Monday Trivia, No. 126 [Mo and Michael Cain win!]
UPDATE: The list should include, not four members, but five, the additional one being Sinaloa.
Arizona, Chihuahua, New Mexico, Sinaloa, Sonora.
This is a complete list, sorted alphabetically.
Mike Schilling
Mike has been a software engineer far longer than he would like to admit. He has strong opinions on baseball, software, science fiction, comedy, contract bridge, and European history, any of which he's willing to share with almost no prompting whatsoever.
The Other Four Corners?
(I was sure that either BC and Alberta split off where Warshington and Idaho split or that Manitoba and Ontario split off where North Dakota and Minnesota do but…)Report
Chihuahua and Arizona do not touch. About 17.5 miles separates the Sonora-Arizona-New Mexico tripoint from the Sonora-Chihuahua-New Mexico Tripoint.
My guess is “states where the Navajo language is taught in the public schools.”Report
Chiricahua leopard frogReport
If I’ve got my geo right, one is a dessert in NM, the other in AZ.Report
Point of clarification: is this one in base -10?Report
Don’t make this more confusing…i can’t even figure out which state i should divide by.Report
I’m still ticked about that one.Report
The introduction to that one said
Here is a tricky one. Assume nothing.
And you’re ticked because it was a tricky one where you shouldn’t have assumed anything?
Anyway, no tricks this time. All the words mean exactly what you’d expect.Report
As an aside, I once put together a simple history quiz with questions like:
Who accepted the British surrender at Saratoga?
A) General Washington
B) General Lincoln
C) General Eisenhower
This famous automatic, gravity operated decapitation device was invented by a national of this country, and that country was by far its predominant user. The country is:
A) France
B) Germany
C) SpainReport
Who accepted the British surrender at Saratoga?
A) General Washington
B) General Lincoln
C) General Eisenhower
None of the above, of course. Was that your intent?Report
Of the available choices, B) is the most correct, although it is clearly not the best answer.Report
How do you figure B?Report
Google Gen. Benjamin Lincoln, who was injured in a skirmish related to Saratoga, and accepted the British surrender at Yorktown.Report
Ah, interesting.Report
Oops. I got my battles confused. ^_^
Anyway, the answer to question 2 is Germany. Guillotine only popularized the guillotine, which was invented by a German engineer living in France, and the largest user of it, by a longshot, was Nazi Germany.
I can’t find my old quiz, which had about 40 such questions. The idea was that the quiz would look like some junior high simple stuff, so everybody would zip through it and think they got a perfect score, but instead most would get nearly zero.
I recall that one question involved the curious fact that the White House wasn’t called the White House until about a hundred years ago, but I forget the trick phrasing of the question.Report
If I recall correctly, TR was the first one to call it the White House, but since the whole point of the quiz is that everything you think you know is wrong …Report
Yes, I think you got it with TR. Prior to that they just called it “the Presidential mansion” or some such.
Perhaps everybody could suggest some questions like that and we could put together such a quiz and inflict it on an unsuspecting world.Report
It must have something to do with border crossings, but then I can’t figure out why it would be only these 4! I mean, Texas has border stretches with Chihuahua too.
I suck at this stuff.Report
States whose borders were settled by the Gadsden Purchase?Report
Recall that the Gasden Purchase Border started at the Rio Grande, (where Today Texas, New Mexico and Chihuahua meet. It then proceeded west thru Sonora to the Colorado River, which Forms the border both between Az and Alta California (us California) and between Sonora and Baja California Norte. So essentially the Gasden border is the South Border of Az and NM, and the north border of Chihuahua and Sonora.Report
Mogollon territory?Report
Google provides a possible answer — since that’s cheating, I’ll rot13 it…
Qbrf gur nafjre unir fbzrguvat gb qb jvgu gur Znqerna Fxl Vfynaqf?Report
No, I’d never heard of that. Nor of Mogollon, for that matter.Report
I was gonna say “Heisenberg Territory”, except A.) He’s out of the business and B.) the Czech Republic wasn’t on the list.Report
The extent of Heisenberg’s territory is uncertain. In principle, anyway.Report
Tuesday hint:
If these states were listed in increasing order, rather than alphabetical, the result would be:
Chihuahua, New Mexico, Sonora, Arizona.Report
Is it states ranked by tequila or agave production?Report
Is it “states with evidence of Stone-Age cultures”?Report
What a straight line!Report
My next guess will be “open pit uranium mines.”Report
Wednesday hint:
The list stops at five (yes, five. I blame the internet) because at that point it hits a constraint. If we ignore that and keep going, the first ten members in ascending order are:
Chihuahua, New Mexico, Sonora, Arizona, Sinaloa, Texas, Baja California, Durango, Coahuila, Colorado.
Naively, you might expect Texas to be first rather than sixth.Report
Most desert area in North America? Most continuous desert area in NA? Or did someone already suggest that?
Most area without a large body of water? Largest continuous area without a large body of water? Only in NA of course.
I don’t think either of these actually make sense, but I suck at this.Report
I thought about desert territory, rainfall, etc., but kept on stumbling on Nevada. Nevada is almost all desert except for the northern part of its western border, and it’s not even on the “unrestricted” list.Report
As another aside, the question of which state gets the most or least rain ends up as Alaska (I think) and Rhode Island, which almost nobody ever thinks of because they’re thinking of inches, not volume.Report
Yeah, Nevada. Like I said, I suck at this.
Most Tex-Mex restaurants?Report
“Naively, you might expect Texas to be first rather than sixth.”
Places you shouldn’t mess with?Report
“Naively, you might expect Texas to be first rather than sixth.” So it’s not high school football teams per capita?Report
All the others are states, but “Baja California” is actually two states. Norte, Sur, or the two in combination?Report
According to Wikipedia, their names are Baja California and Baja California Sur.Report
Monsoons?Report
Pima Indian tribe population?Report
Second Wednesday hint: the answer is about the states’ capitals.Report
Yup, base -10.Report
States whose capitals are continuously inhabited cities founded by Native Americans before the arrival of Europeans.Report
Wouldn’t that introduce Mexico City as an obvious member?Report
Actually, no: Mexico City is like Washington, D.C, not part of any state.
But it’s still not the answer.Report
Denver wouldn’t be on the extended list in that case. The Indian settlements along that stretch of the Platte were seasonal, not continuously occupied.Report
Well we know that Mike likes math, and the selected states are all in close geographic proximity to each other. Maybe it has something to do with the latitude or longitude of the relevant state capitols?Report
Thursday hint:
@don-zeko is thinking in the right direction. Everything you need to find the answer can be seen on a map.Report
Distance from El Paso.Report
Keep going.Report
It can’t be distance of capital from the Rio Grande because NM would win….Report
Distance of the capital from the Rio Grande?Report
I was going to say distance from the border, but why would Colorado be there then, and Mexicali’s almost on the border, so Baja would be #1? Denver’s pretty far from the border. And Santa Fe is pretty much on the Rio Grande, so like Mo says, NM would have to be first, but it’s second.
Maybe it has something to do with the number of alien landings.Report
Maybe distance from the 3-corners of Mexico, Texas, and NM? Their confluence, that is. Or Juarez.
I’m just staring at the map and looking for base -10s at this point.Report
States with capitals within 500 miles of Ciudad Juarez. It may not be the answer, but I believe it matches all of the given conditions.Report
I wonder, if that is the answer, what the “constraint” is that he mentioned in the Wednesday hint.Report
500 miles. Mo’s answer of El Paso above is probably also correct, with that addition. Maybe a better match to the hint about naively thinking Texas should be first. I’ve always thought El Paso should be part of New Mexico. The distance from El Paso to Albuquerque is less than half the distance to Austin, and El Paso is part of the Western Interconnect electrical grid, not the Texas Interconnect. The El Paso-Las Cruces metropolitan statistical area spans the border. And with >800,000 people in El Paso County, they’d be a huge influence in New Mexico’s politics.Report
Ah, yes. It looks like Austin is 526 miles from Juarez as the crow flies, which would put it just above 500 miles, and Texas is the first addition in Mike’s Wednesday hint.Report
On the topic of attaching El Paso to New Mexico, probably worth noting that politically El Paso is solidly Democratic, which is a better match to New Mexico than it is to Texas.Report
Yeah, with the exception of Fort Worth, I believe all of the major cities in Texas are solidly Democratic. I wish we could take Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, Austin, and El Paso and create a new state altogether, and let Fort Worth and suburban/rural Texas do its own thing.Report
Mo and Michael Cain are close enough that I’m going to declare them joint winners. The precise answer is “States whose capitals are closer to El Paso than its own state’s capital is.” As for Chris’s assumption that the question would be unfair, 50 points from Slytherin!Report
Once again, you have proven yourself to be evil! Pure, unadulterated evil. Hilarious evil, perhaps, but evil nonetheless!Report
Interesting. Dalhart, TX is closer to the capitals of New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming, Oklahoma, Nebraska, and Kansas than it is to Austin. I always forget just how far north the Panhandle sticks up.Report
Outside of the Northeast statelets, I wonder which pair of state capitals are closest together? Just by eye, looks like it might be Sacramento and Carson City.Report
You’re probably right. The other pair that comes to mind is Annapolis and Richmond, but they’re a bit further apart.Report
Boston and Providence are 41 miles apart (or about twenty minutes the way most Rhode Islanders drive).
Annapolis and Dover are about 53 1/2 miles apart. Boston and Concord are 64 miles apart. Providence and Hartford are 66 miles apart. Sacramento and Carson City are 101 miles apart.Report
Yes, but those all involve the NE statelets that I intentionally excluded. I mean, with Boston as the capital of Massachusetts, it’s probably impossible to have a city inside RI that’s a hundred miles away. As Will and I point out from time to time, the West has counties bigger than some of the statelets. Riverside County is not only more than twice as large as Delaware by area, it’s got more than twice as many people. Ditto for Clark County, Nevada. I understand the historical factors, but there are days when I think some consolidation might be in order.Report
Of course it bears mention that a number of the northeastern statelets have fairly large populations – NJ is the 11th largest by population, MA the 14th, MD the 19th, and CT the 29th. Even ME (41), NH (42), RI (43), and DE (45) have larger populations than the Dakotas, Alaska, and Wyoming, and are about equal with Montana.
Vermont could probably stand to merge with NH, though. And I’d be thrilled if we could merge Delaware into Maryland – that way I’d only have to drive through one state that I despise with all my soul on my once-regular but now-less-regular drives down to Virginia.Report
Other interesting trivia Idaho and Maine have a whole lot in common. There is even a bit of a potato rivalry between them.
Another interesting factoid: Rhode Island has the most per-capita representation in the US House (one for just over half a million). Montana has the least (one for a million). Fifty thousand people separate them, right at the line that gives Rhode Island two reps.Report
Oh, I also checked on Google Earth – Denver and Cheyenne are 98 miles apart, closer than Sacramento and Carson City. All distances as the crow flies, not on the Interstate.
But, I’m being nationalist. Tlaxcala is 19 miles from Puebla. (Cities, not states; both capital cities bear the same name as their states.) That’s way closer than any capitals, either in or out of New England.Report
Vatican City is inside Rome.Report
A “statelet” is in the eye of the beholder, then, as apparently is New England: I wouldn’t identify either Maryland or Delaware as being in New England. If you ask me, when you’re in or south of New York, you’re not in New England. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, necessarily.
I can see calling Delaware a “statelet” but IMO Maryland has a fair amount of geographic territory even with its skinny little panhandle, and with its great population density in Baltimore and the DC ‘burbs, Maryland has a substantial amount of people living within that territory.Report
Well, I meant NE to be Northeastern. Some definitions of that term include Delaware and Maryland (although now that I’ve looked, the Census Bureau doesn’t). How about original statelets? As for Maryland, certainly not a statelet in a population sense, but since we’re talking distances, I include it as one of those with an unfair geographic advantage based on history.Report
Original statelets … I can dig it.Report
“States whose capitals are closer to El Paso than its own state’s capital is.”
I’m sorry, maybe I’m a moron, but this makes no sense to me. Can someone explain it?Report
The distance from El Paso to Austin (the capital of the state in which El Paso is situated) is about 526 miles.
The distance from El Paso to Ciudad Chihuahua is only 218 miles. So the city of El Paso is closer to the capital of the state of Chihuahua than it is to its own capital.Report
Ah… “its own” refers to “El Paso’s own”. Got it. Thanks.Report
Remember when I said that El Paso is closer to San Diego than it is to Houston? Well, it’s closer to a lot of other state capitals than it is to Austin.Report
I still don’t believe you about that. Both my lyin’ eyes and Google Maps tell me Austin is closer, though the latter is looking at driving distance. However, the difference is approximately 150 miles and both paths look relatively straight. You’re going to have to offer up some proof, son.
I will say it is much closer than I thought, in part because I think I assumed El Paso was due south, not due west.Report
Though I also just learned that Chili, on the Pacific coast of South America, is further east than New York. So I’m clearly bad at maps and knowing things.Report
Houston, not Austin. Though this trivia question was Austin, the principal is the same: El Paso has no business being in Texas.
El Paso to San Diego: 628 miles
El Paso to Houston: 676 milesReport
Told you I don’t know anything.
Clearly, we should split up Texas.
New York, too, while we are at it.Report