A nation divided - into perfect square miles | Hacker News Reader

A nation divided - into perfect square miles

mnn.com

22 pointsOatseller14 comments

Should have split the land into hexagons instead.

Lets do that on Mars! A chance to start with a clean slate.

I'd go with tiling pentagons myself [0] Type 15 is a personal favorite.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentagonal_tiling

But with hexagons, you can cut a horizontal road straight through alternating hexagons. Giving you a grid of diagonal and horizontal roads, with 4-way roundabouts every cell width. Lots of flexibility for different traffic densities!

the.jefferson.grid Instagram account linked in the article: https://instagram.com/the.jefferson.grid/

This stuff feels really alien to Europeans who visit the US. We're used to really weird looking polygons with way too many vertices when dividing the land...

(All of those vertices of course having some sort of historic explanation.)

As a city tourist though, I really like the grid street system.

I wonder: Are there places where you can see necessary adjustments to account for the curvature of the Earth with this approach?

My understanding is that every 36 miles, you have actual latitude/longitude lines as the boundary, and a few of the sections are adjusted slightly so the rest are 1 mile by 1 mile. (I don't remember the exact details)

It's so difficult to keep latitude/longitude straight; which is both the reason for the correction and why I looked it up to be sure. Longitude is the measurement of east-west relative to another point of reference (the prime meridian). Latitude is the measure of angular distance from the equator.

Even though the Earth isn't a perfect sphere, at this scale it's effective enough to consider it one. Latitude lines will be parallel with each other. Longitude lines converge, more closely on the greater latitude parallel.

I've always just used the vague similarity of pronouncing lati to ladder to remind myself that latitude runs horizontally.

When my little pea brain gets confused, I remember the Jimmy Buffet song "Changes in Latitude, Changes in Attitude", meaning that when one travels south to the tropical islands (or at least Key West) Buffet often sings about one's attitude changes. And since Buffet is singing about north/south differences, latitude must...oh, never mind, it's not so simple when I write it out. I really do use that to remember, though.

My odd mnemonic is associating "latitude" with the fictitious word "flatitude", since in the most frequently used projections latitude lines are straight and horizontal.

My Dad always said the turn on the road here was because of that. https://www.google.com/maps/@47.1818501,-110.1911451,14z

Looks like my attempt at Cities: Skylines

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