Next time they should compare it to a Kansas vinyl album.
Kansas is Flatter Than a Pancake (2003)
51–57 of 57 posts
Re: Kansas is Flatter Than a Pancake (2003)
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
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...).
Re: Kansas is Flatter Than a Pancake (2003)
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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.
Re: Kansas is Flatter Than a Pancake (2003)
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
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. (Al…
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.
Re: Kansas is Flatter Than a Pancake (2003)
#55Where 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.
Re: Kansas is Flatter Than a Pancake (2003)
#56So is rest of the earth; Youtube channel Vsauce covered this in one their videos https://youtu.be/mxhxL1LzKww?t=721
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.
Tyson has pretty low standards for rigor and accuracy. Take everything he says with a grain of salt.
Re: Kansas is Flatter Than a Pancake (2003)
#57There 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.
> 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?