George's Tavern in Oak Park, Illinois. Wikimedia Commons The United States is a big, diverse place, with each of the 50 states differing from each other in significant ways.

We wanted to take a big-picture perspective, and try to see how much the states vary from each other and from the country at large.

We were also curious about which states were the most "average" — the most similar to America overall.

We considered 31 indicators from the Census Bureau's 2012 American Community Survey, along with 2012 unemployment rates from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The indicators cover different social, economic, housing-related, and demographic characteristics of each state's population and of the population of the U.S. as a whole.

For each of those indicators, we figured out how far each state's level was away from the national level. These were then rescaled and averaged to get a sense of how far each state is from the overall national baseline. The states were then ranked on "normalness" based on how large that average distance was.

Below are the 32 population indicators from the 2012 American Community Survey and Bureau of Labor Statistics we used to compare the states, along with the corresponding national baseline values.

All values (except unemployment) were taken from the 2012 ACS 1 year estimates, downloaded using the Census Bureau's American Factfinder tool.