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Comment by matthucke | Hacker News Reader

If you interpolate between the 1970 and 1980 points, mid-1972 would be fairly close to Belleville, Illinois - where, in mid-1972, I was born.

...thus confirming my long-held belief that I am the center of the universe.

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<joke>

The fact that you so naturally extrapolate "being the center of the United States" to "being the center of the Universe" also confirms a long-held belief of mine about the average American.

</joke>

Or that you're completely average :)

Another notable result of the 1980 census was that it was the first one where the majority of Americans lived west of the Mississippi River.

Distance, as well as population, is a factor in the mean center of population. Even today there isn't close to a majority of the population living west of the Mississippi.

Good point, I only wish I'd seen it in time to fix my comment.

Not true[1]. Perhaps the "population center of mass" is west of the Mississippi, but that is a different statistic.

[1] http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_it_the_population_west_of_the...

As an example of how this could be possible, imagine the population of the USA were 3: two people living in East St. Louis, and one person living in Hawaii.

It would be fun to actually compute the center of mass, knowing that people are not uniformly massive.

A good starting point might be average weight statistics on a per-state level. I doubt you could get any finer-grained information though.

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