{"id":225,"date":"2011-04-28T12:10:29","date_gmt":"2011-04-28T16:10:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/streamingradioguide.com\/startingover\/?p=225"},"modified":"2011-04-28T12:14:10","modified_gmt":"2011-04-28T16:14:10","slug":"thomas-jefferson-and-central-planning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/streamingradioguide.com\/startingover\/?p=225","title":{"rendered":"Thomas Jefferson and Central Planning"},"content":{"rendered":"

http:\/\/www.tngenweb.org\/tnland\/seven-ranges\/<\/a><\/p>\n

After the Revolutionary War, the new government\u00a0under the Articles of Confederation had to immediately resolve\u00a0the issue of how to settle\u00a0the lands\u00a0North and West of the\u00a0Ohio River.\u00a0\u00a0 Virginia had originally claimed all land west of the Allegheny \/ Appalachian mountains as part of its land (which was why George Washington was sent in the 1750s to what is now Pittsburgh to establish\u00a0a fort to protect Virginia’s land claims from France and Pennsylvania).<\/p>\n

Thomas\u00a0Jefferson crafted\u00a0the Land Ordinance of 1785, which laid out how the (eventual)\u00a0states of Ohio, Indiana, Michigan would be planned and settled, and the concept was expanded to most of the country\u00a0East of the Rocky Mountains.<\/p>\n

Rather than let the people decide where to\u00a0settle and build houses and build roads where people\u00a0thought they made sense, the land was broken into 1 mile squares called sections, with 6×6 sections organized as townships.\u00a0\u00a0 Section #16 – which is located near the center of each township – was set aside to provide the resources to fund public schools.\u00a0 Sections 8, 11, 26 and 29 would be turned over to the United States for its use.<\/p>\n

Except where impractical (like a river in the way),\u00a0main roads run along the section boundaries, with it being fairly common for there to be minor roads running through the middle of each section, dividing the land into “quarter sections”.\u00a0\u00a0 If you subdivide a quarter section into 4 pieces, you have a square block of land consisting of 40 acres – as in the “the back 40″….<\/p>\n

This\u00a0central planning had a few small issues.\u00a0\u00a0 It only “works” because the land is mostly flat.\u00a0\u00a0 In the “unplanned” rest of the world, roads run between cities where people live, which means they don’t run\u00a0on grid lines.\u00a0\u00a0 The shortest distance between two points is a straight line (sort of)<\/p>\n

Another minor problem when you look at maps is the world is not flat.\u00a0\u00a0 The Earth is a sphere – you can’t just lay it out in perfectly square one mile sections.\u00a0\u00a0 Depending on how far North you go, the northern\u00a0edge of each section either needs to be a little shorter and the lines curved, or some accommodation has to be made that hides the fact that sections can’t line up indefinitely.\u00a0\u00a0 The further North you get, the more Euclidian geomtry won’t work.<\/p>\n

Thomas Jefferson didn’t include non-Euclidean geometry in his plan because science’s understanding was based on Newton and Euclid – it wasn’t well understood at the time that land is not a flat plane and you can’t apply Euclid’s principles to real life.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The original intent as understood by Thomas Jefferson was that the world is flat so that is what we must continue to follow, since that was the intent of the founding fathers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

http:\/\/www.tngenweb.org\/tnland\/seven-ranges\/ After the Revolutionary War, the new government\u00a0under the Articles of Confederation had to immediately resolve\u00a0the issue of how to settle\u00a0the lands\u00a0North and West of the\u00a0Ohio River.\u00a0\u00a0 Virginia had originally claimed all land west of the Allegheny \/ Appalachian mountains … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-225","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-american-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/streamingradioguide.com\/startingover\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/225","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/streamingradioguide.com\/startingover\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/streamingradioguide.com\/startingover\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/streamingradioguide.com\/startingover\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/streamingradioguide.com\/startingover\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=225"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/streamingradioguide.com\/startingover\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/225\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":229,"href":"https:\/\/streamingradioguide.com\/startingover\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/225\/revisions\/229"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/streamingradioguide.com\/startingover\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=225"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/streamingradioguide.com\/startingover\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=225"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/streamingradioguide.com\/startingover\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=225"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}