dear jack
this one really is from oz
& i dont mean down under
i have been trying to read & think about it for days
how could the geographic center keep bouncing around like that
changes in the population center i could understand
but the geographical territory of kansas has scarcely budged since it was
created in 1854
there do seem to have been a few minor changes
all owing to various avulsions of the missouri river
& probably all recognized simultaneously in the 1950 boundary adjustment
with missouri mentioned on p118 of bus&ss
but are these what caused the various changes
possibly tho i doubt it because none of the known dates match up
or was it the forward march of the necessary mathematical knowledge
i doubt this too because i dont believe it really budged either
perhaps the cause was primitive computational errors discovered years
afterwards
but those people were much better at arithmetic than we are today
so i just cant figger it
even the deliberate settlement of kansas center has become unsettled
it is as if the central kingdom & royal court of oz itself were shaking
m
> The discussion re how to find the center of an area reminded me of
>the attached article from the Lyons, KS paper which somebody sent to me
>a long time ago. On our midwestern trip 2 months ago we visited this
>location and found a small fenced area with a metal fence post in the
>center. No signs or markings and no one home at the nearby farm house.
>Using the method of averaging geocoordinates of the four corners of
>Kansas put me about 17 miles west of the point shown in the newspaper
>article. The northeast corner of KS follows the Missouri R. and this
>introduces a significant error into this method of calculating the
>center. It should work very well, as David points out, for rectangles
>like Colorado or Wyoming. David's method in message 1032 should be much
>more accurate but very tedious to calculate. It seems to me that
>sherical geometry must be involved in order to avoid the problem that
>Jesper found in trying to locate the center of N. America on a flat
>map. Do we have any mathemeticians in the crowd who can solve this
>problem? eGroups Sponsor
><http://rd.yahoo.com/M=102308.1038796.2731130.908943/D=egroupmail/S=1700065786:N
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