- WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Kansas
really is flatter than a pancake, U.S. geographers reported on Monday.
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- A scientific comparison of the topography of Kansas to
a pancake shows the state, known for its vast, even fields, is in fact
really, really flat, geographer Mark Fonstad of Southwest Texas State University
and colleagues found.
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- "While driving across the American Midwest, it is
common to hear travelers remark, 'This state is as flat as a pancake,'"
they wrote in their report, published in the Annals of Improbable Research.
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- "Simply put, our results show that Kansas is considerably
flatter than a pancake."
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- While the study, written for a humorous journal, is tongue-in-cheek,
the researchers used serious methodology.
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- "There are bigger questions that we ask even though
we are doing this sort of thing for fun," Fonstad said in a telephone
interview.
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- "The kind of question we ask is: how do you compare
two things that aren't the same size? We like to play games in our heads
to try to answer these questions."
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- A United States Geological Survey digital elevation model
of Kansas provided one set of data for the comparison.
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- Photographs of the pancake were translated into digital
data and scaled to enable a comparison with Kansas. Scaling is the process
that map makers use when they represent an entire state, for instance,
on a single page.
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- "We used a comparison called a flattening ratio,"
Fonstad said. "It is the same comparison as used for figuring out
how spherical the Earth is."
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- While Kansas has some hilly parts, on an overall average
it is quite level, the analysis showed.
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