L.E.D. (spoiler 200+)

[Dan Schmidt]

michael.mcaulay at 3do.com (Michael McAulay) writes:

| Sounds like a fractal to me.  And there's another fractal ref around
| page 400 or so (can't dig it up at the moment) where a shoreline is said
| to have infinite length (?? paraphrasing).

I haven't gotten to this passge yet, but the shoreline problem is
pretty famous in fractal circles (as I bet Michael knows, but perhaps
not everyone);---the Issue being, at what point (working towards
smaller detail) do you just just use straight lines, rather than
painstakingly circumnavigating each jetty, each boulder, each grain
of sand, each freaking molecule?  If you go down far enough, the
length becomes (theoretically) infinite.

I think there's even some article that set it all off called something
like, you guessed it, "How Long Is the Coast of England?"  A good
poser for the L.E.D.  I'm sure this is all discussed in some Douglas
Hofstadter book or something, it's his kind of thing.

-- 
                 Dan Schmidt --> dfan at harmonixmusic.com, dfan at alum.mit.edu
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