Because the shortest distance between two thoughts is a straight line
A new capability for the JTS Topology Suite is operations to process Simple Polygonal Coverages . A Simple Polygon Coverage is a set of edge-matched, non-overlapping polygonal geometries (which may be non-contiguous, and have holes). Typically this is used to model an area in which every point has a value from some domain. A classic example of a polygonal coverage is a set of administrative boundaries, such as those available from GADM or Natural Earth.
The first coverage operations provided are: