Cities lined up in a row?

There are two reasons for cities to lie on the fall line: On the one hand, yes, it’s the furthest inland you can easily bring ships. But that’s not really a reason to build there rather than at the river mouth, because there’s not much advantage to being as far inland as possible. The other factor is that a fall line represents a major source of cheap power, for mills and other industry. Nowadays, that would mean hydroelectric, but even before electricity, there were plenty of industries which could make good use of a turning water wheel.

Richmond and Atlanta are on the same line, if you squint hard enough. I always found it curious that I-95 wasn’t routed through Atlanta.

Prague is roughly halfway between Berlin and Vienna. Copenhagen and Athens are along the same curve, if you don’t mind getting wet.

I-95 isn’t routed through Atlanta for the same reason it doesn’t go through Raleigh, Charlotte, or Greenville. None of which are on the route to Miami from Washington, D.C.

Funny, there IS an interstate that goes through all those cities. I wonder what it could be? :cool:

Atlanta yes, even without squinting, but Richmond takes an awful lot of squinting. Here’s the Great Circle of the airports of these cities. Well, each leg of that route is a Great Circle, so you can see where they diverge by small changes in direction. I used Reagan National and Laguardia, rather than Dulles and JFK, because those are closer to the city center. Note that Baltimore’s airport is far enough off the circle that you can see the bend that causes.

But that Great Circle extends to Europe. London, Munich, Belgrade, and Istanbul are all on it and Brussels is just north of it: transAtlantic corridor

Just for S&G, if you treat this particular Great Circle as an Equator, where, relatively, would be the north and south poles?

If my rough guessing with a globe is right, you’d have one pole in the vicinity of Midway Island and the other one off the coast of Namibia.

San Francisco, San Jose, Los Angeles and San Diego make an almost perfect line. Laredo, San Antonio, and Austin are very close to a line and Dallas is just off of it.

I’m still stuck on the OPs question. Outside of magic ley lines, what conceivable design could people have had in mind to put those cities in a line? How would they have convinced multiple separate colonizers over decades to plant their cities there? How could they know that those cities would succeed and be around in 200 or 300 years? Why just there and no place in between?

It’s like one of those fabled questions from a Google interview. Come up with a scenario that would justify those cities being on a line. You have five minutes. Go.

Show some regional pride. There’s the Buffalo/Rochester/Oswego line.

Wouldn’t some of those groups happen to be on a road or along the coast? And given the size of American towns, you’ve got what my Draftsmanship teacher used to call “a fat point” (or rather, collections thereof). A point with the surface of Miami or Los Angeles is a lot easier to align than one with the size of, say, Bilbao or Venice.

Reminds me of my solution to the old “nine dots, four lines” puzzle. If you have fat dots, you can actually pull it off with only three.

Especially in the New World this is an especially important point. It’s not that long ago, historically speaking, that the USA’s important cities were not the same ones they are today. Before the Civil War, Charleston, SC was one of the biggest and most important cities in America; today it’s not anywhere near the top hundred. Cincinnati basically sprang up from nothing at the same time, going from a backwater hamlet to being one of the most important cities in the country in twenty years or so. Albany was once one of the biggest cities in America, one of the reasons it’s the state capital; today it isn’t one of the five biggest cities in the state and is quite a bit smaller than it once was. New Orleans was (by a very wide margin) the largest city in the South until into the twentieth century, and now it is nowhere near that; in 1901, Las Vegas wasn’t a city at all. None of this stuff could have been accurately predicted beforehand.

Not to mention the Rochester-Syracuse-Oneida-Rome-Utica-Saratoga line :eek:

Of course, all of these are only approximate. What’s really astounding is that, if you take the city centers as surveyed to centimeter-level precision, Poughkeepsie, NY and Kalamazoo, MI lie exactly on a straight line.

I am, indeed, awed that these two city centers lie on the same line. What’s really amazing is that they line on a line , no matter whether you determine the centers through weighting by population or by precisely measuring the city corporate boundaries!

nm

:stuck_out_tongue:

Depending upon how you look at things, they might actually be on two different lines!!! :cool:

As for San Diego, LA, San Jose and San Francisco, the defining linear quality isn’t the coast so much as it is the San Andreas Fault. Just think: they built California’s biggest cities along the most destructive force in the state. :eek:

At least for my birth town of Savannah, it was founded on the first high ground from the mouth of the Savannah River. Similar to the French Quarter of New Orleans being the first reasonably high ground you come to from the mouth of the Mississippi.

In what sense is New Orleans “reasonably high ground”? You have to go uphill to get to the river!

With fat lines, you can do it with just one.

You can also do it with one thin line and nine thin dots if you allow folding the paper and drawing a line across folds.

Hmm. Returning to the OP, I believe that for any arbitrarily large number of cities, there exists a finite set of wormholes that would allow a single neutrino to fly in a straight line directly through city hall of all of the cities. Finding a way to generate enough power to create the wormholes is left as an exercise for the student.

But, more seriously, CalMeacham is on the right track here. Any set of random coordinates are likely to have a line that comes close to connecting a bunch of them, especially with large error bars. More generally, nearly all data sets have more patterns and connections in them than the size of the data set itself. For example, if you closely examine the 80,000 most common words in the English language, looking for connections between them (e.g. the fact that crony and chronometer both come from the Latin word for time), you can find more than 80,000 connections. The human mind is very adept at finding connections, which simultaneously makes us skilled hunters and superstitious astrologers.

There are more things dreamt of in your philosophy, Horatio, than are in Heaven and Earth.

We don’t want no easterners on our line.