[Purdue-pm] Mark's Travelling Capital Problem

[Mark Senn]

  > Great circle (e.g., bird flight)?   Direct (e.g., mole tunneling)?
  > Driving distance?  
  > 
  > Or all three?

Your choice.  I'll be doing at least as the crow flies and the mole
digs.  GUESS: since the lower 48 are relatively flat (i.e. don't wrap
around a sphere much) I'm guessing the solutions for those two will be
the same.  I don't plan to do driving distance because of garbage in,
garbage out problems if bad data is used---if I remember right people in
England have driven into the ocean following instructions from their
GPS.  (A much harder real-life delivery person problem: given a list of
addresses find the driving route between them that will take the least
time.  Take the times people will be home and the traffic into account. :-)

I think there also may be issues with the earth not being perfectly
round.  I plan to ignore that, difference in altitude between cities,
etc.  Figure it won't change the answer.

If I run into problems with great circle distances acting weird at short
distances like Bradley wrote about I'll probably just consider latitude
and longitude as 2D Cartesian coordinates.

I'll shut up now.  Thanks for you patience.    -mark