It Sort of Makes Sense

[kevin_standlee]

Part of the work I'm doing on The Big Project involves plotting the geographic centroid of each US state and picking out a city to stand for that state's centroid. This doesn't always work well for odd sized states. It appears, for instance, that the geographic centroid of Maryland is Washington DC.

Comments

[sfrose.livejournal.com]

http://www.nws.noaa.gov/geodata/catalog/national/html/us_state.htm ???

But it is out there if anyone wants to take a crack at finding the file, which is named "s_16mr06.zip" and contains a dBase file.

That seems to have a file for each state's centroid LON and LAT.

And in doing a google search to find an ap to locate the locations, I found this:

http://www.maptech.com/support/forums/messages.cfm?threadid=1101&threaded=no&CFID=820102&CFTOKEN=93740132

(I was curious whether Hawaii's centroid would end up in the ocean or on land..._

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

Yep, that's it. Good job.

When you look at the specific points, you realize how useless some of them are. That's why I had to go through and pick a city that was at least on a main highway. The "notional centroid" has to correspond to a specific 5-digit zip code because we're using to calculate average shipments.