Interesting idea – use the features of your graphics program to calculate the area of an irregular shape to get an accurate count of its size to calculate the number of people it can support.

Over at Lost Kingdom, they have an article on Surface area of an irregular shape in Photoshop. There is a helpful comment at the end of another way to do it by determining the number of pixels and determining how much area a single pixel equals. I don’t have Photoshop, but use Gimp and Inkscape. The question is posed in the article asking if Gimp can do this. I am far from a strong user of either program. I manage to get what I need out of them.

That is a very refined calculation, and perhaps more than most would worry about, but if precision is needed or desired, this is an interesting way to do it. I recall from college calculus that there is a way to calculate this but I have no recollections of the specifics of how to do it. There has only been one instance in my life that I wished I could remember how to figure something using Algebra, but it was quicker for me to figure it out the hard way than figure out how to apply the formula. I first took algebra about 35 years ago. I usually get by with basic arithmetic.