Exactly; some people can't seem to grasp the concept that whenever you "quantize a continuum" with an arbitrarily chosen boundary, there will always be objects in the same neighborhood of the continuum but on opposite sides of the boundary, one in one category, the other in a different one, yet they will be almost indistinguishable from one another. It doesn't matter where the boundary is drawn (unless it happens to fall in a region that is not occupied by elements of the continuum, in which case it arguably isn't a continuum!) -- as long as the boundary divides a neighborhood, you'll be able to find two elements of the neighborhood on opposite sides of the boundary.
The Inuits of Northern Canada live life in ways starkly different than Americans in the lower 48 -- they live on blubber and travel around in kayaks and dog sleds; but do Canadians in Windsor, ONT live life much differently than Americans across the river in Detroit, MI? If you put them in a police line up, you probably couldn't tell the Windsor resident from a person from Detroit, while the Inuit would stand out like a dead seal pup with a baseball bat embedded in its skull.
The point is, this same similarity of elements in the same neighborhood bisected by a boundary would occur, NO MATTER WHERE YOU CHOSE TO PUT THE US/CANADIAN BOUNDARY!
As you correctly note, the phenomona is to be expected, and doesn't signify much of anything significant, as it is simply an artifact of the quantizing process.
As Plaintiffs meticulously and effectively presented to the Court, Pandas went through many drafts, several of which were completed prior to and some after the Supreme Court's decision in Edwards [Edwards v. Aguillard], which held that the Constitution forbids teaching creationism as science. By comparing the pre and post Edwards drafts of Pandas, three astonishing points emerge: (1) the definition for creation science in early drafts is identical to the definition of ID; (2) cognates of the word creation (creationism and creationist), which appeared approximately 150 times were deliberately and systematically replaced with the phrase ID; and (3) the changes occurred shortly after the Supreme Court held that creation science is religious and cannot be taught in public school science classes in Edwards. This word substitution is telling, significant, and reveals that a purposeful change of words was effected without any corresponding change in content, which directly refutes FTE's [FTE = the Foundation for Thought and Ethics, the publisher of Pandas] argument that by merely disregarding the words "creation" and "creationism," FTE expressly rejected creationism in Pandas. In early pre-Edwards drafts of Pandas, the term "creation" was defined as "various forms of life that began abruptly through an intelligent agency with their distinctive features intact – fish with fins and scales, birds with feathers, beaks, and wings, etc," the very same way in which ID is defined in the subsequent published versions.Source: Kitzmiller et al. v Dover Area School District et al..
Answering these unanswerable questions nearly drove me bonkers, as I'm sure you can imagine. And of course, because there is no answer, the EPA can find a producer and pipeline in noncompliance at will. Nifty trick.
