Kansas is Flatter Than a Pancake (2003) | Hacker News Reader

Kansas is Flatter Than a Pancake (2003)

usu.edu

134 pointssdenton454 comments

I object to their methodology. They are including the sides of the pancake to model the pancake as having a plateau-like topology to conclude that it's "not flat". Clearly the pancake being referred to in the adage "Kansas is as flat as a pancake" is referring to the interior region of a pancake that excludes the edges. A more appropriate methodology would model only a Kansas sized interior of a larger North America sized pancake, without the cliff-like edges.

Science is a conversation, my friend! I encourage you to gather some new data and write a rebuttal article.

Check the x-axis/y-axis ratio of the graphs. Even if the pancake edges weren't included I think Kansas could still be flatter.

There are places in Kansas where you can turn 360 degrees and see not a hill, tree, structure, or any landmarks at all (other than the road). You see the curve of the earth. It looks like a golden ocean.

Would love a good google street-view link too that.

[edit add] had a google, nowt special jumping out beyond some rather good jokes of which one I feel sums things up nicely "Kansas is so flat you can watch your dog run away for two weeks".

I found this, Hwy 96: (38.4823316, -100.6892430)

https://goo.gl/maps/iRajjCbBDJQMz5ud7

Parts of Iowa and Illinois are much flatter than any parts of Kansas I’ve ever been to. Incredibly so.

People romanticize this idea that Kansas is a flat nothing-land, luckily most of them also stay away. Kansas is only the 7th flattest state, even https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/flattest-st...

Living in Ohio I was surprised to see that we are less flat than North Carolina and the tiniest bit flatter than Nebraska. Thanks for sharing!

I think the big reason for KS's flat reputation vs places like Florida, Illinois, Louisiana, Minnesota, and Delaware is trees (or lack thereof). In SW Kansas (the flattest part of the state) you can drive for miles and miles of endless flatness without hardly seeing a single tree. There is just nothing that disrupts your view of the horizon. It is a bit of a different experience then being in a flat forest/swamp.

(Also, the terrain of eastern/central KS is very different from the west. So if your only experience of KS is Wichita/Kansas City/Topeka, then you don't know how truly flat the other half of the state actually is...)

> (Also, the terrain of eastern/central KS is very different from the west. So if your only experience of KS is Wichita/Kansas City/Topeka, then you don't know how truly flat the other half of the state actually is...)

People say that, and every time I make a trip somewhere out west I haven't been previously I brace myself for the boredom. So far I've always been "disappointed" and have yet to find this boring and barren landscape I've been promised.

People don't like to believe it and that's ok, less people to share the landscape with.

Have you driven specifically through KS? I remember a 5 hour stretch going from MN to CA (yeah, I took the long way) where it was like driving in a matte painting, nothing changed.

Have lived here for a couple decades.

Kansas is certainly not the best drive you'll ever see, but there are many that are worse.

The east/west drive across Nebraska is a lot worse - even less geography around the interstates. Kansas at least has some geographic change as you come through the high plains in the west toward the hills in the east.

For that matter - going north/south on the western side of Iowa is crazy boring too. Road runs right along the river so there is no perceptible elevation change for an eternity. East/west across Illinois is the same way - completely and totally flat highways for hours and hours.

The Sand Hills is a very pretty drive in an east/west drive across Nebraska.

The Symphony in the Flint Hills (eastern Ks) is pretty cool if you ever get to attend.

https://symphonyintheflinthills.org/

That makes sense. I think it’s also due to contrast, specifically due to Kansas neighboring Colorado with its very not flat mountains.

Of course, the eastern half of Colorado is just as flat as Kansas. You really can’t tell the difference driving west until you get to the front range and that is in the middle of Colorado.

It's pretty weird to see Nevada rank so highly. It does have a lot of extremely flat valleys (Nevada is under geological tension, literally stretching out the flat parts) but you'd have a hard time finding part of Nevada without mountains on the horizon. If anything, it shows how difficult it is to define 'overall flatness'. But, as a Floridian, I knew we would win easily regardless of metric.

Yeah I'm not sure what metric is best. Would be easy to pull up a DEM and try a few things... (standard deviation of height, fraction of points differing from neighbors by more than the DEM uncertainty, mean norm of the Hessian...).

Thanks for the link, I was going to say how much flatter Florida is, but didn't have proof. From east to west across the state, elevation only changes like 80ft. Whereas Kansas is in the thousands.

However, because of all the development everywhere you look, I can see visibility being much better in the plains states.

I've always liked that about Kansas.

An optimist senses it as an "unbounding": a freedom to travel, adventure, explore in any direction.

A cynic feels: anywhere but here.

I've felt both during my time in Kansas.

> You see the curve of the earth

I was under the impression that this is an optical illusion. You can't actually see the curvature of the earth until you get to a certain elevation above its surface.

Was I misinformed?

In the words of my grandfather “you could stand on a tuna can and see the back of your head it’s so flat”

“It’s so flat you can watch your dog run away for 3 days”

The Flint Hills in Kansas are certainly not flat. It's actually a beautiful part of Kansas.

So is rest of the earth; Youtube channel Vsauce covered this in one their videos https://youtu.be/mxhxL1LzKww?t=721

"So is rest of the earth" ... when taken as a whole, though. Switzerland is not flat as a pancake, for example.

From what I understood from the video, the surface irregularities a general pancake can have when stretched to dimensions of the earth would lead to 10km high feature; Given even Mt. Everest is <9km, I am not sure why Switzerland wouldn't fit the definition

edit: Typo

If you stretch the pancake only to the dimensions of Switzerland, the vertical features would be a lot less high. And Switzerland has quite some height differences within a small area.

Or a more extreme example: If you stretched the pancake to just the width of Everest clearly Everest would be less flat.

The peaks measure ~9km above sea level. The deepest portions of the ocean add another 3-4km.

Not sure how to read this, but have you heard of the Mariana Trench?

I recall Neil deGrasse Tyson mentioning that the whole earth would be smoother than the smoothest billiards ball if scaled down. I found that surprising.

Wow, that scale! Thanks for posting that!

If my calculations are right, Earth's diameter is about 12000km and its highest/lowest places are about 10km, so about 0.001 If a billiard ball is about 10cm, it's highest/lowest places equivalent to earth would be 0.1mm.

Not sure what are the standards for billiard smoothness, but that seems very smooth to me.

0.1mm is not very smooth. According to wikipedia, 150 grit sandpaper has average particle size of 90-100µm

edit: of course there is vigorous internet commentary about billiard ball smoothness compared to earth:

https://possiblywrong.wordpress.com/2011/01/03/is-the-earth-...

https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/10763/is-earth-...

https://billiards.colostate.edu/faq/ball/smooth/

Which mostly seem to agree that earth definitely is not as smooth as a (new) billiards ball, but there is lots of debate about the details.

A billiard ball is about 50mm in diameter. I guess the question is to what tolerance they are made. I wouldn’t expect a small feature to stick up (you’d be able to feel or see those fairly easily) but the overall deviation from a perfect sphere could easily be that large.

Me too, I was going with "smoother than an orange", the billiard or bowling ball seem excessive - https://what-if.xkcd.com/46/ posted here

Tyson has pretty low standards for rigor and accuracy. Take everything he says with a grain of salt.

I am only getting a search results page with no results. It was like this hours ago already when the submission was still in the second chance pool.

Edit: seems to be a problem with my Firefox profile. A new profile works. My apologies for polluting the comment section with this and thanks to the commenters for helping me figure this out.

I see an article with a first subheading of "In this report, we apply basic scientific techniques to answer the question “Is Kansas as flat as a pancake?”." It's kind of a funny article. Maybe try this mirror: https://web.archive.org/web/20210511013956/http://www.usu.ed... ?

I click on it and I get a page talking about how Kansas is flatter than a pancake. I don't know why it didn't work for you.

Oh, please do not downvote them. The comment might be stating something obvious for you but it actually helped me notice that the problem was on my side.

I was downvoted to an unreadable gray, was just sharing what worked for me on Firefox. Enhanced tracking protection makes the browser redirect to https when available and the server weirdly redirects to a 404 page when you try the same url with https. I don't understand why people dislike me just stating the fact? Given a reasoning I'd be more careful but...

It's weird sometimes but don't let this stop you from helping others, I appreciated your effort in any case.

I had the same, seems to be a result of having HTTPS-Only Mode enabled. Looks like usu.edu is available over HTTPS but not this page.

When the Firefox enhanced privacy protection is on, it redirects to the not found page. Weird. Some cookie confusion or redirection issue I guess.

Same issue in Chrome.

Where I live in central Kansas there's plenty of (small) hills and trees. Also as someone else mentioned, the Flint Hills are not flat.

Western Kansas is the part that's mind numbingly flat.

The horizon broken up only by the ubiquitous grain elevators.

And often by dramatic cloud formations. The sky can be much more interesting than some bland mountains.

German pancakes (Eierkuchen) are considerably more flat, especially in Eastern Germany.

‘Flat’ is referring the surface of the pancake here, not the overall thickness.

Relevant xkcd: https://what-if.xkcd.com/46/

Next time they should compare it to a Kansas vinyl album.

Damn flat.

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