Geography

Philadelphia is northeast of Vienna. Until today, I would have stressed the "north" part of that description; henceforth, I'll stress the "east": Philadelphia is 78 miles to the north but 113 miles to the east. The east west distance is 45 percent larger than the north-south distance. Who'd've thought?

And how, you ask, do we compute distances like this? We need two bits of information.

1. The latitude and longitude of each location, which can be found by entering the city (or the zip code) on NOAA's weather page (http://www.weather.gov/); the resulting weather forecast begins with the latitude and longitude of the location.
2. The number of miles in a degree of latitude and longitude, which can be found by entering the latitude into the calculator on http://www.csgnetwork.com/degreelenllavcalc.html.

By the way, that last site (csgnetwork.com) has other calculators that look pretty interesting. Here's one tidbit. If a pitcher throws a 90 m.p.h. fastball, how long does it take to get from the mound to the plate. Answer (thanks, http://www.csgnetwork.com/baseballpitchspdcalc.html): 0.45 seconds.