Mathematically perhaps, but real estate is less concerned with genuine mathematical accuracy and more concerned with convenience. They just draw a shape with lines and say “everything inside this is the property”. The actual quantity of feet of coast ends up as a ballparked figure by necessity. This ballparked figure will reduce.
That’s only because they haven’t yet figured a way to sell coastlines by length. Once someone solves this trivial problem, you can expect the market to boom.
Anyway, I agree with you in the sense that shapes with smaller areas tend to also have smaller circumferences, all other things being equal. However, we can’t really be sure that’s the case for the Earth without actually computer-modeling it to check because, for all we know, the coastline might become more ‘wiggly’ as sea levels rise.
Still not giving Trump any fucking credit at all, of course.
the only way we’d get more usable coastline as sea levels rise is if landmass got “thicker” at higher elevations, but it does not.
at a fractal level, anything can happen, but at a practical/macro level it’s pretty self evident; landmasses are smaller up high and bigger the base because gravity.
On the contrary: coastline is infinite! 🤓
As such, Trump is still definitely wrong because a new infinite coastline cannot be larger than the old infinite coastline.
(The reason your simplification doesn’t work, by the way, is that a circle is a rectifiable curve and coastline isn’t.)
It’s not infinite though. It says so in the wikipedia article under critics and misunderstandings
Mathematically perhaps, but real estate is less concerned with genuine mathematical accuracy and more concerned with convenience. They just draw a shape with lines and say “everything inside this is the property”. The actual quantity of feet of coast ends up as a ballparked figure by necessity. This ballparked figure will reduce.
That’s only because they haven’t yet figured a way to sell coastlines by length. Once someone solves this trivial problem, you can expect the market to boom.
Hence the self-deprecating 🤓, LOL
Anyway, I agree with you in the sense that shapes with smaller areas tend to also have smaller circumferences, all other things being equal. However, we can’t really be sure that’s the case for the Earth without actually computer-modeling it to check because, for all we know, the coastline might become more ‘wiggly’ as sea levels rise.
Still not giving Trump any fucking credit at all, of course.
the only way we’d get more usable coastline as sea levels rise is if landmass got “thicker” at higher elevations, but it does not.
at a fractal level, anything can happen, but at a practical/macro level it’s pretty self evident; landmasses are smaller up high and bigger the base because gravity.