

Kansas Is Flatter Than a Pancake - frisco
http://www.improbable.com/airchives/paperair/volume9/v9i3/kansas.html

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miked
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.

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rimantas
And the Earth is smoother than billiard ball:
[http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2008/09/08/te...](http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2008/09/08/ten-
things-you-dont-know-about-the-earth/)

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nostrademons
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...

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davidw
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.

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sp332
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.)

~~~
davidw
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.

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rsheridan6
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.

