(Is this really my first post of 2010? Huh.)

A couple of months ago I found myself involved in a conversation about the heights of various states. The topic was triggered, if memory serves, by talking about scenic Northern Minnesota. Lovely country, we said, but man alive is it a long way across Minnesota going North. Stupid Minnesota – why is it such a tall state? From there we moved on to wondering whether it was, in fact, the tallest state. Alaska probably wins, we agreed, but after Alaska, Minnesota and California must be in a tight race for #2.

This, I thought, is the sort of conundrum that the Internet, and more specifically the good folks at Google (forever may they query), exists to help solve. But I came up empty. I couldn’t find any listing of state by latitude or longitude dimensions. I did, however, notice that the Wikipedia entries for states included their farthest North, South, East, and West dimensions. All that was needed was for some nerdlish soul to compile it into one document and calculate what those dimensions meant in terms of distance.

It turned into a fun project. I learned that a degree of latitude is 69.046767 miles and plugged that into a spreadsheet to start calculating state height. Width was a trickier proposition – a degree of longitude isn’t a consistent size. It’s (69.046767 miles)x(cosine of latitude), but which latitude to pick? Accurate width measurement would require determining where the wider part of the sate was and adjusting the formula state by state – northier latitude for Florida, southier latitude for Louisiana, etc. The main purpose of this project being to determine state height, that was more work than I was interested in doing, so I worked off the assumption that all states are shaped like Iowa or Texas (two of my native lands) and widest in the middle – I used (69.046767 miles)x(cosine(average of N and S latitudes)). I added another column of data that I call “IIWAS” (“If It Was A Square”), which is just the product of the height and width, because what the hey, Excel’s doing the work anyway. Hawaii becomes almost twice the size of Texas if you assume both are squares from their furthest cardinal direction points.

The data is from Wikipedia and you found this posted on some guy’s blog, so take it for what it’s worth. I doubt, for instance, that Nevada and Idaho are actually exactly the same height, down to the tenth of a mile. I find it interesting, though, and I enjoy having plugged a hole in the completeness of the random trivia available on the Internet. Turns out Minnesota is way down at #9, too. Well played, Florida. Well played.

Here’s a pdf version of the results, organized by height, and here’s the Excel spreadsheet if you’d like to play with the data or make fun of my formulas. Drop a comment and let me know if you find any use for this; I’d be curious to know.