Two for the price of one. These are related lists, from most to least:
#86: Wyoming, Montana, North Dakota, Iowa, Alabama, Nebraska, Alaska, Delaware, South Dakota, Ohio, Vermont, Louisiana, Minnesota, Utah, Michigan, Washington, Oklahoma, Wisconsin, Connecticut, Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, California, Kansas, New Hampshire, Missouri, Georgia, Massachusetts, Maryland, Idaho, Maine, Oregon, South Carolina, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, Hawaii, West Virginia, Illinois, Rhode Island, Texas, Florida, Arkansas, New Jersey, Mississippi, North Carolina, Arizona, Indiana, New York, Nevada, DC, Colorado.
#87: Wyoming, Mississippi, Alabama, Oklahoma, New Mexico, North Dakota, Missouri, Indiana, Vermont, Georgia, Arkansas, Montana, Tennessee, Kentucky, Maine, South Dakota, North Carolina, Minnesota, Nebraska, South Carolina, Kansas, Wisconsin, Florida, West Virginia, Iowa, Virginia, Idaho, Louisiana, Delaware, New Hampshire, Michigan, Maryland, Ohio, Utah, Arizona, Colorado, Texas, oregon, Connecticut, California, Washington, new Jersey, Massachusetts, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Nevada, Hawaii, New York, Alaska, DC.
More liberal states toward the bottom of the second list; somewhat less so in the first. More conservative states towards the top of both lists.
DC, Alaska, New York, and Hawaii at the bottom of the second list make me think it is unrelated to size, at least in terms of land area.
Hmmm…
Hint: Colorado’s placing on the first list is suspect, but the data from both lists comes from the federal government, so I don’t know what to think.
Also, it is not entire coincidental that red states tend to be higher up on the lists and blue states lower.
And in return, WillT, Questions 67 & 68!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTa7ADWjrYY
Geez, they were good.
My guess after seeing the Tuesday hint is ratios of registered weapons to people. There are two lists because one is for handguns and the other for rifles.
My doubt in this guess comes from my suspicion that this may be data the federal government does not actually collect.
But Colorado at the bottom of such a list does look decidedly anomalous. DC at the bottom of such a list does not. And Alaska near the top of one list and near the bottom of the other makes a lot of sense if one is rifles (an excellently useful sort of weapon in Alaska’s semi-wilderness environments) and the other is handguns (for which I would suspect most Alaskans would have little use other than personal recreation).
A gun registration story from a few years back:
I inherited my father’s guns when he passed (including a rifle taken off the body of a dead Nazi, as well as a Ruger Mach 1 handgun), but being around 10ish, I didn’t have a whole lot of use for them. They stayed in Michigan.
When I turned around 35, I had opportunity to drive out to Michigan and drive back. I came back with the guns. First place I went was the police station and told them the above story and asked how I should go about registering these guns. The person behind the counter told me that I didn’t have to.
If Colorado doesn’t collect the data, Colorado may have no data.
Concealed carry permits in Colorado are issued by county sheriffs, who are not required to report such permits to the state’s centralized database. IIRC, about two-thirds of the sheriffs don’t report. Colorado state statute prohibits any jurisdiction from having gun registration.
Another registration story. Many years ago (damn, am I getting old) I moved from Texas to New Jersey. Driving to Bell Labs on my first day of work I was stopped by a NJ state trooper because I had Texas plates, so that he could tell me that NJ, unlike Texas, had gun registration laws. He also wanted to know how many weapons I was carrying in my tiny Toyota.
One explosive device and one container of dangerous chemical agents (gas tank and battery respectively.)
It seemed clear that simply by having Texas plates I was already on the trooper’s bad side, and it was the first day of work at my first real job. I was, for me, remarkably polite and cooperative. As I would discover over the next few years, by NJ standards the regular me was remarkably polite and cooperative.
Hint: It is about the existence of a thing. Per capita.
86 is EXCEPTIONALLY compounding then. Wyoming and Colorado are the North and South Dakotas of the Mountain West.
Or we were, before California came here.
Compounding? Confounding.
Some have suggested that Colorado’s and Wyoming’s polarization is not unrelated. That Colorado’s are actually in – or counting as being in – Wyoming. Or something like that. The theory doesn’t make sense to me, but maybe you can explain it when someone has answered it.
This tidbit may provide more confusion than assistance. I thought about this being a hint, but I decided to give a real hint instead.
Okay, so it’s not weapons. I’m finding the disparity between Nevada and Utah on the two lists to also be confounding. And the semi-clue about Colorado and Wyoming suggests that it might be something a state would prefer to have over the border of a neighbor because it’s unpleasant. For some reason I can’t get my mind out of it being related to animal or livestock population. Maybe… Ranches and slaughterhouses?
86) Automobiles per capita (with Colorado’s number being erroneous)
87) Trucks per capita
These two things combine (with other things) to answer #86.
So #86 is “motorized vehicles”, perhaps?
That would make #87 something sort of related to motorized vehicles, like gas stations?
#86 is indeed motor vehicles. Think I’m going to have to give Randy credit on that one, however.
#87 is not gas stations. It is not, actually, a “thing” in the way my hint suggested. That was for #86, I just didn’t say so in my previous hint.
#87 is vehicle miles traveled per capita.
Correct.
That’s a fair award. My contribution to that answer was minimal compared to his.
Okay, Michael Cain or Jaybird or somebody that lives there, explain to me what the heck Colorado is doing at the bottom of #86!!!!
Here’s my best guess. Back in 1990, when I moved here, the most hated immigrants were Texans. Why? Well, Colorado had an emissions requirement for automobiles. Your car had to be *THIS* eco-friendly to drive. For the most part, this could be dealt with by driving up to monument hill at 75 mph and back 15 minutes before your exhaust test, but it was still a bit of a hassle.
Texans, let me tell you, bragged (OPENLY, LIKE IN FRONT OF EVERYBODY) about how they registered their vehicle in Texas and, therefore, didn’t have to register their car in Colorado.
So I’m guessing that most of the folks who came here from out of state (which is the majority of the state anymore, I tell you what, seriously, we should have pulled the ladder up in 1992), have their cars registered yet in the state from whence they came.
The only explanation I came across while researching the subject was out-of-state registration. Specifically in Wyoming (hence my comment above). The Wyoming part made only limited sense because there are only so many cars (and people, though more cars than people apparently) in Wyoming.
Who is this “Randy Harris” person?
He’s the man who wins all of these things.
The smartest person at The League. So smart that he keeps his commenting participation to a minimum.
If intelligence is inversely proportional to commenting at the LOOG, then … well … heh heh … whasthatnow?
Jaybird and I are Tweedledee and Tweedledum.
I’m a trivia troll who’s been banned from several sites.
Just kidding. I actually follow the LOOG because of the high quality of posts and comments. Because of writer’s block, I find commenting difficult.