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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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... ?
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...
