Bad with shapes

I’m in the air over one of the presently aptly named flyover states. According to the free map channel, it’s Nebraska, near Omaha. On the ground are nothing but mountains and squares with little bits of forest and tree speckled throughout. A few squiggly roads cross over the lines to keep it from becoming some a big hypnotic pattern.

The uniformity of the squares strikes me. I mean, these are gigantic plots of land judging by my altitude and the size of the houses, but they’re all perfect squares … sharp right angles and all the same size.

How do they do that? Does someone drive a cart from one plot to the next with a giant roll of bright yellow tape and a bed full of stakes marking it all off? How long would that take? These squares go on for miles … as far as I can see. I suppose there are tools they use that I don’t know about, and they probably use trigonometry.

I’m impressed the plotters are so good at it because I would have a miserable time trying to get one giant square all even, let alone hundreds. If you gave me a sticky note and asked me to draw 36 identical squares in a grid, I couldn’t do it. If I could do it as six lines and then six more and I had a ruler, it’d come out alright, but even then it’d be a bit lopsided. If I had to draw each square one by one you’d get a lot of trapezoids and other non-square shapes. And as soon as one’s off, all the rest are; they won’t fit together after that.

That’s why I couldn’t build a bridge, either. I’d do my best to cut all the pieces to the right sizes, and maybe I’d get close, but inevitably a few’d be off. Then trying to fit it all together, one wouldn’t fit, and then none of the others would, and if I’d been gluing the pieces as I went, I’d be screwed and have to start over. You can’t just force it in and let it be crooked when it comes to bridges … it’d fall apart and everyone’d fall into the river and probably get hurt. I’d get thrown in jail for my negligence and that’d be the end of me.