There is no single accurate measure of a coastline. Its measured length will depended on the method used to measure it. As the Wikipedia article "Coastline Paradox" explains: 

"More concretely, the length of the coastline depends on the method used to measure it. Since a landmass has features at all scales, from hundreds of kilometers in size to tiny fractions of a millimeter and below, there is no obvious limit to the size of the smallest feature that should not be measured around, and hence no single well-defined perimeter to the landmass. Various approximations exist when specific assumptions are made about minimum feature size." ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coastline_paradox )

This is ultimately an issue of scale, which is explored by fractal math. See for example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractal_dimension.

The Coastline Paradox can be expanded to encompass other similar paradoxes. One such example is the question of how many colors does one need to most accurately reproduce (or store in digital format) the colors of a human face, or an oil portrait. The answer, again: it depends on the method used to record it--from the plainest black-and-white lineshot or screen (2 colors), to 24 or 256 or millions of digitally-defined colors, down to microscopic-level imaging technologies that record surfaces' light-reflecting properties that are inherent and not dependent on light ambience. It's interesting, for example, how a French project has attempted to apply multispectral imaging to capture in digital form an extremely broad-spectrum dataset of attributes of the Mona Lisa. Here:

http://collab.teldap.tw/2009teldap/abstract/Arts%20&%20Illustrations/Alejandro%20Ribes_Multispectral%20Capture%20of%20the%20Mona%20Lisa%20of%20Leonardo%20da%20Vinci.pdf

and here:

http://www.lumiere-technology.com/indexb.htm


Author: JunVerzola

See also: GeneralAndParticular