re: #108 John Hughes

Wikipedia is, of course, wrong, as anybody who bothered to follow the link in the article would find.

You work out the centre of gravity by suspending the cardboard map of the US form some point near an edge then drawing a vertical line down from that point. You then pick another point, suspend the map from there and draw another vertical. Where the two lines cross is the centre of gravity.

Once you know the centre you could balance the map on that point, but it would be ridiculously hard to find that point just by trying to balance it.

This is in the realm of folk-geodesy, which is why it hasn’t been updated. The monument is actually set some distance from the cardboard-solution, which is on a private farm, and even that is assuming a CEP of 20 miles. ‘Twill serve for a tourist goal on our travels.