Doughnut shaped land masses woulda been nice. Land masses with a hole in the center for a fresh water lake. Maybe God had in mind for mankind to use their mind and machinery to construct some nice land patterns instead of wars and trying to blow each other up. If they can build a Great Wall and pyramids with hardly any machinery we could have had a very pretty looking planet by now as a tourist attraction for any low flying alien space explorers.
It reminds me of this scene from Out of Africa where Meryl Streep is flying in this 1940's two-seater airplane with Robert Redford and they are flying over the Ngong Hills in South Africa and you see the bird's eye view of untouched perfection and she states to herself, "yes, this is how God must have intended it".
Actually nicw geometric designs are rarely the most functional design for something. The dramatic example is sluice gates in Dams: As people we tend to make them nice and rectangular, and that is exactly the wrong thing to do. A rectangle have only two frequencies it can resonate at, other frequencies get damped out. But with hundreds of tonnes of water flowing past the edges of an open gate all the power of the floating water end up resonating in the gate at those two frequencies. It does not take long before the gate have shaken itself to pieces. Eventually some smart engineers figured it out and modern dams have gates with more irregular shapes, specifically designed to dampen out as much vibration as possible. They are also less noisy that way, but that is a side benefit.
But there are places where regularity is both harmless and pleasing to our eyes and ears: eg Pianos and some other musical instruments that deliberately use the shape of the instrument to shape it harmonics.
This post was edited by JakobA the unAmerican. at October 19, 2017 6:45 AM MDT