US State Centers

One of my favorite podcast genres is "two friends talking". Some of them are analyzing books, discussing a court case or a movie, or sometimes just shooting the shit about their lives that week. As long as the chemistry between the two is good, the content is entertaining. Inside jokes inevitably develop, and then, as a listener, you can feel like you're in this parasocial friend group.

Once such podcast started in July 2016, and the ridiculous premise was "how to make money on prediction markets with the 2016 US elections"; they aptly named it Election Profit Makers. I found it a fun way to follow the US political news. After The Unthinkable™ happened in November 2016, they took a hiatus until the 2020 US elections.

It isn't all politics. One of the reasons I love EPM is that the hosts are from my home state of North Carolina, and they have a lot of content about the goings on there. They also let their personal interests carry the show to weird places, like encouraging listeners to send in bird recordings and debating which cities have the best skylines. One of the hosts, Jon, loves to crunch numbers and statistics about stuff, but especially US geography. This week, they released a patreon-only episode comparing the locations of three things for each of the 50 states:

1. The geographical center of the state
2. The location of the state capitol building
3. The population center of the state

Some states are more "balanced" than others when it comes to these metrics. I remember learning in school that most states intentionally avoid having their most populous city be their state capital; part of it is to "keep money out of politics" and part was to locate it more centrally because the representatives had to ride their horses to go vote. The latter is very evident in my country of residence, Spain, where centrality is the only reason for the location of Madrid.

In this episode, Jon shared a Google Earth link where he hand picked the data to place pins in all 150 of these locations. He mused that it would be interesting to see historical data of how the population centers have migrated over the years, imagining that AI could probably put something like that together. Well, Jon... hold my Cheerwine.

Two things that jumped out at me watching the initial version of this video.

1. The state capital of Oklahoma moved! It was in Guthrie until 1910 when they moved it to Oklahoma City.
2. The population center of Mississippi wandered outside of the state for one census!

When I confronted the bot about it, it said:

Mississippi is a Census typesetting error, not us inventing a river cruise. The 1890 latitude in the 1923 book is 35°59′52″, which dumps the pin in Tennessee. Census already starred it: the place description is 3.5 miles SE of Sallis, Attala County, so they say it should be 32°59′52″. We copied the starred number. Fixing it to 32°59′52″ and re-encoding.

Census’s own footnote: Mississippi 1880–2020 table. Only that one starred cell in the whole 50-state series.

The footnote:

The north latitude for Mississippi that appears in the source material appears to be an error but is displayed here as in the report. The description accompanying the center of population in the source material states it is 3.5 miles SE of Sallis, Attala County, Mississippi which does not correspond to the north latitude. We believe the correct north latitude is 32° 59′ 52″.

Pretty funny.

This was an amusing exercise, and I enjoy random nerdy crap like this, which is probably why I'm an EPM patron. If you want a file that you can play with in Google Earth yourself, you can get that here.

Thanks Jon and David for amusing me through the years. 💙