Westlakes weirder caper novels. Two guys are travelling through a really flat section of Oklahoma. One is a stone killer with no sense of humor or irony. They reach a place where the land is so flat and featureless, you can't even see the horizon. The killer turns to the other guy and says, "You know, before the white man came, there was absolutely nothing here!"
to which my friend calmly replied -> I'm reminded of a scene in one of Donald Westlakes weirder caper novels. Two guys are travelling through a really flat section of Oklahoma. One is a stone killer with no sense of humor or irony. They reach a place where the land is so flat and featureless, you can't even see the horizon. The killer turns to the other guy and says, "You know, before the white man came, there was absolutely nothing here!"
One of my friends was hitch-hiking across Kansas/Oklahoma when a really weird guy picked him up. They drove for miles and miles without the guy saying anything or even looking at him. Finally he said in a low, slow voice, with his eyes fixed steadily on the road ahead -
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
I mean, why would anyone waste their time to prove Kansas is flatter than a friggin pancake? Sure, we've seen pretty pointless things on slashdot, but in what way is this gonna help us discover The Meaning Of Life?
They should use their time to find out The Meaning Of Life.
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Testing the limits of the U.S. Postal Service:
http://www.improb.com/airchives/paperair/volume6/
Worth the read.
...when you consider that the globe would be smoother than a squash (or racket) ball if it were shrunk to the same size.
All things in moderation; including moderation
that no one got paid for that.
With a statement like that, nothing else needs to be said.
... Kansas is flattering a pancake. But then I wonder what for?
You need less maple syrup to cover kansas than the equivilent sized pancake????
The single biggest problem is that Interstate 70 (which runs across the northern section of the state) goes through some of the most MIND-NUMBINGLY BORING terrain I've ever seen, and since that is how most people who cross the state see it they form an unjustified opinion.
Most of Kansas used to be inland see, millenia ago. Hence the flatness - the ocean bottom deposited uniformly across the state.
However, IF you are going to be going through Kansas, let me give you some pointers on where to go:
Southeastern section: Go see Big Brutus in West Mineral, KS.. If you have any interest in mechanical engineering you'll love this.
South Central: The Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center has the best collection of Russian space hardware outside Russia itself, as well as US gear. They were the first to be made a Smithsonian partner, and that was as much so that the Smithsonian could gain access to the Cosmospere's collection as the other way around. Hutchinson, KS - and if you were planning on going across on I-70 I's suggest you drop down on I-35 (throught the Flint Hills)to US-50 then across into Hutch. Stop by Yoder, KS and get some Cinnamon Rolls at the Carriage Crossing Restaurant.
If you are going towards New Mexico, drop down and take I-160 from Medicine Lodge through the Gypsum Hills. There IS scenery in Kansas - we just don't run our major roads through it.
North West: If you are heading to Denver, you pretty much have to take either I-70 or K-96. If you are on I-70, stop through Quinter, KS and see Castle Rock, a natural formation akin to the Badlands in South Dakota.
Also, you can go to Monument Rocks which is a similar sort of geography.
Also on I-70 in Hays, KS is the Sternberg Museum of Natural History which will be a hit with any parent of children who are interested in dinosaurs.
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Now I just moved home to Central Illinois after living in Kansas for 4 years. I lived in the KC area and I've toured Western Kansas several times and I can tell you that Central Illinois is way flatter than Kansas. Kansas has rolling hills/plains and is only really flat on I-70. Central Illinois is flat. There's no getting around it. When you can look out your door and see 30 miles away (when the corn is down) then you know flat. Of course I've also been to Colorado and Kansas sure looks flat compared to the Rockies, but it's just not as flat as you'd think.
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As the title says...And Still No Cure for Cancer.
Research Experience:
A year of research to determined Kansas was flatter than a well cooked pancake.
I would have to skip this candidate just on the conclusion that this person has no life and found a completely meaningless experiment that most likely will be proved to be incorrect by some other hapless soul.
Now if it were compared to say, Jennifer Lopez's arse, then we have some research there.
flatness measure is the RMS of the discrete slopes
Shouldn't it be called GNU/flatness?
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This research is faulty in many ways. They did not account for anisotropy is the samples (i.e. different flatness in different directions) and they fail to mention if the pancake was from the bottom or the top of the stack. Also, I don't think a confocal microscope is the best tool- they probably could have gotten better results with a stylus or an AFM (Atomic Food Microscopy) instrument. With an AFM they could have also nano-indented the sample to hold more syrup. The pancake measurement seems under-sampled from both the digital image processing and the confocal measurements, and it was probably stale well before they finished. I think that this report would have a 'rougher' time in any peer-reviewed journal.
P.S. Their next research- seeing if the humid summer air is really thicker (more viscous?) than the leftover maple syrup...
...and I can certainly say that not all of Kansas is flat. The Flinthills certainly aren't flat (where I'm from) as anyone that has ever tried to haul a load up one of those hills can tell you. Sure Western Kansas is quite flat. Basically the entire western half of the state is flat (with some exceptions of course, and the line that devides the flat part of Kansas from the feature-rich part of Kansas isn't really straight). Central and Eastern Kansas is anything but flat. Our glacier-cut hills are fairly steep (including the one named after my family near my home town). Not as steep as the Ozark "hills" mind you but steep enough to give gravel trucks a long grade to pull. This doesn't look very flat. Those hills are mild compared to the ones in my neck of the woods. Kansas flat? Ha! Only if the Pope is Athiest.
What they carefully left out was that every place you can think of is flatter than a pancake. "Nepal is flatter than a pancake" would have been news to most people, but not so funny.
*wordlessly passes the valium*
"America has done some terrible things. But I know that Americans don't cheer when innocents die." -Dave Barry
Highest point in Kansas is the smallest mountian in the US.
See: Mount Sunflower
...is it flatter than my last girlfriend's chest?
1) I was kidding. I mean, well, the expression is just that: an expression... and it's using the word in an ambigous way. I countered one wrong way to look at flatness with other troll-ish semi-informed thing to be silly.
And I got modded informative? Sheesh.
2) RMS of the magnitude of discretely sampled gradients is probably a misleading indicator anyway. You really want is to know: 1) how much of Kansas is "tilted" and to what average magnitude; 2) how much of these titled areas are surrounded by areas of similar tilt. The latter are places that look flat to someone driving through it, but on a geological scale are significant! So roughness might not be a bad measure from that point of view either.
In the end you're going to need some sort of autocorrelation applied to some heuristics about elevation, grade, and changes in grade.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
See the photo here. (No joke.)
So...Hawaii is perfectly flat, then? Same elevation on all sides...
Unfortunately, it seems they used pancakes from International House of Pancakes. The so-called food from this so-called restaurant is severely inferior to any real pancake. Therefore, all of this intensive research should be thrown out and the researchers jailed for gross misconduct.
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Then what happened?
my last girlfriends chest. Her nipples didnt even poke up.
Maybe next they can determine if pouring hot grits down your pants has any effect on petrifying a naked Natalie Portman.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Maybe that's why the bible is so popular there. They have direct experience of the flatness of the earth. They can't venture past the edges of the flat bit, because here be dragons and athiests and jews and stuff.
Untenured junior faculty looking for press. That's who.
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I have also heard that if the earth were the size of a billards ball, it would be smoother than any normal current billards ball today.
hope that makes sense
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I've always wondered about Arkansas ... is it really urKansas? or erKansas (as in "Toto I don't think we're in er Kansas anymore")? or irKansas (as in "gee it's 2 in the morning and I can still feel the glow from the ground")? or maybe just orKansas (as in "I could live here or Kansas, I can't tell the difference and people will make fun of me anyway")?
I've driven across KS more times than I remember, and grew up in the state. "Most of it isn't too flat"??? This is just false. The Western two-thirds or so is flat like a pool table (much like Eastern Colorado). There are rolling hills in Eastern Kansas, but that is not "most of it".
"Thin air? Why is it always thin air? Never fat air, chubby air, mostly-fit-could-stand-lose-a-few-pounds air?"
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Government IS the problem.
Is the auto-quote generator using PageRank to determine the content of the discussion or something ?
Bottom quote from this story page:
Federal grants are offered for... research into the recreation potential of interplanetary space travel for the culturally disadvantaged.
but the real question is, if space is curved, and Kansas is flatter than a pancake, do interplanetary travelers need maple syrup ?
"Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech."--Benjamin Franklin
Does anybody else think that this sounds remarkably like a headline for a SimCity game??? -dg
To say "Kansas is flatter than a pancake" is to say there exists a pancake, somewhere, anywhere, that is less flat than Kansas. I've seen some pretty damn lumpy pancakes in my day, so I really don't think the Kansas claim is much of a claim at all. It's like, "duh!"
does it rain syrup there?