For example on wikipedia for Switzerland it says the country has an area of 41,285 km². Does this take into account that a lot of that area is actually angled at a steep inclination, thus the actual surface area is in effect larger than what you would expect when looking onto a map in satellite view?

  • njm1314@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    It’s not, but I love the idea that it could be. You just know some of those megalomaniac dictators would be piling up fake Hills to make their country bigger. Turkmenistan would have giant Towers of dirt everywhere.

    • Deestan@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      Due to the fractal nature of geometery, all they would have to do is use more fine-grained measurements. :)

      • sp3tr4l@lemmy.zip
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        3 months ago

        Lets now measure all coastlines with the minimum increment possible, the planck length.

      • Faresh@lemmy.ml
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        3 months ago

        That would work for the perimeter, but not for the area.

        • Deestan@lemmy.world
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          3 months ago

          It works exactly the same!

          edit: With the assumption that we now measure inclines of course. If measuring area of the flattened overhead projection (the current normal way) we don’t get fractal effect.

          If I go over our parking lot with a 1m^2 granularity, I get 100m^2. If I go with 1cm^2 granularity, I get 110m^2 because I catch the sides of the curbs, potholes, etc.

          https://demonstrations.wolfram.com/3DSnowflakeFractals/

          • Faresh@lemmy.ml
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            3 months ago

            With the assumption that we now measure inclines of course

            I interpreted your reply to njm1314 as meaning “we don’t need to measure inclination to cheat, we can do that by simply increasing our precision”

          • Karyoplasma@discuss.tchncs.de
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            3 months ago

            Fractals are self-replicating while surface area or coastline of a country are inherently finite. You could very accurately measure the surface area, but there’s no reason to do that.

    • I Cast Fist@programming.dev
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      3 months ago

      Do you think the holes left by digging the dirt would also count as increased area? Because it feels like it’d be a 2 for one deal

    • AA5B@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      Eff that and their primitive math: I want to see the Vatican truck in gravel of precisely the size of the increment, to become THE LARGEST COUNTRY ON EARTH, MUAH HA HAH!