Go West, Young… Nation…
The center of population for a region is, essentially, the center of mass of its inhabitants. The Census Bureau defines the center of population of the US (currently in Missouri) as “the point at which an imaginary, flat, weightless, and rigid map of the United States would balance perfectly if weights of identical value were placed on it so that each weight represented the location of one person on the date of the census.”
As we load our wagons, we might recall with a Masonic smile that it was on this date in 1791 that Mozart’s last– and arguably most glorious– opera, The Magic Flute (Die Zauberflöte, K. 620), premiered in Vienna. Mozart conducted the opening, though he’d fallen ill weeks before in Prague; he died 10 weeks later.
Hear the overture here.
