The United States of America: Onwards and Upwards

I awoke this morning to some highpoint trivia, which is obviously the best way to start the day:

(11:11:59 AM) Todd Nappi: well you probably didnt read that HP records post I sent you awhile back 
(11:12:06 AM) Todd Nappi: But there are two up for grabs
(11:12:13 AM) Todd Nappi: doing them in Ascending height order 
(11:12:20 AM) Todd Nappi: And doing them in order of admittance to the union

My first thought was that order of admittance would actually work pretty well.  It would move generally west, and you end in one of the far travel ones of Hawaii and Alaska.  Then, I realized that ascending order would be pretty similar.  I wondered how similar and have been practicing R lately, so I found out.

To start with the big reveal, the correlation between state highpoint elevations and dates of admission is 0.703.  What's more, p = 0.000000013, or about a 1 in 77.5 million chance of random data of this size giving this correlation.  This is pretty conclusive: The United States has been adding states of ever increasing height in an effort to increase average state highpoint elevation.

I did some calculations and here is the relationship between year (y), and height (h):
`y = 0.01338 h + 1757.6`
`h = 74.738 y - 131 360`

Using these formulas we can predict that the US will annex Nepal/Tibet sometime around 2146, and Mars in 2748.