Animated Mean Center of Population for the United States: 1790 to 2010

Re:Animated Mean Center of Population for the United States:... by mpyne on Saturday June 14, 2014 @03:13PM (#7893419)

Another notable result of the 1980 census was that it was the first one where the majority of Americans lived west of the Mississippi River.

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Re:Animated Mean Center of Population for the United States:... by hollerith on Saturday June 14, 2014 @03:29PM (#7893461)

Not true[1]. Perhaps the "population center of mass" is west of the Mississippi, but that is a different statistic.

[1] http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_it_the_population_west_of_the...

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Re:Animated Mean Center of Population for the United States:... by raldi on Saturday June 14, 2014 @05:54PM (#7893814)

As an example of how this could be possible, imagine the population of the USA were 3: two people living in East St. Louis, and one person living in Hawaii.

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Re:Animated Mean Center of Population for the United States:... by inportb on Saturday June 14, 2014 @11:12PM (#7894254)

It would be fun to actually compute the center of mass, knowing that people are not uniformly massive.

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Re:Animated Mean Center of Population for the United States:... by ekimekim on Sunday June 15, 2014 @12:22AM (#7894362)

A good starting point might be average weight statistics on a per-state level. I doubt you could get any finer-grained information though.

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Re:Animated Mean Center of Population for the United States:... by mattst88 on Saturday June 14, 2014 @03:25PM (#7893451)

Distance, as well as population, is a factor in the mean center of population. Even today there isn't close to a majority of the population living west of the Mississippi.

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Re:Animated Mean Center of Population for the United States:... by mpyne on Sunday June 15, 2014 @11:27PM (#7897265)

Good point, I only wish I'd seen it in time to fix my comment.

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