Is it GESTALT, or is it just another DOH?

My burn theme camp, 3 Old Men, centers around a multicursal labyrinth: 144 tent stakes and hundreds of feet of muslin walls arranged thusly:

Here’s a plan view of the structure:

So how do we lay this thing out? It’s complicated — we have a 13-page guide to remind us how to do it. The basic idea is that we have two triangles made of chain. The first, when stretched tight, provides us with the right angle needed for the axes of the structure.

The second is also a right triangle, but one leg is the short radius of the octagon while the hypotenuse is the long radius. The short radius is marked with bits of blue duct tape, every two feet. The long radius is marked… well, the point is that the stakes get placed at the corners of the walls.

After Alchemy 2019, though, somehow the storage tub with the chains fell off the trailer on the way home. I went back to look for them but I never found them and had to make replacements.

You might think that, though tedious, the process would be simple enough. It’s just math, isn’t it? But when we started burning again after the pandemic, last summer, something seemed wrong. Stakes seemed to be in the wrong place more often than they had before, and after To The Moon in June I vowed to recalibrate the chains. It had to be the markings.

Here’s the problem: Do you see in the image above that the calculations for the markings on the hypotenuse (the red dots) are in decimal feet? You know how calculators do. How does one measure .7 or .8 of a foot? (One guesses, that’s how.)

And while I was looking over the diagram, I found myself annoyed that I had not aligned the blue and red dots to be straight across from each other. (There was no point in doing so; it’s the numbers that are important.)

THAT’S WHEN IT HIT ME:

ALIGN THE DOTS. IF THE BLUE DOTS ARE TWO FEET APART, AND THE RED DOTS ARE SUPPOSED TO ALIGN WITH THEM, JUST RUN A STRAIGHT-EDGE AT A RIGHT ANGLE TO THE BLUE DOT AND RE-MARK THE RED DOT.

The whole thing was mostly accurate, to my astonishment. I moved a couple of red dots, but mostly they seemed to be in the right place. In a fit of accuracy, I actually used my Pythagorean mastery to construct a foot divided into two equal parts…

…to double check the length of the short outer chain, i.e., 8.4 feet.

Completely accurate.

The mystery of the slippery stakes remains. More work is required, as we say in the Lichtenbergian Society.