When I lived in Lincoln my work ethic was pretty mediocre, as I recall.
Why does Lincoln need a press release? Everybody goes there at least twice a year.
I'm very fond of their math department. They're incredibly supportive of young women.
The guy who taught me Calc is still there.
The Poli Sci department has changed. I only recognize two names of people who aren't emerited.
The article was really brief and factless. The Haymarket is nice enough, but still. Mayor Beutler seems way off topic when he talks about the kids wanting to leave. It pulls kids from across the state into town and plenty have always stayed. A third of my high school class lives there.
Anyway, I was very surprised to see that Lincoln was only 86% white.
Small to mid-sized city which is the state capital and hosts a flagship university and does not have a significant legacy industrial base. Shocking that its economy is relatively decent.
I liked the photo they chose to lead off with. Lincoln has a vibrant urban cultural center! It only looks grey, dismal and lifeless! For god's sake move to Lincoln!
They probably want to prepare people who arrive by Amtrak for what they will see when they leave the station at midnight, which is when the only train comes.
One thing I'll say for Lincoln is that their police response times are very fast. I once called the cops at around 2am because there was screaming from the house next to me that sounded like someone was either being murdered or was trapped in a fire (it turns out that she was having a drug freakout). Almost before I hung up the phone there were 3 police cars pulling up.
And they didn't shoot or even taze the drug freakout case! Friendly cops in Lincoln.
They really did go out of their way to control the worst effects of underage drinking while putting a minimum of inconvenience on underage drinkers.
12: Better than no train at all in much larger Columbus.
But at least that means nobody can take a picture outside of Columbus's train station and put it on the news.
Also, I haven't been there for a while, but I think I recall that Columbus's airport had more than four gates.
15: You don't even have a TRAIN STATION? Good god!
It's sort of amazing how many of the bars I knew are still there.
Sorry, I'm the one who was being mean to Columbus. Oops!
Columbus isn't as fancy as Toledo.
I work right beside the last remaining part of the Columbus train station.
http://www.touring-ohio.com/central/columbus/union-station.html
Pulled down a perfectly good abandoned prison to build a hockey arena.
Cool, peep! If we have to go to Cbus Pride again, I'll be able to tell the girls what the heck that is. Our train station is much better, but still only has stops in the middle of the night.
Our local train station is kind of charming, but if you look closely you'll see that the main building has been redeveloped as a place to watch sports and eat chicken wings.
Everything was in place for trains to make a triumphant return to Columbus, but then Ohio elected a Republican governor.
http://www.boston.com/business/articles/2010/01/27/ohio_lands_stimulus_money_for_passenger_train/
Sometimes `work ethic' means `really grateful for jobs with no likelihood of promotion'.
I thought work ethnic meant meth over heroin.
It's easier to have a good work ethic when there's nothing else to do there.
No, it really isn't and hasn't been since at least the coming of cable TV.
Not even a little bit easier?
Also in the mountain time zone (which I guess Nebraska isn't), the late news comes on at 10pm, so you automatically go to bed an hour earlier than elsewhere. Surely that helps?
Trying to come up with the list of places that fit my criteria in 10, and the extent to which their economies have done well over the last 30 years compared to the rest of their state.
Lincoln, Nebraska
Madison, Wisconsin
Lansing, Michigan [does not strike me as being vibrant, but probably more so than other similarly-sized Michigan cities other than Ann Arbor.]
Raleigh, NC [actually the whole Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill area]
Tallahassee, Florida
Columbia SC [to the extent that I am aware, I think the piedmont area of Greenville/Spartanburg has done better (and Clemson is in generally the same area]
Columbus, OH and OK City/Norman OK are sort of in the category, although with bigger pre-existing non-gov/education/spinoff economic sectors]. Columbus has certainly had a stronger last 50 years than any other Ohio city.
Central and Mountain time were the same as far as the TV went. It did mean that back when people watched the news and then Carson and went to sleep, they got a bit more sleep.
Madison, Wisconsin
But how good will it look once Scott Walker is done destroying the state university system?
Plus, they stole Pitt's coach and he was only 19 and 19.
Trying to come up with the list of places that fit my criteria in 10, and the extent to which their economies have done well over the last 30 years compared to the rest of their state.
Austin.
36: Right! That was one of my prime examples, and then I forgot to put it in.
Lincoln is awesome! The university is nice and there are great places to eat. When I lived in Omaha 20 years ago, we thought lincoln was cooler because it was more intellectual. Then, of course, I disdained all things of my native state and went away to school. Now that I live in Appalachia, I really think of Nebraska with fondness.
Have you tried the Paris of the Appalachians?
I guess UNL's research group in my field beats those of nearby states like Kansas and Oklahoma by being nonexistent rather than containing crazy people.
Lincoln has a vibrant urban cultural center!
Ah yes, so many fond memories of the Lincoln center--the time Vengerov stared down a patron stumbling in loudly between movements of the Shostakovich, Stoppard's Coast of Utopia trilogy, and of course Netrebko's Hotel Transylvanie scene in Manon at the Metropolitan. Funny that I've been out west so long I forgot it was in Nebraska.
41: Laugh all you want (and it was Omaha, not Lincoln), but we originally moved to Nebraska because my father got a job with an opera company.
39 Harrisburg?
(It's Nashville, isn't it?)
Those places don't have good opera like Omaha or Pittsburgh.
Oh Opera Omaha is a decent regional company by all accounts.
I'm sure the New York region has its own opera companies that are very good for that area.
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OMG. My MIL came today, as regularly scheduled, picked up Kai from the bus, and then lay down on the couch. She has not budged in 4 hours, and is now snoring at a shocking volume. This is "taking care of the kids".
She's not especially ill, and if she is, why the fuck is she here?
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I don't think I ever saw any Opera Omaha productions. Maybe? Can't remember who produced what. I just remember how insanely cheap the tickets were -- $87 for a front row seat for the WHOLE SEASON. Crazy.
There's some okay theater in Omaha, but a lot of dreck as well. Just like anywhere, really. Lincoln is pretty cultureless, except for the university film society.
38: Hey, I lived in Omaha 19 years ago! I wonder if we ever crossed paths? Did you go to shows at Sokol, or shop at the Ace Package Store? Or walk around downtown by yourself early on Saturday mornings waiting for the library to open?
51: Alas, I did not go to shows at the Sokol (not cool enough and not enough $), but I loved that downtown library like nothing else (except my awesome branch library W. Clark Swanson). I went to the College World Series every summer and even when we were in college, my parents had a zoo membership so we could go to the zoo. I was going to the Antiquarium and getting drunk in parks; I also saw art movies at the Dundee. Occasionally hanging out at Westroads Mall.
Yay! The Antiquarium! I wish I had gone back while it was still around. One of my favorite bookstores ever, and hanging out with bitter queers smoking cigarettes in the front was always fun too.
So you probably never went to the Cog Factory either then? That was a neat space. Shows at the Ranch Bowl, by contrast, were awful.
Much of my Omaha experience consisted of long walks to and from theaters after the buses had stopped running. Had to walk all the way from that movie theater at 108th? 120th? to my skid row apartment at the Drake Court one time in dress shoes. That was pretty awful.
Anyway, I never went to most of those places in Omaha. Mostly just the zoo or Westroads. My uncles used to work at the CWS, but that was before I was born.
One time I had a flight that landed in Omaha. Or maybe it was Wichita.
Fran Lebowitz jokes aside, it's not easy to change planes in Omaha. Mostly if you land in Omaha, it's because you are getting off in Omaha.
Lincoln seems like a nice low cost place if you don't have any interest in an outdoor scene and can overlook the "tornado alley" thing. So yeah, no thanks.
You're just mad because JP neglected to include SLC on his list in 32 even though it obviously meets his criteria.
There's plenty of outdoor stuff. You just need to learn how to see the beauty in starkness.
it's because you are getting off in Omaha
That's why they call it "The Big O"
The article in the OP appeared in my facebook today. The only other actual news was that the gay marriage ban in Nebraska was overturned. So that's nice, if a form of niceness that has a temporary injunction against it.
60: I thought Orem was the capitol of Utah.
It's "Orin" and he's just a senator.
When I took my epic journey by Greyhound from Mpls to LA, we went through Utah. It basically looked like Hell. But then we got to Phoenix, so I knew it couldn't be.
67: Whatever, some kind of dwarven name.
I wondered, but not enough to look it up.
Oh god, State College is such a pit. (I was only there once for piano camp in high school, where one of the junior advisors talked to us all about Jesus.)
71: I know a guy who was there for football camp and met Sandusky.
60: Hmm, SLC seems different, but I don't think I have defense of that.
I guess because it is far and away the biggest city in the state unli e any of the others. So, a somewhat different thing.
75: It kind of is. SLC has done well, but the Provo-Orem and Logan areas are probably even more of a boom on paper. SLC is also an uncommon combo of state capital + largest city + flagship state U.
That's what I get for pausing to talk to my wife mid comment.
SLC is also an uncommon combo of state capital + largest city + flagship state U.
Now that I think about it, it's interesting how uncommon this is. There seems to be a strong tendency towards specialization among communities in most states, even very small ones.
Yeah. Talking to people in the same room is nearly always a mistake.
The only other example I can think of offhand is Honolulu. Maybe Phoenix, depending on how you define "flagship."
What happened in Nebraska is the whole rest of that state got together and decided the main requirement for the capital was that it be not Omaha.
The Twin Cities, I guess, if you count them together. Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill and OKC/Norman are similar situations.
Wasn't there also some sort of political folk wisdom when most of the states were being founded that the capital should not be the largest city?
Yes, only 17 states where they're identical. And some of them may be unintentional, due to the growth in governments.
84: Probably, plus there was a tendency in most of the states that were founded in the 19th century to make the capital centrally located geographically, while the large cities tended to develop along major rivers, which often formed borders between states.
When I was a little kid in Illinois, I knew the state capital was Springfield, roughly smack-dab in the center of the state. So for some reason I deduced that all capitals were smack-dab in the center of state for which they served as the capital. And, likewise, I surmised that Washington, D.C. must be in the middle of the U.S. somewhere, since that was the capital of the whole country. I was obviously really smart.
The other 250 colleges in Massachusetts are all in the biggest city/state capital, but somehow the "flagship state U" is in Amherst.
They gave them the university in compensation for taking the sound from their 'h'.
To be fair, there are also about 50 other colleges in the Amherst area.
I wonder which state capital is farthest from the state's population balance point. Maybe Carson City, or Sacramento. But then controlling for state land area.
If you don't control for land area, it's got to be Juneau.
I like that the Louisiana Supreme Court was basically like, "Oh, did you say Baton Rouge? That's interesting. We'll be hanging out in the French Quarter."
Tallahassee is decently far away given the current population distribution. Not so much way back in the day. Hard to beat Juneau, though.
I decided to divide distance by the square root of surface area (mean diameter). So far, Juneau is 67%, Sacramento is 61%, but Tallahassee well outstrips them both with 94%. Also, the population center of Alaska is 880km from Juneau but surprisingly close to Anchorage - 61°23'59.6"N 148°52'26.3"W, on the far side of Chugach State Park.
Why surprisingly? Anchorage has 40% of the state's population.
Lincoln is pretty close to the population center of Nebraska. Omaha's western line is now less than an hour from the east edge of Lincoln.
It's funny that VT has no cities at all, but still didn't put their capital in the biggest town.
Again depending on how you count universities, there's Boise.
I think Boise State has a much more tenuous claim to flagship status than ASU, actually.
Not that ASU's claim is very solid either.
Columbia, South Carolina. (Depends on how exactly you count size.). Like Columbus it's not the traditional large city, but has caught up.
I dunno, if you take the definition to be "best football team" it's clearly the flagship.
103: Well, sure, but there's more to academia than football, I'm told.
You can't have a flagship U in Moscow, commies.
96: That helps, but I had no a priori idea what direction different cities pull.
It's interseting to compare with Canada. The plains provinces purposefully split capital and university (though Edmonton cheated, the university wasn't supposed to be there) but you get this triple a lot more often.
106: When it comes to Alaska demography, a useful guideline is that Anchorage is by far the largest community when it comes to everything.
With all the data in, states with best to worst placed capital cities.
1. Columbia, SC
2. Augusta, ME
3. Phoenix, AZ
4. Concord, NH
5. Denver, CO
45. Springfield, IL
46. Sacramento, CA
47. Juneau, AK
48. Carson City, NV
49. Honolulu, HI
50. Tallahassee, FL
My most surprising result was Wyoming, which would be #44 in the full list. Even though Cheyenne is the largest city, the population center is right in the middle of the state, WSW of Casper, the second-largest city.
That Honolulu ranking has to be an error...
Oh sorry, area. I we thinking population.
No wait, you're taking distance from population center to capital and dividing by square root of area? I'm shocked by Hawaii then. It must just be that square root of area doesn't work well for highly linear states.
Oops, actually Jefferson City, MO should be #4, and Concord #5. (Conveniently located between Kansas City and St. Louis.)
It's total surface area, not land area, so yes, probably. I think it's better with surface area because you still have to travel over water.
But almost everyone in Hawaii lives in Honolulu. I don't understand how the population center could be so far away.
How are you defining total surface area?
It's not like Hawaii could improve on Honolulu without putting its capital in the open ocean... Honolulu must be there because the shape is very poorly approximated by a disk and so the denominator is artificially small.
It's pretty close - between Oahu and Molokai. There might be fewer people on Maui and Hawaii, but they pull a fair distance away.
The real puzzle is why that relatively short distance divided by the square root of the state surface area is 91%. I think something is counterintuitive about the surface area figure, which on inspection claims to be only 41% water area - it's not fully accounting for all the space between the islands.
But the population center is still off Oahu, that's confirmed.
In both SC and ME, the center of population is inside the city limits of the state capital.
93: New Orleans was the colonial, territorial, and first state capital. It's possible that the Court has not yet deigned to notice the move (as they were wise to do with the relocation of the capital to Donaldsonville). Or it may have to do with the mysteries of the Napoleonic Code.
Annapolis is home to a large public university.
Remember, Midway is a part of Hawaii. Its tiny, but if the relevance goes up with the square of distance from the center, that ought to have some counterbalancing effect.
120: I'm reading a good book about New Orleans history, but it definitely didn't prevent stomach bugs for the whole household and may not have even cured them, so I don't think I can recommend it.
109: it is a little surprising that mn didn't rank higher. I would have guessed the cent of pop to be within a few miles of the st Paul border. Stupid Duluthians messing things up for everyone.
Was driving across Pennsylvania recently with someone newly-arrived from Europe and they were surprised when we went past Harrisburg that a place they had barely heard of was the capital of Pennsylvania when there were two much more prominent cities. As we talked, we realized just how prevalent the dominant city/capital combo was in Europe. Switzerland not-- nor in practice the Netherlands, but it comes with an asterisk. Berlin (which not I guess was never completely dominant in the context of Germany versus Prussia) and Istanbul are sort of on extended "time out." And Russia had the St. Pete thing. But otherwise it seems to be strong central city/capital which persists even through a "land" being part of the Ottoman, Austria-Hungarian, or Russian empires.
Median population centers are more interesting than median ones. (How much did the Apollo astronauts move the mean population center of America?)
125: That good old republican spirit, trying to keep power from being too centralized. And given transportation means at the time, Harrisburg is a very sensible place to be; it's at the intersection of the Susquehanna and the Great Valley. It's probably close to the median population center of Pennsylvania, too.
Ours is Helena and not Anaconda despite the Helena people paying less in bribes. The two main universities were patronage, and Deer Lodge was famously given the choice between the state prison and the ag college.
I'd imagine that in most post-colonial states, these things are purely political.
I think when I understand 126.1, I will achieve satori.
124: Actually, IIRC from checking them out on GMaps last night, it's a few dozen klicks NW of Mpls.
+45.203555,-093.571903. In the city of Rogers, with the marker coming right down over I-94.
Mean population centers are more affected by outliers and the precise spatial location thereof. There weren't many Apollo astronauts but they were really far out there, and that might actually have a noticeable effect. That question wasn't entirely rhetorical as I haven't done the math, but in the limit one astronaut shot into space could move the mean population center arbitrarily far from Earth.
But it'd have no effect on the median population center. Or to be more earthbound: the mean population center of the US is affected by the fact that Hawaii is so far out to sea; if it were one hundred miles to the west or east, which in my opinion isn't a particularly meaningful difference, this would change the mean population center. This wouldn't occur with the median population center.
125. Bejing and Nanjing mean northern and southern capital respectively. I think that in many places witha long history as a single territory, the main city is the capital is more than half the economy.
Being exiled from the capital used to be almost as bad as being exiled from the country. Just ask all the unhappy academics who can't find work in manhattan.
At first I thought 126 was in a different thread.
131. Wait all these numbers don't count Jesus living in heaven?
Oh. I guess that was incoherently unrelated. Guess it's a bit of a hobbyhorse of mine. Nevermind.
134: I don't know the exact location of Kolob. Kobol? Whichever one wasn't from Battlestar Galactica.
The states where the capital is also the major city, on the European model (forget about universities) are, let's see, Arizona, Minnesota (yes twin cities you count as one for this purpose), Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, Iowa, Arkansas, Oklahoma (sort of), Indiana, Tennessee, Mississippi, Georgia, Virginia (sort of), WV (sort of) and Hawaii. I think that's it but maybe am missing a few. Of those, the places that are (a) real cities and (b) unquestionably the historic and current leading cities in their states are Atlanta, Boston, Denver, Phoenix, Minneapolis/St Paul, Hartford, Providence, Indianapolis, Salt Lake City, and Honolulu. Maybe I'm forgetting something. I thought this would reveal more interesting results but maybe not, it's hard to see a pattern, it seems like where you put your state government doesn't matter much except for bar tabs in Albany.
Not Tennessee until recently, and even then only sort of now (Memphjis 2-3x size of Nashville in 1960).
And I would not count Hartfordgiven New haven (and even Bridgeport back in the day). Otherwise I think that is the list.
131: That makes sense. Unfortunately I can't find median centers of population for each state - the Census seems to only do means except nationwide.
I guess there's the obvious point that if your state has multiple cities competing for pre-eminence, as opposed to one dominant city, the state capital is unlikely to be in any of the dominant city contenders. Tennessee (Nashville v Memphis) and Oklahoma (OKC v Tulsa) are the only counterexamples, I think. Columbus doesn't count because its push for dominance is too recent.
Spaces, commas and capitals are all repressive tools of the patriarchy.
I guess there's the obvious point that if your state has multiple cities competing for pre-eminence, as opposed to one dominant city, the state capital is unlikely to be in any of the dominant city contenders.
Like in Switzerland, or West Germany.
141: Yeah, centrality is probably the tiebreaker in those two cases (and of course they tend to get set early on--for instance Ohio was Zanesville->Chillicothe->Columbus in the first few years--and there is a lot of path dependency after that).
140: Yeah, it's a lot less popular metric for whatever reason.
Another point of comparison: the population mean of Canada is in the Toronto suburbs (which tells you Toronto is really big); the median is on Toronto's longitude but Montreal's latitude, which tells you that Canadians are substantially to the south of the country (and in fact most are south of the 49th parallel) and that most are in the east.
Connecticut does belong on the list with TN and OK.
The General Assembly of Connecticut (state legislature) met alternately in Hartford and New Haven since before the American Revolution. ... After the Civil War, the complications of this plan began to be evident, and both Hartford and New Haven competed to be sole state capital. Hartford won.
Interesting! I'm actually surprised that the idea of a mobile capital hasn't hit more states recently as a gimmick. Let's move around and be closer to the people! Or, fuck it, why not have a "virtual" "cyber-capital" "in the cloud" and outsource the back end of printing bills and the like to Bangalore.
I believe Bridgeport is the largest city in CT and may have been for a while. Hartford might be third.
147 Back when I worked for the state, we had a thing called capital for a day -- the gov and a bunch of cabinet secs would go to some city, and interact with the citizenry. People liked it.
148: So it is. And Stamford now almost as big as New Haven And Hartford. 144k, 122k, 129k, 124k respectively. (And Waterbury 110K). in 1960* it was Hartford>Bridgeport> New Haven (all over 150k).
*I like my city population like my dinosaurs: frozen in time in 1960**.
**Getting the 1963 (I think) World Almanac was a watershed event for me--in particular it showed both the 1960 and 1950 census and I spent countless hours mapping states, counties, cities that had gone up or down in population. Where were the fucking computers I ask in retrospect. Hours of that shit.
149: In Nebraska, they used to (or still do) have the state appeals court travel for a few sessions.
149.last: New blood in the pickup joints.
The inside of the state capital building in Lincoln is surprisingly impressive. Maybe even overdone. "Dudes, it's just Nebraska. Don't you think you maybe got carried away?"
My dad had a great office in that building.
