Kansas Is Flatter Than a Pancake | Hacker News Reader

Kansas Is Flatter Than a Pancake

improbable.com

24 pointsfrisco8 comments

I grew up in the sunflower state. The eastern half of the state isn't nearly as flat as has been reputed, but the western half, especially the southwest, is just amazingly level. I mean a landscape without a single feature anywhere.

On the geophysical plus side, it has astonishingly varied weather. Live anywhere else and the weather will bore you. Tornados, hail the size of softballs (yes, literally), vast temperature swings within an hour, blizzards. Righteous stuff.

And the Earth is smoother than billiard ball: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2008/09/08/te...

Debunked:

http://www.geotimes.org/oct03/NN_pancake.html

They measured the sides of the pancake as well, which is ridiculous. In their defense the authors of the study did cite prior research showing that comparing apples and oranges is possible...

I'm not sure I agree: they're looking at the overall elevation gain, rather than the wiggly ups and downs. If you just look at the original article, you can see the pancake is hillier than Kansas. Not by a lot, but it is.

I, for one, would not want to live in such a "vertically homogeneous" state in any case.

I know someone who grew up in Kansas who moved to NH. She felt claustrophobic for a long time because she can't see the horizon. (In NH, you can't see the horizon except at the beach - there are a few mountains and more trees than you ever knew existed.)

My wife and I lived in Innsbruck, Austria for a couple of years, and got that feeling (and its opposite) going back and forth between there and Padova, which is in the middle of a very wide open plain.

I can verify that sentiment. I grew up in Illinois and now live in the foothills of the Berkshire mountains in Massachusetts in a little river side village nestled in a valley. I miss seeing the horizon and watching thunderstorms roll in from miles away. My in-laws here think its funny that we used to sit in the garage and watch storms roll in for fun.

Their methodology would make anything look flatter if it was covered a bigger area. I wouldn't be surprised if mountainous states like Colorado would look flatter than a pancake with their method. The mountains there are less than two miles higher than the valleys they rise from, which is less than 0.5% of the width of Colorado.

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