Tomorrow, I’m heading on a business trip to glamorous Topeca, Kansas for a few days. I am actually really excited. Partly because of the steaks and the flatter-than-a-pancake* landscape, but mostly because it’s my first business trip. A funny tidbit:
*source:
This year, for instance, three geographers compared the flatness of Kansas to the flatness of a pancake. They used topographic data from a digital scale model prepared by the US Geological Survey, and they purchased a pancake from the International House of Pancakes. If perfect flatness were a value of 1.00, they reported, the calculated flatness of a pancake would be 0.957 “which is pretty flat, but far from perfectly flat”. Kansas’ flatness however turned out to be 0.997, which they said might be described, mathematically, as “damn flat”.
From: http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2003/sep/25/research.highereducation2
