In descending order:
Texas, Louisiana, California, Florida, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Washington, Michigan, New York, West Virginia, Ohio, Alaska, Alabama, Virginia, Maryland, Minnesota, Indiana, Mississippi, Illinois, Hawai’i, Oregon, Maine, Georgia, Massachusetts, Wisconsin, South Carolina, Tennessee, Puerto Rico, Missouri, Connecticut, Delaware, North Carolina, Rhode Island, Kentucky, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, Kansas.
In three four instances, I was required to split elements between two states, affecting the data for a total of seven states. Data current as of 2004, which was the most recent apples-to-apples data I could readily locate. No data was available for the 14 states and other USA possessions not listed.
UPDATE: With this win, the top of our all-time leaderboard welcome Michael Cain as joining the ranks of those who have won more puzzle contests than have gone to default:
| Player | Wins |
|---|---|
| Randy Harris | 25.50 |
| Mark Thompson | 20.83 |
| Mike Schilling | 15.50 |
| Johanna Aitch | 10.00 |
| Mo | 7.50 |
| Michael Cain | 6.00 |
Burt Likko is the pseudonym of an attorney in Southern California. His interests include Constitutional law with a special interest in law relating to the concept of separation of church and state, cooking, good wine, and bad science fiction movies. Follow his sporadic Tweets at @burtlikko, and his Flipboard at Burt Likko.
I have a feeling the fact that most of the missing 14 are a contiguous block of interior Mountain West and Great Plains states should be relevant. But not a real clue why.Report
Wild guess: total length of border defined by a body or bodies of water.Report
West VIrginia…Report
WV has a considerable amount of border defined by rivers…Report
Alaska or Florida would be first in that case, wouldn’t they?Report
IIRC, and I may not, Alaska has as much coastline as the rest of the country combined.Report
Splitting elements between two states – and not necessarily one number split to two. What goes across state lines, but only does so rarely? There’s no way that miles of interstate highway are reported by state, lumping North and South Carolina together. Or only seven states have airports that service more than one state.
It’s got to be something that includes interstate partnerships, or has federal involvement. Energy production (TVA), military bases, national parks.Report
Splitting elements between two states
Fission reactors.Report
Does it have something to do with national parks? Maybe “square miles of land that are protected as both a state park and a national park”?Report
Hmm… Texas, Louisiana, California, Florida… fruit farms per square mile?Report
Practicing Catholics per square Mile?Report
Tuesday hint: Texas and Louisiana are WAY out in front. Between them, they account for approximately 3/8 of the total; Texas is nearly three times California and Louisiana about two and a half times California. Louisiana also has the single largest data point assembled in the state-by-state list, again by a pretty considerable margin.Report
Interesting. What is Texas a lot of that Oklahoma is almost none of?
And there are multiple data points per state, it seems. But this is all 2004, so it’s not multiple years. So city or county data? Also, if one data point isn’t enough to bring Louisiana into #1, it’s probably not strictly additive. May be sum of something per capita.
So maybe the big data point is New Orleans. What does it lead in? I’d think something about alcohol, jazz clubs, political corruption…this was pre-Katrina, so not FEMA funding, but maybe Army Corps of Engineers projects?Report
Port traffic (ocean/lake/river) by tonnage. Texas and Louisiana handle an enormous amount of sheer tonnage. California not so much tonnage as TX/LA, but lots of value. New York/New Jersey are the most obvious split, but I can think of others. The Great Lakes ports are surprisingly big, as are some inland ports on the Mississippi, Ohio and Missouri.Report
This is the correct answer. When I saw that there was such a thing as the “Port of Kansas City” I said “whaaaaaa?” and dug in a bit more. Turns out, there’s lots of inland ports, but they have to be on navigable rivers, and most of the mountain west and even Pacific-draining rivers are not navigable, at least not very far.
Internationally, it is not surprising at all to find that the PRC is way, way ahead of any other nation in this category; Shanghai alone handles more tonnage than every port in Texas combined.Report
amusingly enough: portauthority.org goes to Pittsburgh’s port authority.Report
My mind immediately went to http://www.thebrightonportauthority.com/Report
The Missouri is actually navigable as far as Sioux City, Iowa during the right part of the year and for the right kind of vessel. There was considerable dismay in Nebraska when they discovered that part of the Yucca Mountain repository “standard transportation flow” included 125 barges of spent fuel coming up the Missouri each year to be offloaded in Omaha so it could go west by rail.Report