This is another guest trivia question, this time submitted by recent Monday Trivia winner Michael Cain.
The top twelve states, in order from one to twelve, are Texas, Florida, California, Louisiana, New York, Alabama, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Mississippi, Massachusetts, and New Jersey. The bottom twelve thirteen, in order from 39 38 to 50, are Tennessee, Kansas, Kentucky, Idaho, Iowa, Wyoming, Nebraska, West Virginia, South Dakota, Montana, North Dakota, and Vermont, and Hawaii.
percent of the states population that is Hispanic/Latino?
A data-extraction error resulted in Hawaii being left off the list. Hawaii should appear in last place, after Vermont.
Correction incorporated into the question.
Number of state and local elected officials?
My guess is perhaps similar to Russell M’s: public schools in which ESL is taught as a subject.
The ESL thing does look plausible, but it’s not related to my thing. At the risk of giving away too much too soon: this is part of something that we all take for granted, until it’s not available.
Electricity generation by state?
Fossil fuel consumption per capita?
Electricity generation using natural gas.
We have a winner. I suppose that I owe Burt an apology for having complained that he gave away too much information too early in the week :^(
Yeah. You should have waited until Tuesday to drop that clue. You’ll know for next time. 🙂
Yeah, it was originally my Wednesday clue, but almost no one was making a guess. And here I was, thinking that if nothing else, getting older had taught me patience.
Randy Harris again?! It’s just like Groundhog Day.
Out of curiosity, would you run through the thought processes that got you to the answer?
Before you corrected the question to include Hawaii, I had no clue. Once I saw that Hawaii was in last place, it brought to mind things I has researched while trying to answer prior Monday Trivia questions. I recalled that Hawaii has very few local governmental jurisdictions; thus my “state and local elected officals” guess. After Mark Thompson guessed “electricity generation by state” I recalled that Hawaii’s electricity came primarily from fuel oil, with none from natural gas. I then Googled “electricity production by fuel by state,” found http://www.getenergyactive.org/fuel/state.htm, and pretty much confirmed what I was thinking.
It’s interesting how the top 12 change if you combine Mark and Will’s guesses into “electricity from fossil fuels”. Then the list is Texas, Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, California, Alabama, Illinois, Georgia, Kentucky, North Carolina, and Missouri. Other than California, the top 15 are all in the South and Midwest (the next three are Louisiana, West Virginia, and Michigan). California would be higher in absolute terms if you could track power transfers at a detailed level, since they burn almost no coal in-state, but buy significant coal-fired generation from out-of-state. Pretty easy to guess where opposition to CAIR, CSAPR, and carbon taxes comes from.