I'm super happy to have you here. Happy New Year to you and your family.

So some states are very easy to draw. Colorado, for example, is a beautiful, perfect rectangle.

Wyoming also rectangle. Very easy states to draw, right? Utah also easy. It's a rectangle with a notch.

New Mexico is easy. It's a rectangle with a notch and it's notch.

Some states are very, very easy to draw. Even if like me, you cannot draw at all.

But when your state's borders are formed by mountain ranges or by rivers, in particular,

your state by definition is hard to draw well because its borders are all wiggly.

Perhaps none more so than the wigglyest. Kentucky. Kentucky,

bordered on the west by the Great Mississippi River and then over the whole wiggly top of the state,

it's the Ohio River. And on the northern part of that wiggly arc where the the Wibblewobble border

of Kentucky sticks out the most. There at that spot this week, you will find an American political

miracle because there at the northern Poke bit of Kentucky that sticks out like it's trying to

start a fight with Indiana on one side and Ohio on the other. There at Covington, Kentucky,

there is the southern end of a huge double layer cantilevered truss bridge, a huge bridge

across the Ohio River. It's Covington, Kentucky on one side on the southern side and on the northern

side of that bridge it is Cincinnati, Ohio. Enough trucks cross the Ohio River on that one single

bridge every day. That somebody finally did the back of the envelope calculation to figure out

that that one bridge carries 3% of our annual GDP as a nation every year just in terms of the

amount of freight that crosses it in trucks. One bridge and that very important bridge is falling

apart. It was opened in 1963. When that bridge was opened it was designed to carry just a huge number

of vehicles, almost an unimaginable number of vehicles at the time. It was designed to carry 80,000

vehicles a day. Well now on some days it carries not 80,000 vehicles but 180,000 vehicles.

...