A blog from a couple weeks ago has bothered me. If we can learn from our mistakes, then I have an opportunity here.
I thought I would try finding the area of Colorado. It is a rectangle. That was mistake #1. It is bordered by lines of longitude of 102W and 109W. That is a difference of 7 degrees. but distances between lines of longitude don't stay the same. The distance between them narrows as you move from the equator going toward the poles where they all meet. So Colorado is really more of a trapezoid. And there we have mistake #2. It really isn't a trapezoid since it is on the surface of a sphere. So there are non-Euclidean aspects to deal with. I won't be dealing with that as I'm having enough problems with this. I'll stick with Euclid.
In mistakes #3 and counting, I found that it either can't be done, or I can't figure out how to get those horizontal boundary distances. I resorted to a website where you can plug in latitudes and longitudes and it will compute the distance using something called the haversine formula.
Long story short, doing so told me the south boundary is 386.2 miles and the north boundary is 363.9 miles. A couple weeks ago I had correctly computed the height as lines of latitude are parallel and thus stay the same distance apart. That value was 276.4 miles. Using the formula for area of a trapezoid, I got 103,056 square miles. The internet says it is 103,718 square miles. I'm calling that a win.
I'm not sure how they actually figure the areas of states. Maybe its just an estimate. Online I found at least three different values for the area of the state on sites that seemed to be fairly credible. So, my guess is as good as theirs.
