Trivia
I'll be posting the answer to Friday's trivia question tomorrow. Anybody want to take a stab at it?
posted by Adam Villani @ 6/04/2007 11:30:00 AM
10 comments
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The Life and Opinions of Adam Villani, Gentleman
Monday, June 04, 2007
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10 Comments:
They're obviously all California cities. But they're not in size order. It doesn't look like date order. It must be something really bizarre, like "most urban planning jobs per capita."
It's not as esoteric as that. And it does *roughly* correlate with size, but not exactly.
HINT: If this list were expanded to the entire U.S., Chicago would be #1, New York would be #2, and Los Angeles would be #3.
Could it be "largest number of some identifiable group -- blacks, Jews, Poles, retirees, etc."?
West Hollywood being that high caused me to think "homosexuals" (that's the only thing "West Hollywood" is known as), but Berkeley surely wouldn't be that low then. And there's no way Chicago would be ahead of New York.
Nope. It's not anything found in the Census (not that I know of any comprehensive census of gays, anyway). My brother-in-law Erich (not to be confused with my brother-in-law Eric, a different guy) saw Cabazon in there and thought it might be Native Americans. But Cabazon's inclusion on the list is related to the Native Americans there.
Something not a Census category, roughly correlated with size, related to the presence of American Indians, and with West Hollywood at #5, ahead of Sacramento, Long Beach and Oakland ...
Unless it's number of lavendar wigwams, I can't think of anything it could be ...
Actually even that joke doesn't make sense if Chicago is #1 and NY #2 nationally ...
Didn't mean to throw you off there... the presence of Native Americans is related to Cabazon's inclusion on the list, but it's not related to the other cities' inclusion on the list.
In other words, Cabazon is a tiny town in the middle of nowhere, but something related to the Native American presence there allowed this tiny town to jump up into the ranking with a bunch of urban places.
There's another hint for you: a better rough indicator for how a city gets into this ranking is not "size" but "urban-ness". With the exception of Cabazon, which made it onto the list because of something having to do with the Native American presence.
Time for the BIG hint:
If expanded to worldwide, the ranking would be:
1. Toronto, Canada
2. Taipei, Taiwan
3. Chicago, USA
4. Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
5. Hong Kong, PRC
6. Shanghai, PRC
7. Moscow, Russia
8. New York, USA
9. Kaohsiung, Taiwan
10. Shenzhen, PRC
11. Guangzhou, PRC
12. Beijing, PRC
13. Doha, Qatar
14. Dubai, UAE
15. Los Angeles, USA
16. Kuwait City, Kuwait
17. Houston, USA
18. Bangkok, Thailand
19. Melbourne, Australia
20. Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
Depending on definition, some would dispute Toronto, Moscow, and Beijing's inclusion on this list, and would quibble with the exact positioning of many of the others.
It must be "cities ranked by tallest structure" or something similar. (I will leave it to others to decide what counts as a structure and what counts toward the height.)
Ding! Ding! Ding! We have a winner! It's cities ranked by their tallest building; California doesn't have any really tall observation towers* so the issue of building vs. structure is kind of a moot point, but on the international list I counted the CN Tower, not considered a building by some, as the tallest since it has the highest inhabitable space (and thus the highest roof). I didn't count non-inhabitable structures like transmission towers, bridges, roller coasters, etc.
The tall building in Cabazon is the Morongo Casino's hotel tower. It's the only tall building for many miles around. Most of the others are in urban centers. I counted the campanile in Berkeley and the similar tower at Stanford (Palo Alto).
Most of the urban centers are large cities, but there are also heavily urbanized smaller incorporated cities with big office buildings (Emeryville, El Segundo) or residential buildings (West Hollywood).
For my reference, I used this great site, narrowing it down to California, built structures, and ordered by roof height:
http://skyscraperpage.com/diagrams/
That's a fantastic site, chock-full of accurate color diagrams of tall buildings both exotic and mundane. Check it out!
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