Ursus Pacificus

I have Bill Maher’s “Religulous” on DVD, finally, and have viewed it a couple times. During viewing #1, with the GF, the part of the movie that focuses on
The Creation Museum left her slack-jawed. I was a little less surprised, knowing as I have for most of my life that, generally speaking, in this country, the average level of credulity seems to be inversely proportional to latitude and directly proportional to longitude. Since the Creation Museum is located in Kentucky, it seems safe to guess it’s banking on some fairly credulous patronage. Put another way, such a project would likely not have been so enthusiastically supported in, say, Vermont. This is supported by my highly scientific calculation (at least as scientific as the “science” you’ll likely find at The Creation Museum):

Given the hypothesis:
“The further South and West within the Continental United States one goes, the more credulous the average person seems to be.”

Let us first establish the 4 extreme points of the Continental United States. I chose Wikipedia as my source. My formula will allow the use of other values, but for the purposes of demonstration, let’s use the values I have at hand:

Continental US:
Northernmost: Lake of the Woods, MN (49.38N)
Easternmost: West Quoddy Head, Maine (66.95W)
Westernmost: Cape Alva, WA (124.71W)
Southernmost: Cape Sable, FL (25.12N)

Note: I have converted the “minutes” value to decimal (M/60) and discarded “seconds”. You can recalculate to higher precision if you like. I leave that as an exercise for the reader.

If one was to create a “box” on the surface of the Earth, whose northern edge ran coincident with 49.38 degreed North latitude, whose Eastern edge ran coincident with 66.95 degrees West longitude, and so on (per the values above), one would create the region in which this calculation can be valid.

Given the values above, the Partial Relative Credulity (Latitude) (Crpa) of any location can be established with the following formula:

Crpa = ( 24.23 / (A - 25.12 ) ) - 1

Where A is the Latitude of the point in question.

Similarly, the Partial Relative Credulity (Longitude) (Crpo) can be found thusly:

Crpo = ( O - 66.95 ) / 57.76

Where O is the Longitude of the point in question.

Thus, the full Relative Credulity of a region’s population can be given as:

Cr = Crpa * Crpo

OR

Cr = ( ( 24.23 / ( A - 25.12 ) ) - 1 ) * ( ( O - 66.95 ) / 57.76 ) )


I live in Rhode Island, which, by some accounts, is populated by a fairly credulous lot. The lat and long of RI is (roughly) 41.7N 71.44W.

The “Creation Museum” (according to its website) is in, roughly, Idlewild, KY, positioned at 39.07N 84.79W

If we plug these values into the formula above, we find that Rhode Island has a Relative Credulity of .035, and Idlewild, KY has a Relative Credulity of .226. Not the most credulous people in the country, but certainly six-and-change times more credulous than the folks in RI.

Does this follow? You tell me.

I can tell you that when I lived in San Diego (the Southwestern-most major city in the continental US, Cr = 1.118) (1992-1998), the Promise Keepers filled what was then Jack Murphy Stadium, a Mormon Temple was completed, we had the Heaven’s Gate mass cult suicide and Dave Shelly and Chainsaw convinced the bulk of their listening audience that 1) The Space Shuttle would be landing at Montgomery Field in town AND 2) a truck carrying an orca (either to or from Sea World) had jackknifed on I8 in Mission Valley, and listeners were instructed to bring water to wet-down the whale until authorities to figure out what to do (both April Fools’ Day pranks).

What’s the Relative Credulity of YOUR home town?

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 26th, 2009 at 7:41 am and is filed under Oh, my lack of gods!. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.