Bill Tammeus
Flatter-y will get you, uh, to Kansas
http://www.NewsAndOpinion.com | KANSAS CITY, Mo. I don't know why I'm always the one who has to stand up for my neighbor, Kansas.
Heck, I don't even like Kansas all that much, though I like lots of Kansans. Kansas itself tends to look a lot like, well, Kansas. In fact, some stretches of Kansas look so much like Kansas that when you drive through it you swear you're stuck in one of those cartoon chases, where the background scenery endlessly repeats.
But now some smart-aleck researchers - scientists with way too much time on their hands - have conducted what they claim is a scientific comparison between a pancake and Kansas.
Folks, Kansas really is flatter than a pancake.
I'll explain their research in a minute, but if you can't wait, you can find it in the May-June 2003 issue of Annals of Improbable Research, which a guy I know at Harvard University, Marc Abrahams, edits just because it's so much fun to make sport of scientists. (See www.improbable.com.)
First, let's name names. The folks who did this research are Mark Fonstad and William Pugatch of the geography department of Southwest Texas State University and Brandon Vogt of the geography department of Arizona State University. It's not clear whether the authorities at those schools know what these people are up to, but maybe now that we're bandying about their names in public they'll check up on them.
In their report, Fonstad, Pugatch and Vogt said that one way geographers measure flatness is by determining the "flattening ratio."
I don't expect you to understand what I'm about to quote any better than I do, but I offer it to show you that these people are clever enough to couch this implausible research in language that has the ring of authenticity: "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."
You could memorize that to rattle off at a cocktail party or neighborhood picnic. I guarantee people who hear you will leave you alone after that. But allow me to translate: Something perfectly flat is given a value of 1. The less flat it is, the closer to zero its value.
The researchers, after considerable effort, determined that a pancake's flatness, using that scale, is equal to 0.957, "which is pretty flat," they concluded. And Kansas is flatter than that? Precisely.
Here's what the researchers reported: "The state is so flat that off-the-shelf software produced a flatness value for it of 1.
The 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 0.997. That degree of flatness might be described, mathematically, as 'damn flat.'."
Well, all of this is fascinating, I suppose, but let me complicate your thinking a little - and perhaps the thinking of these researchers.
First, you should know that they used "a well-cooked pancake from a local restaurant, the International House of Pancakes."
See? Right there the data is skewed. The folks at IHoP have been making pancakes for decades and have got flatness down to an art. By contrast, I have produced pancakes in my life that look like the Appalachian mountains with severe cellulite problems, especially my famous General Tso's Chicken Pancakes.
Now, the researchers did say that they took a west-to-east profile across Kansas to measure its flatness so they considered the whole state. But we all know that a person can drown in a stream that averages 1 foot deep.
I personally have been in parts of Kansas where any fool can see plenty of unevenness. Like the Flint Hills. Like the Capitol building in Topeka. Like my back yard when I lived for a few years in Overland Park.
So don't think that Kansas' flatness makes it dull. It's dull
for other reasons, including the way it tastes with syrup.
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JWR contributor Bill Tammeus' latest book is "A Gift of Meaning." To order it, please click on title. To comment on his column, please click here.
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