After every census since 1790, Government mathematicians have been put to work on a problem calculated to burn the numbers off their slide rules. Its terms: if the country were a rigid plane, encumbered by nothing but its human population, and if every man, woman & child had exactly the same weight, at what point, if placed on a fulcrum, would it achieve exact balance? Object: to find the geographical center of U.S. population.
The computers start with an arbitrarily selected tentative center, just as a man might move the weights to an approximation...
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