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HG_Shurtugal t1_j39o6bh wrote

It's the same reason nobody really knows how long the coast is.

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sckego t1_j3au1ji wrote

No, it’s completely different. They aren’t the same in any way.

Colorado is supposed to have straight borders. When surveyors went and staked out the borders, they didn’t place them right on the theoretical straight line, sometimes they were off by thousands of feet. And once the markers are placed and everyone shook hands on it, those became the “ground truth” - not the theoretical straight line. That didn’t really matter (or was even discoverable) until the advent of GPS, when they figured out that their “straight” line really zigged and zagged all over the place, and fixing them is real PITA as described in the article. So, they got left as-is.

Coastlines are jagged, not straight. You can measure a coastline with a mile-long ruler and get a value, but you’ll have skipped a bunch of zigs and zags along the way, so the coastline is actually longer than what you measured. So you get a shorter ruler, maybe 100 yds long. Same problem. You can use a normal 1-ft ruler, but you’re still missing the zigs and zags of individual rocks at the waters edge. Etc, etc…

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2ndOfficerCHL t1_j3avxzm wrote

That's hair splitting. So human surveying errors caused Colorado to have a jagged border which appears straight from a distance. For practical purposes it can be drawn as a rectangle on maps, just like you don't need to account for the position of every grain of sand on the beach when measuring coasts.

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jeremykelly1 t1_j3axqvh wrote

The jagged edge of Colorado is still measurable though. Changing the scale of measurement as is done in the coastline problem doesn’t change the outcome of the measurement of Colorado.

You don’t have to account for every grain of sand when measuring coasts, but what grains of sand do you account for? Answering that question differently amounts to different measurements. Colorado is not arbitrary in that regard. It’s just not 4 straight lines. It’s 697.

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sckego t1_j3b04od wrote

If it could be drawn as a straight border, we wouldn’t be having this conversation—no one would care if it were off by a few feet one way or the other. It matters because it’s off by more than half a mile in places, and can’t be just hand-waved away as “straight enough”… which is the point of the article, that Colorado actually has 600whatever sides.

In measuring coastlines, there is no “straight enough.” It’s ALWAYS changing. You say you don’t need to account for every grain of sand. Fine, what about every large rock outcrop? Every small inlet? Every major bay? The length is 100% dependent on what measuring stick you use, and there is no right answer for which is the correct measuring stick.

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LetsTryScience t1_j3dxcqx wrote

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koch_snowflake

This idea applies. Area approaches 8/5 of original triangle while perimeter approaches infinity.

This has also come up with the length of hiking trails. Several people hiked the PCT using rotating wheels to measure and even they came up with different lengths.

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dandroid126 t1_j3b41jj wrote

Reddit LOVES splitting hairs. This whole thread is filled with people splitting thinner and thinner hairs.

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starmartyr t1_j3bk953 wrote

It kind of depends on which maps. Along the borders, you really need to know where the state line is for things like zoning regulations and legal jurisdiction. In some cases, these jagged edges are half a mile wide.

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