Which city ranks as the smartest in America?

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binzing said:
Kansas is the most boring state to drive through! Sorry to all residents, but it is. Totally flat, and the time I went through, covered in snow. How do you people survive without seeing mountains?

Sorry? Nah... we take that with pride... We are mathematically superior! See here:

http://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/200310/pancake-kansas.cfm"

"The scientists compared the two surfaces?Kansas and the pancake?using special geographic information software. Topographic elevation data for Kansas was taken from a digital scale model prepared by the United States Geological Survey.

The pancake was purchased from an International House of Pancakes. "The importance of this research dictated that we not be daunted by the 'No Food or Drink' sign posted in the microscopy room," write the authors.

How flat is Kansas, compared to a pancake? Fonstad, Pugatch, and Vogt explain that:
Mathematically, a value of 1.000 would indicate perfect, platonic flatness. The calculated flatness of the pancake transect is approximately 0.957, which is pretty flat, but far from perfectly flat.

After many hours of programming work, we were able to estimate that Kansas's flatness is approximately 0.9997. That degree of flatness might be described, mathematically, as "damn flat."
 
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tribdog said:
I was going to see where Phoenix ended up on the list, but couldn't figure out where the actual list was. Maybe that tells me we wouldn't be on the list anyway.

Maybe not, but Pheonix has about 5 Mary Coyle's ice cream parlors, don't they? That's better than making the "smartest cities" list.

Or, at least they did at one time. I used to make the ice cream at the original Mary Coyle's in Akron, OH. Bud Coyle and his wife, Mary, moved to Phoenix and sold the original store to a retired Army Colonel. Bud Coyle opened a new Mary Coyle's and had 5 of them in the mid to late 70's.

(Mary Coyle's history was one of the key parts of every employee's training, along with the correct answers to "Are you in my way?" and "Can I get a raise to at least minimum wage?" :biggrin:)

(Hint: The correct answers to the two questions were different from each other.)
 
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I'm surprised Gainesville (alma mater's city) made the list. Granted the university is very large, anyone not connected to the university educationally lives in poverty. It has one of the highest homeless populations in the country (there are actually tent cities). The "have not" population is extremely visible here.
 
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