I was thinking about this recently, the way to do is to define a radius, and then imagine rolling a circle of that radius around the outside of the coastline (or around the inside! Define that as well) and then take the length of the equivalent track that never leaves contact with the circle. So you get a different length depending on the radius you choose, but at least you get an answer. You could define the radius in a scale-invariant way (proportional to the perimeter of the convex hull of the land mass for example) so that scaling the land mass up/down would also scale our declared coastline length proportionally.
alistairSH
tl;dr - for the same reason as any other coastline or complex border. Also, it annoys me that the trail in question is advertised as allowing one to walk the entire English coast - but fails to mention Wales and Scotland are in the way (the trail is not contiguous).
Lucasoato
This article says that by using a smaller unit of measure, the measured coastline increases. The concept of dimension in fractals is backed by a similar idea! Take the Koch curve for example, at any iteration it gets longer and its 1-dimensional length loses the usual meaning because it diverges to infinity as you continue iterating. Intuitively the fractal dimension allows you to calculate how fast the measurement increases as the scale to measure it gets smaller. In a more precise way, for most self-similar fractal made of N copies of itself, each scaled by factor r, the dimension is defined as: D = log(N)/log(1/r) In the case of Koch curve it’s 1.2619...
hleszek
I completely understand why measuring the length of coastlines is not possible but surely measuring a trail should be doable quite easily, you could simply use a gps tracker and it would be precise enough.
sota_pop
How on earth can you write an article that practically plagiarizes the title, mention the paradox, and neither mention mandelbrot nor cite the original paper anywhere!? https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ion-Andronache/post/Wha...
avazhi
I guess I could understand why this would be borderline impossible if you did it manually, but surely today with satellite images and computer vision it really shouldn’t be that difficult to agree on a standard unit and then just automate it. Surely just make the scale human at its smallest (meters works and can get converted from there, assuming you have sufficient zoom level data for the coastline) and call it a day - I have no clue why we are discussing atomic fractal calculus approaching the limit as if that's a real problem for agencies trying to give a cogent answer about a particular country's coastline.
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Discussion Highlights (6 comments)
jstanley
I was thinking about this recently, the way to do is to define a radius, and then imagine rolling a circle of that radius around the outside of the coastline (or around the inside! Define that as well) and then take the length of the equivalent track that never leaves contact with the circle. So you get a different length depending on the radius you choose, but at least you get an answer. You could define the radius in a scale-invariant way (proportional to the perimeter of the convex hull of the land mass for example) so that scaling the land mass up/down would also scale our declared coastline length proportionally.
alistairSH
tl;dr - for the same reason as any other coastline or complex border. Also, it annoys me that the trail in question is advertised as allowing one to walk the entire English coast - but fails to mention Wales and Scotland are in the way (the trail is not contiguous).
Lucasoato
This article says that by using a smaller unit of measure, the measured coastline increases. The concept of dimension in fractals is backed by a similar idea! Take the Koch curve for example, at any iteration it gets longer and its 1-dimensional length loses the usual meaning because it diverges to infinity as you continue iterating. Intuitively the fractal dimension allows you to calculate how fast the measurement increases as the scale to measure it gets smaller. In a more precise way, for most self-similar fractal made of N copies of itself, each scaled by factor r, the dimension is defined as: D = log(N)/log(1/r) In the case of Koch curve it’s 1.2619...
hleszek
I completely understand why measuring the length of coastlines is not possible but surely measuring a trail should be doable quite easily, you could simply use a gps tracker and it would be precise enough.
sota_pop
How on earth can you write an article that practically plagiarizes the title, mention the paradox, and neither mention mandelbrot nor cite the original paper anywhere!? https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ion-Andronache/post/Wha...
avazhi
I guess I could understand why this would be borderline impossible if you did it manually, but surely today with satellite images and computer vision it really shouldn’t be that difficult to agree on a standard unit and then just automate it. Surely just make the scale human at its smallest (meters works and can get converted from there, assuming you have sufficient zoom level data for the coastline) and call it a day - I have no clue why we are discussing atomic fractal calculus approaching the limit as if that's a real problem for agencies trying to give a cogent answer about a particular country's coastline.