As a statistician, I am always looking at data, and try to find new and interesting ways to look at new and interesting data. So I always appreciate when someone does something cool … read on to see what it is!

Stephen Von Worley has taken the location data for the entire McDonald’s chain and looked at patterns and so on. As he says, “McDonald’s cluster at the population centers and hug the highway grid. East of the Mississippi, there’s wall-to-wall coverage, except for a handful of meager gaps centered on the Adirondacks, inland Maine, the Everglades, and outlying West Virginia.”

So far nothing novel or surprising. But then when he analyzed for distance – and it isn’t clear whether he used a pixel-intensity analysis method on the map or a minimization regression analysis on the data or just looked at things and then mapped them out – he found something interesting:

Between the tiny Dakotan hamlets of Meadow and Glad Valley lies the McFarthest Spot: 107 miles distant from the nearest McDonald’s, as the crow flies, and 145 miles by car!

That means that regardless where you are in the continental US, you can get ‘Super-Sized’ in no more than about two hours! Chew on that!

Source: Weather Sealed via Consumerist